A program sold to the poor, built on a pattern we've already lived
New Mexico has heard this pitch before. A program arrives wrapped in the language of fairness — help for the working family, the first-generation student, the kid from the small town who deserves a shot. The press release glows. The endorsements line up. And then, somewhere past the headline and deep in the fine print, the money quietly drifts toward the people who needed it least, while the families it was named after are left holding a lottery ticket and a tuition bill.
We are not guessing about this. We watched it happen with the Lottery Scholarship. And now, with Representative Melanie Stansbury and Senator Martin Heinrich championing the federal Postsecondary Student Success Act, we have an obligation to ask the question our leaders rarely ask out loud: who actually gets the money this time?
This is not a hit piece. It is an education piece — written by New Mexicans, for New Mexicans, about a system that keeps promising us the moon and handing us the bill.
What the bill actually does
The Postsecondary Student Success Act would permanently write into law the federal Postsecondary Student Success Grant program, a competitive pot of money the Department of Education hands to colleges to fund retention and completion efforts — advising, tutoring, peer mentoring, career coaching, and real-time tracking of student progress. The stated goal is reasonable and even admirable: roughly four in ten students who start college never finish, and that wasted potential is real.
On paper, eligibility tilts toward the institutions that serve our kind of students — low-resource schools, minority-serving institutions, Hispanic-serving institutions, the colleges enrolling large shares of low-income students. In a state like ours, that should read like good news.
The problem is what happens when the paper meets the payout.
The precedent: a "help the poor" program that did the opposite
Before we judge the new bill, look hard at the one we already have. The New Mexico Legislative Lottery Scholarship was sold for a generation as the great equalizer — tuition-free college for New Mexico's children. The reality earned a harsher name from the people who studied it: a regressive transfer that bleeds the poorest communities to subsidize families who were going to college anyway.
The scholarship is not need-based, even though New Mexico carries one of the highest poverty rates in the country. The dollars that fund it come disproportionately from lottery tickets bought in our lowest-income neighborhoods, while a large share of the benefits flow upward — a meaningful slice of first-time scholarship dollars goes to families in the top bracket of New Mexico tax filers. Economists have flatly described it as a major regressive tax on the state's poorest residents.
And here is the part that should stop every policymaker cold. Peer-reviewed research found that the scholarship didn't just fail to help the most vulnerable students — it actively hurt them, lowering completion rates for less-prepared students by 11.6 percentage points by steering them onto riskier four-year paths they weren't supported to finish. The students who already had every advantage did fine. The students the program was sold to protect did worse.
That is the New Mexico playbook we are warning about: the marketing targets the poor, the money finds the comfortable, and the most vulnerable are left measurably worse off than if no one had "helped" at all.
The repeat risk: the new money is already flowing the old direction
Now hold the Postsecondary Student Success Act up against that mirror.
Since the grant program began, it has distributed close to $100 million — and the largest awards have gone overwhelmingly to big universities and university systems. Flagship-scale institutions pulled grants worth more than $7 million apiece. Meanwhile, the community colleges that carry the highest dropout rates and the thinnest resources — exactly the schools serving the working New Mexicans this bill names — are largely watching from the sidelines.
And New Mexico? Not one New Mexico institution has won an award under this program. Not a university, and not a single community college.
So we ask the plain question: if the dollars keep landing at well-staffed universities with professional grant-writing offices, while under-resourced two-year colleges in places like Roswell, Hobbs, and Farmington can't break through, then who is this program really for? Eligibility on paper means nothing if the neediest schools never see the check. That is the lottery pattern wearing a federal suit.
The accountability gap: money without proof
There is a second problem, and it is bigger than New Mexico. We are being asked to permanently fund colleges at a moment when public trust in higher education sits near record lows and tuition sits near record highs. Across the political spectrum — from conservative think tanks to the current administration — the loudest demand in education policy is for transparency and results. Show us the outcomes. Prove the money worked.
This bill codifies the spending. It does far less to codify the accountability. In 2026, writing a permanent check to an industry facing a genuine credibility crisis — without ironclad, public proof that the money actually moves completion for the students it targets — is not generosity. It is a leap of faith we can no longer afford to take with taxpayer dollars.
