As a commuter school with a blue collar reputation, Suffolk students should be jumping for joy all over President Obama’s promise to increase the availability of Pell Grants and make them an entitlement program, like Social Security and Medicare.

In this budget, Obama is increasing Pell Grants by 92 percent, which will allow students to receive a maximum of $5,710 annually and will allow one million more students to access funds for financial aid. He is also attempting to convince Congress to make the grants an entitlement, which as the LA Times explained, “would be guaranteed to anyone eligible, and Congress would be obliged to fund the program for all who qualify. At present, the program is subject to haggling in the budget-making process, and so the actual grants end up being less than what lawmakers authorize.”

In 2008, the average student debt for those graduating from four-year private not-for-profit universities was $33,050 and 96 percent of graduates from those schools had some sort of student debt.

At Suffolk, many students don’t receive as much financial aid as they need, unfortunately, what with the massive amount of bureaucracy involved, combined with the financial meltdown of the past couple years, and, thank god, someone finally noticed.

Obama is the best thing to happen to college students since Pell Grants were invented in the 1970s – especially because of his recommendations that student debt would be forgiven in 20 years and that graduates would only need to pay 10 percent of their income on federal student loans.

Making college affordable is one of the campaign promises Obama is actually sticking to, and it’s one of the main reasons college students came out in droves to elect him in the first place.  “In the United States of America, no one should go broke because they chose to go to college,” he said in the State of the Union last month. And he’s right.

If nothing else gets done at all in the next three years, at least Obama can say that he tried to fix the problem of student debt – because it’s ridiculous that students can be thousands of dollars in debt the second they take their last final. And Obama gets that.