Author’s Note: This excerpt is from my weekly “Top of Mind” email, sent to subscribers every Thursday. For more content like this and to receive the full newsletter each week, sign up on Minding the Campus’s homepage. Simply go to the right side of the page, look for “SIGN UP FOR OUR WEEKLY NEWSLETTER, ‘TOP OF MIND,’” and […]
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Now that Paul Ryan has joined the Republican ticket, it’s worth considering how his much-discussed budget changes higher education. Ryan wants to cap the maximum amount of Pell Grant awards at the current level of $5,550, eliminating the automatic increase according to inflation. Ryan would also shore up the eligibility requirements, adding a maximum income […]
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How do you reduce the growing mountain of student loan debt? Stop subsidizing higher education? End the notion that ‘any degree’ is better than ‘no degree’? Teach kids that paying off $12,000 in loans isn’t a cakewalk? No, no, let’s just tell them again how much it costs and hope they make the best of […]
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From MyBudget360, a sobering reminder of explosive student loan growth:
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Until recently, much talk about student loans was fact-free: There simply weren’t publicly available figures worth paying attention to. The official balance of student loans from the NY Fed were unreliable: There was a bucket of random obligations called “Miscellaneous”, which included things like utility bills, child support, and alimony. And it turns out that […]
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At Bloomberg News, Virginia Postrel writes about how federal subsidies intended to make college more affordable have instead encouraged rapidly rising tuitions, in a column entitled, “U.S. Universities Feast on Federal Student Aid.” Education analyst Neal McCluskey links to four studies showing that increased government spending on student aid results in large tuition increases. As […]
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The executive council of the Modern Language Association (MLA), the leading organization for English and foreign-language professors, issued a statement on Wednesday decrying the rising debt levels of college students. Well, sure, who isn’t against student debt? But I think that the MLA statement is more than just pious boilerplate. It’s a statement of panic–that […]
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The Income Based Repayment (IBR) program, which took effect in 2009, is designed to lighten the student-loan burden for some students. The basic idea is to limit monthly payments to less than 15% of disposable income. If a student makes these payments for 25 years, any remaining balance is forgiven, meaning that taxpayers essentially pay […]
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Megan McArdle of the Atlantic, with a few strokes of her blog pen, has just solved the problem of too much student debt and the college affordability dilemma — all while ensuring access to higher education for those who truly deserve it. That is, for folks like herself. First, bowing to the widely circulated claim […]
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Thousands of British university students walked out of classes on November 24 to protest the cuts in governmental subsidies. Demonstrations in a dozen cities were mostly peaceful, but several dozen students occupied part of Oxford’s Bodleian Library and protesters in London set fires outside government offices in Whitehall where two police officers were injured in […]
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As an observer of the national political scene for over a half of a century, and as a former employee of the U.S. Senate, I have seen a lot of political sleaze and chicanery. But nothing tops what happened as the Congress, using a relatively arcane procedure designed to correct spending excesses in budget bills, […]
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The New York Times’ “The Choice” blog is running a helpful question and answer series on the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. Take a look if you’re puzzling through the process of filling the thing out.
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