At this time tomorrow, voting venues on the East Coast will have begun to close, and the anxiousness and hype and honest, urgent concern for America’s future will be at its fever pitch. While tomorrow is merely one day in the future, it’s still the future. The future of yesterday is today, somebody once pointed out, and that’s often true. But the future of today is never today; even after all this waiting, we still must endure another dangling day.

Waiting is hard, but it allows time to think about the future–in this case, the future of federal grants and financial aid packages that fund your college tuition. As it happens, Senator Obama and Senator McCain’s early plans for federal college aid contain significant differences. The New York Times’ Patrick Healy put forth an instructive piece called Candidates’ Positions on Student Loans Reflect Experience and Market Views. The whole thing is not too long and well worth a read.

Here, you’ll find a selection of points from the Times piece, supplemented with a quote or two from AP Education writer Justin Pope’s Obama, McCain differ on college fix. First, a quote from early in Healy’s piece.

“Whoever wins will not have any money to do anything new,” said Thomas G. Mortenson, a longtime independent analyst of student financial aid programs.

That would seem a valid point, given A) the extremely dire straits of the American (and global) economy, and B) our government’s serial, seemingly unbreakable pattern of underfunding higher education: even when Congress passes legislation raising the cap for higher education spending, they then later pass a budget that fails to fund it. From Pope’s AP article:

Because they target the neediest, Pell Grants are widely considered among the most effective aid programs. But over the past 20 years, demand has vastly outstripped supply. The maximum Pell Grant used to cover more than half of the cost of an average four-year public university; now it covers about one-third.

Congress has increased the maximum authorized Pell Grant, but in practice the increase is meaningless unless Congress and the next president fully fund the program — something that hasn’t happened for 30 years.

As for the candidates’ plans to directly help college students and their families, Healy writes, McCain isn’t proposing new programs to help with college costs, but a senior adviser says the GOP candidate is committed to helping families, especially low-income ones, pay for college.

Obama, meanwhile, …is calling for a $4,000 tax credit for tuition, which would mostly benefit middle-class families rather than low-income students who struggle the most with tuition increases and loan repayment. Recipients of the tax credit would have to perform 100 hours of community service. Healy goes on to write that …the benefits of a tax credit, meanwhile, usually come after the tuition bill is due (therefore mostly benefiting students and families who can pay tuition upfront).

Worth noting in the Pope article, however, is the distinction that the $4k tax credit …would be awarded based on prior-year tax data, so families wouldn’t have to fill out lengthy federal aid forms and face a long wait to find out how much aid they can get.

So, that would seem an important clarification. All around, interesting stuff.

To reiterate the early point, whoever wins the election will not have access to new money for higher education that doesn’t come via borrowing or cuts in other government programs. Will adequate funding for higher education be the kind of forward-thinking, long-term priority it rightfully seems to be? We won’t know for months, at least. But starting tomorrow, we’ll have the winning candidate’s stance on the issue as a new framework on which to wait.