Riley Discovers There Are No Purse Strings to Keep Tight

Just two weeks after starting his new job as education secretary, Richard W. Riley is learning he inherited a department that is much more cash-strapped than he realized.

“I come in here with all the spirit of excitement to try to get education rolling, and it looks like it would be an enormous accomplishment to get enough money to break even,” Riley said Wednesday. “You caught me at a time of frustration.”

In an interview with The Times, Riley talked about how difficult it will be for the Clinton Administration to achieve its education reform goals because of financial problems, such as a $1.4-billion deficit in the Pell Grant program.

Clinton’s commitment to education as governor of Arkansas and his campaign pledges to make reinvigorating the nation’s schools a priority have created high expectations.

Riley stressed the Administration’s commitment, despite the financial problems, to systemic change in elementary and secondary schools and to making college more accessible to children of middle-class and poor families, but indicated that will be difficult.

“I think people need to realize that we’re working from a very difficult situation as we start,” he said.

Riley’s understanding of the depth of the financial troubles facing the Pell Grant program, which provides money to 4.3 million college students each year, was gradual, he said. First he was told of the $1.4-billion deficit. Then he was told that the program for the 1993-1994 school year was underfunded by $571 million. And just Wednesday he learned that the actual shortfall in the current school year is more than $600 million.

“I inherit that (from the Bush Administration), Bill Clinton inherits that,” he said. “That is devastating.

“We have to get ahold of the money thing in the federal government,” said Riley, a former governor of South Carolina. “We don’t operate like that on the state level. I’m not used to it and I’m very uncomfortable with that. But that is what they have put in my lap here.”

Riley’s struggle with financial woes comes as the bipartisan National Commission on Responsibilities for Financing Postsecondary Education, made up of congressional and presidential appointees, has called for the federal government to spend an additional $7 billion a year to help students pay for college through a combination of grants, work-study and subsidized loans.

The commission’s report showed that the cost of attending a private college or university increased 146% in the 1980s and that families shouldered most of that increase.

Influential senators and congressmen endorsed the commission’s proposals and warned that the nation must make this investment in its young people or lose its position as a strong country.

Riley said he sympathizes with parents and students trying to pay college fees that have soared over the last decade. But he added that the commission’s proposal to offer a maximum of $4,000 in grants and $10,000 in loans to students may not reflect current fiscal realities.

“Those numbers look distant for those of us who are looking at the federal deficit and the Pell Grant deficit,” he said. “People must understand it’s just a report. It is not like it’s an act of the government.”

He also cited Clinton’s commitment to allowing young people to earn college aid by working as police officers or in some other community service post. Riley said he and Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich are working with the head of Clinton’s national service office, Eli Segal, to help design a national service program.