Our View:

ANTI-DRUG LAW BACKFIRES

When Congress passed a law four years ago taking federal financial aid
away from college students who had been convicted of drug crimes, it
was hailed as a miracle cure. "The best thing we can do for education
is to get somebody clean and then get them back into school," said
Rep. Mark Souder, R-Ind., the law's chief sponsor.

Not a bad goal. But the supposed benefits haven't materialized.

Instead, the law has sparked countermeasures at several universities
and protests on more than 80 campuses by students who are seeing other
results.

Among the most problematic:

* While the most trivial drug offenses can cost students their chance
for a college education, students who commit rape, robbery and murder
face no such outcome. So the sponsors' stated goal of showing that
actions have consequences is scoffed at.

* By withholding federal financial aid, the program hurts low-income
students with drug convictions who can't afford to attend college
without aid. Wealthier students with similar convictions are not
penalized if they don't depend on federal financial aid.

* By refusing aid to students who have already been punished for drug
crimes, the law "undermines the process" in which colleges offer
students a fresh start, says Hampshire College President Gregory Prince Jr.

After the Bush administration began aggressively enforcing the law,
which had been largely ignored, more than 15,000 students with drug
records lost financial aid for all or part of this year. Another
10,000 who failed to answer a question on government loan applications
about whether they had a drug conviction also were denied aid. The
vast majority of the students penalized have family incomes of $30,000
or less.

To counteract the lost aid, Yale decided this month to make up the
dollars while a student undergoes a rehabilitation program that can
reopen the door to federal aid. A handful of other schools have set up
similar scholarship or loan programs. Hampshire, for example, has a
loan fund of $10,000 available to students hurt by the drug law.
Meanwhile, student governments, from George Washington University in
the nation's capital to the Berkeley in the West, have passed
resolutions denouncing the law.

But such efforts don't touch the vast majority of students at the
nation's 7,000 colleges. Students who attend schools that can't or
won't compensate for this faulty federal statute miss out on the
college education the federal aid programs were designed to provide to
the neediest students.

The law's supporters argue that if aid goes to a student with a drug
record, less money is left for law-abiding students. Their reasoning
is a stretch. The aid is from an "entitlement program," and no student
eligible based on family income is turned away.

Even Souder recognizes its problems and favors amending it so that it
applies only to students already in college when they commit a drug
offense.

Better to get rid of the law altogether. Otherwise, college students
are taught a damaging lesson: that low-income students must pay twice
for their crimes.

Author - Bob Schaffer
Note: Rep. Bob Schaffer, R-Colo., is a member of the House Education
Committee.

Opposing View:

DON'T REWARD CONVICTS

It's heartbreaking, the great number of Americans summarily rejected
every year in their application for federal student aid, especially
when their only deficiency is that their family's income is just a few
pennies above the eligibility limit.

Too bad, says the government. After all, grants are scarce, and rules
are rules. Those denied aid must often abandon their academic dreams
or attend cheaper schools.

The situation screams for congressional hearings on the exorbitant
cost of tuition, the paucity of student aid, perhaps the unfairness of
arbitrary income caps, but no. Liberals in America have identified
worthier victims whose sob stories of rejection are, to them, even
more heart wrenching and pitiful: drug convicts.

Of course, criminals deserve a second chance. They just shouldn't
expect the rest of society - the society whose laws they brazenly
violated - to give them generous subsidies, especially when these
gifts come at a cost to law-abiding taxpayers.

The question of whether Americans should resume subsidizing drug
offenders requires a perspective banished from most university
campuses and editorial boardrooms. First, college is not an
entitlement, and federal student-aid grants are gifts, rather generous
ones, at that.

Second, drug abuse is always immoral and always dangerous. And it is
always illegal.

Third, whether drug convicts are treated fairly in comparison to
murderers and rapists is simply irrelevant to the majority of
America's hard-working taxpayers whose wages make their own kids
ineligible, by tiny margins, to receive the aid in question.

Fourth, no one is denied an education under the existing law, which
underscores the offender's personal choice and judgment. An abuser's
impulse to do drugs must be weighed against his risk of being caught,
forfeiting (only for a year) the federal gift.

Fifth, public money goes only so far, and subsidizing convicted drug
abusers means there will be less money for everyone else. Rewarding
drug convicts with precious cash subsidies trivializes the perils of
drug abuse, sabotages America's war on drugs and supports the same
worldwide drug trade that costs Americans billions of dollars and
claims millions of lives.