BY MARK S. JAMES This week, President Biden announced his most ambitious plan to forgive student loan debt since the US Supreme Court ruled his last sweeping effort unconstitutional last year. I’ve written about my own experience with student loan debt forgiveness and being what I call “post-debt.” The journal that published the article is…
BY SHARON BASKIND-WING For-profit colleges are not deserving of your tax dollars. By now, most of us have heard of the many controversies surrounding these for-profit institutions: that they don’t deliver on employment promises, have poorly qualified faculty, are overpriced, spend too much on a racist recruitment process, and create more debt than their graduates…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following open letter was published today in The Guardian. Dear Joe Biden, We write to you as the first generation made worse-off because of higher education. Student debt is a national crisis that destroys lives, drags down the economy and fuels the racial wealth gap. No one should be forced…
BY HANK REICHMAN On May 21, the Department of Education released new data about levels of student debt in various academic programs. Writing in the New York Times, Kevin Carey, who directs the education policy program at New America, suggests that the move is part of the Trump administration’s deregulatory agenda. The department is already…
BY HANK REICHMAN According to a report by Bloomberg News, U.S. outstanding student loan debt reached a record $1.465 trillion last month, more than double the $675 billion outstanding in June 2009. “The Bloomberg analysis found that loans issued about six years ago have the highest cumulative loss percentage compared to any other year since…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH This resolution was passed unanimously by the chapter leaders and members attending this year’s annual meeting in the Columbus suburb of Westerville. Whereas the state funding for public higher education has been declining for the last 30 years, Whereas the State Share of Instruction (SSI) accounts for only about 13 percent…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH At a very high percentage of both public and private universities academic budgets are under strain because of all sorts of expenditures on non-academic programs, initiatives, and enterprises. One of the largest of these expenditures is typically on intercollegiate athletics, and the athletics budgets almost never include spending on stadiums, arenas,…
BY HANK REICHMAN In his essential and devastating critique of the privatization of public higher education, The Great Mistake, Christopher Newfield concludes a chapter on the student debt problem with the observation that “the current financial aid system is structured to translate either flat tuition or higher tuition into higher debt.” Here’s how this works:…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH In the “Culture Matters” section of NBC ‘s website, Daniel Arkin has contributed on article on a new game show called Paid Off, on which contestants are college graduates with significant student debt compete to answer trivia questions, with the winner having at least some of his or her debt paid…