There is nothing wrong with America that can’t be cured by what is right with America.

These naive yet insightful words spoken by Bill Clinton, our nation’s 42nd president, have ignited new meaning to his and Congress’ revisions to the Higher Education Act in 1998. This act, originally signed by Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965, was created to watch the operations of federally funded higher education programs, along with giving blacks more rights-financial aid being the main component of these rights.

The Clinton administration’s addition to the bill states that “a student who has been convicted of any offense under any federal or state law involving the possession or sale of a controlled substance shall not be eligible to receive any grant, loan or work assistance under this title.”

The billl goes on to say that if convicted of one drug possession, a student cannot receive federal education or work funding for at least a year, and of two possessions, at least two years.

At first glance, the bill seemed a bit harsh, possibly unconstitutional.

Many organizations have been created that are against the bill. One of them, linked to several anti-drug restriction coalitions, states that since this bill’s amendment in 1998, 160,500 potential students have been blocked from collegiate advancement because of their drug convictions.

160,500-an unfathomable number of students whom the U.S. government has allegedly kept from going to college. This number just doesn’t seem to click with education standards in the United States.

The Education Development Center, Inc. website contains an actual copy of the amended bill. The bill read exactly as the first source had portrayed it, but contained one valuable piece of information that our source did not have.

The statement ommitted says, “A student whose eligibility has been suspended may resume eligibility before the end of the ineligibility period if the student satisfactorily completes a drug rehabilitation program.”

These are considerable extracts to simply leave out.

The first source led us to believe the government was simply denying education to students who messed up with drugs once or twice.

The actual bill led us to the truth, which says that the government will allow a drug offender federal funding if he or she commits to and completes rehabilitation and passes two unannounced drug tests.

The shortcoming is not in Clinton’s Higher Education Act amendments, rather in the laziness of drug offenders who don’t have enough of a desire for education to go through a rehab program and become clean, and activists who don’t think that these offenders should have to take steps towards being clean to gain federal funding.

We support the rehab requirements, we support education and we believe that education is available to anyone in the country who truly wants and seeks it.