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When cash-strapped students enroll in college, often the most motivated are in a race to earn enough credits to graduate in the shortest amount of time.

The idea is to get in and out quickly in order to enter the workforce and start earning a living wage, while also accruing less of the debt that comes with higher education.

To graduate ahead of schedule, students often need to take summer classes.

So it caused a lot of hardships four years ago when the administration of President Barack Obama eliminated summer Pell Grants as a means to reduce the deficit.

Pell Grants are the federal financial aid dollars set aside for low-income students. Currently they are only available during fall and spring semesters.

Cutting summer Pell Grants, however, has proved unpopular on college campuses as well as in Congress.

On Friday, Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., met with students at Harris-Stowe State University to update them on his efforts to restore summer Pell Grants.

Blunt is the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services and Education.

Last week, the committee voted 29-1 to restore summer Pell Grants in 2017. Blunt called it an encouraging step in the long process to get the bill on the president’s desk.

“If we get this done, we can minimize student loans and make college more affordable,” Blunt said. “We want students to graduate with less debt.”

He added that more than 20,000 Missouri students and 1 million students nationwide rely on Pell Grants each year.

Tierra Wilson, 21, a Harris-Stowe senior, is one of the students trying to graduate early by taking summer classes.

Wilson said she’s anxious to get into the workforce.

On Friday, she told Blunt how devastating it was for her to have to take out a $3,000 loan in order to take summer classes.

“It was really discouraging,” she said.

Harris-Stowe President Dwaun Warmack talked to the senator about the school’s demographics.

Nearly 80 percent of Harris-Stowe students are first-generation college students. Eighty percent of them get some form of a Pell Grant each year. Fifty-eight percent of them receive the full $5,815 yearly Pell Grant award.

Restoring summer Pell Grants would be “life-changing” to students such as like Wilson and a significant number of Harris-Stowe’s students, Warmack said.

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