Writing in The New York Times, Gretchen Morgenson observes: In the years before the mortgage crisis, financial regulators often looked the other way as banks and other lenders pursued reckless activities that cost investors, taxpayers and borrowers billions of dollars. When trouble hit, these regulators had to scramble to fix the mess that their inertia had helped create.…
The Department of Education and Corinthian Colleges have been engaged in extended negotiations over how the for-profit corporation will either shut down or scale down its various entities, including the Everest University, WyoTech, and Heald College chains. The government actions against Corinthian Colleges came after the Harkin Report highlighted Corinthian’s extraordinarily high student-loan default rate,…
Writing for the New York Times (June 24, 2014), in a column titled “The Reality of Student Debt Is Different than the Cliches,” David Leonhardt reviews a recent study released by the Brookings Institute. These are the main assertions: (1) Student debt, on average, has actually not increased significantly. (2) Because the earnings of college…
An “On the Issues” Post from the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education [http://futureofhighered.org] _______________ Jeff Kolnick CFHE Guest Columnist The dramatic increase in college tuition and fees over the past dozen years is justifiably big news. Few doubt that the massive disinvestment of public dollars is responsible for much of the…
It is easy to teach good students. The “star teachers” at Harvard or Stanford can assume a certain knowledge base as starting points in their classes and can set expectations that the majority of their students can reasonably meet. They have a narrow range of students, all of whom have been carefully selected through an…
This post was written by Jeff Bryant for the blog of the Campaign for America’s Future [http://ourfuture.org/] which has become a driving force behind the New Populist Movement. The group’s report, Organizing to Take Back America: The New Populist Movement, is available at: http://y.ourfuture.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/New-Populist-Movement-Organizing.pdf. Prepared by Riger Hickey, the co-director of the Campaign for America’s…
On May 16-18, the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education’s 7th National Gathering drew nearly 100 faculty, student and organizational leaders to the Desmond Hotel in Albany, New York, where the organization held panel discussions and workshops surrounding a theme of “Building Alliances for Access, Equity and Quality.” The increasing problem of student debt was…
In this morning’s e-mail, I found the following two items, one right after the other: first, from University Business, their daily newsletter with this header, “Four Shot at Seattle Pacific University,” and then from Sen. Patrick Leahy, writing for Stand with Students, “Give students a fair shot: join Elizabeth Warren and me in supporting student…
Although the more overtly political spending of the Koch brothers has received much more attention, the Walton Family Foundation has, not surprisingly, been one of the major supporters of right-wing think tanks and public-policy experiments. Long a major donor to the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, the…
I am posting the following letter to this blog for three reasons: (1) it illustrates the types of complex and specialized issues that state conference leaders are frequently asked to address; (2) in some instances, such as this one, the conference leadership may take the position that there simply was not enough faculty input into…