The vanishing department: codifying a program as its house comes down
There is an elephant in this room, and honesty requires we name it. The federal Department of Education is being dismantled. On March 20, 2025, President Trump signed an executive order directing Secretary Linda McMahon to facilitate the agency's closure and return authority over education to the states. McMahon has framed shrinking the department as its "final mission," and by early 2026 roughly 87% of its staff had been affected, with some 40% already gone — making Education the only cabinet agency singled out for outright elimination.
This is not abstract, and it lands directly on the bill in front of us. The department has begun shifting 118 of its programs to other agencies, and the Office of Postsecondary Education — the very office that administers these student-success grants — is being moved to the Department of Labor, along with management of roughly $3.1 billion in funding. Put plainly: the program Representative Stansbury wants to write permanently into federal law is, at this very moment, one the administration is trying to dissolve or hand off to another agency entirely.
That collision raises a fair question every New Mexican should sit with. Codifying a grant program in statute is one way to protect it from an administration trying to kill it — Congress, not the President, controls whether a program lives in law, and that is a legitimate reason a member might race to lock it in. But it is also worth asking the harder version: as the department that houses this money disappears, is this bill about shielding students from the chaos, or about cementing a federal spending stream and the influence that travels with it before the window closes? We do not claim to know the motive, and we will not pretend to. But New Mexicans are entitled to demand the answer — and to insist that if this money is going to survive the transition, it survives with a community-college guarantee, a critical-skills priority, and a school-level accountability we lay out later. A program worth saving is a program worth fixing first.
Where the accountability belongs
Let us be precise, because precision is what makes this fair. Representative Stansbury does not run a classroom, and Senator Heinrich does not set New Mexico's K-12 curriculum. Those levers belong to the governor and the Legislature.
But that is not the end of their responsibility — it is the heart of it. New Mexicans elected these officials to steward the federal tools that shape our health, our welfare, our safety, and our schools. They write and co-sponsor the legislation. They direct where federal dollars land. They can pick up a phone, call an agency head, and pressure the system to send resources home. That is the job. That is what the paycheck buys, every single day.
So when New Mexico has ranked dead last — 50th in the nation in education — for eight consecutive years, with the same federal delegation holding our seats, voters are not out of line to ask what, exactly, has been moved. This is not blame for things outside their reach. It is accountability for the things squarely within it. A leader who holds the federal levers cannot stand beside a #50 ranking year after year and treat each new program launch as if the scoreboard reads zero. The scoreboard does not read zero. It reads fiftieth, and it has for nearly a decade.
We know it can be done — because New Mexico just did it
Here is why this is written from hope and not bitterness: we have proof that New Mexico can move a number fast when leadership decides to.
In the same span that our overall education ranking stayed frozen at 50th, New Mexico's adult education outcomes climbed from dead last to 20th in the nation — a leap measured in real skill gains for adult learners, driven by deliberate investment and execution. To be clear, that does not mean New Mexico is now 20th for college, or 20th overall. We are still 50th. But that single, narrow win demolishes the excuse that our ranking is destiny. It isn't. It is a choice about where leadership points its will.
So point it here. If we want the Postsecondary Student Success Act to actually reach the New Mexicans it names, three fixes would turn a hopeful slogan into a program with teeth:
- Reserve at least 30% of the funds for community colleges. That is where the dropout rates are highest and the resources thinnest, and it guarantees the money cannot simply pool at the flagships again.
- Prioritize dollars for students pursuing critical-need skills — the nursing, teaching, healthcare, trades, and technical fields our state and nation are desperately short on — so completion serves a workforce New Mexico can actually build a future on.
- Put the schools' own money on the line. If an institution holds the grant, it should share in the result: tie a real portion of continued funding to whether students actually finish, with partial repayment when a school falls short of its own completion targets. Skin in the game turns a handout into a contract — and contracts get honored.
None of that is radical. It is simply the difference between funding good intentions and funding good outcomes.
The bottom line
We do not write this to tear anyone down. We write it because we have read this script before, and we know how the last act goes for working New Mexico families. A program named for the poor. A pot of money that drifts to the comfortable. A vulnerable student left worse off, and a politician's press release that never mentions it.
If you want a state to climb from the bottom, you change the policy, you change the execution, and you hold the leadership accountable for both — the same leadership that collects a federal paycheck on our behalf every single day. New Mexico has waited at fiftieth long enough. The least we can demand is that the next "help" actually reaches the people it was sold to.
Read the fine print. Then ask your delegation to fix it.
Sources
- Rep. Stansbury, Rep. Chavez-DeRemer & Sen. Heinrich — bill announcement and provisions: https://stansbury.house.gov/media/press-releases/reps-stansbury-chavez-deremer-and-senator-heinrich-introduce-bill-support
- Sen. Heinrich — bill introduction and eligibility (low-resource, minority-serving institutions): https://www.heinrich.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/heinrich-stansbury-chavez-deremer-introduce-bill-to-support-student-success
- IHEP — program overview, FY2023 grant awards, and grantee list: https://www.ihep.org/press/ihep-celebrates-the-introduction-of-the-bipartisan-bicameral-postsecondary-student-success-act/
- Third Way — mapping of PSSG grants distributed to date (~$100M, 22 institutions): https://www.thirdway.org/blog/mapping-postsecondary-student-success-grants
- U.S. Department of Education — Postsecondary Student Success Grant program description: https://www.ed.gov/grants-and-programs/grants-higher-education/improvement-of-postsecondary-education/postsecondary-student-success-grant-program
- NM Voices for Children — Lottery Scholarship is not need-based; benefits skew to higher-income families: https://www.nmvoices.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Lottery-scholarship-factsheet-2-2018.pdf
- Education Finance and Policy (MIT) — merit aid lowered completion for less-prepared students by 11.6 points; regressive-tax critique: https://direct.mit.edu/edfp/article/15/1/164/10312/Does-Broad-Based-Merit-Aid-Improve-College
- NM KidsCAN — New Mexico ranks 50th in education for the eighth consecutive year: https://nmkidscan.org/news/facing-the-facts-new-mexicos-latest-education-ranking-and-the-path-forward/
- U.S. News & World Report — New Mexico Best States rankings (#50 education): https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/new-mexico
- NM Higher Education Department — adult education rises from 50th to 20th in national outcomes: https://hed.nm.gov/news/adult-education-in-new-mexico-rises-in-national-rankings
- AEI — increasing transparency to restore trust in higher education: https://www.aei.org/economics/increasing-transparency-can-restore-trust-in-higher-education/
- White House — executive action on transparency and integrity in higher education: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/08/ensuring-transparency-in-higher-education-admissions/
- K-12 Dive — Trump executive order to close the Education Department: https://www.k12dive.com/news/trump-issues-march-2025-executive-order-gut-close-education-department/741790/
- NCSL — what to know about the order to close the department and return authority to states: https://www.ncsl.org/resources/details/what-to-know-about-trumps-order-to-close-the-education-department
- NEA — the plan to abolish the Education Department, one year later (staffing impact, "final mission"): https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/plan-abolish-education-department-one-year-later
- Bloomberg — how Trump is dismantling the Education Department (staffing figures, sole agency targeted): https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2026-how-to-dismantle-education-department/
- EdWeek — the department is sending 118 programs to other agencies: https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/the-ed-dept-is-sending-118-programs-to-other-agencies-see-where-theyre-going/2026/03
- K-12 Dive — Education Department outsources program management via interagency agreements (Office of Postsecondary Education to Labor): https://www.k12dive.com/news/education-department-outsources-program-management-interagency-agreements/805819/
- Fisher Phillips — steps to dismantle the department and the ~$3.1B / Office of Postsecondary Education transfer to Labor: https://www.fisherphillips.com/en/insights/insights/trump-administration-takes-steps-to-dismantle-department-of-education
- EPI — executive order on closing the Department of Education (Congress controls authorization/funding): https://www.epi.org/policywatch/executive-order-on-closing-parts-of-the-department-of-education/
