BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL In “Colleges Should Not Allow Students to Pay With a Percentage of Future Earnings”, Forbes contributor Derek Newton got both the intent and purpose of an income share agreement (ISA) wrong. In conversations with higher education leaders across America, my experience indicates that there has been a dramatic shift over the past…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH In September, about six weeks before the presidential election, Abby Jackson wrote the following short item for Business Insider: Russian Education and Science Minister Olga Vasilieva called for a return to mandatory farm labor for school children, according to Russian state-operated news agency RIA Novosti via The Moscow Times. Vasilieva said that students should be…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Writing for Forbes, Preston Cooper, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute who specializes in the economics of higher education offers “Five Higher Education Reform Ideas For The New Congress.” I have tried to select the key point of elaboration on each item: Put a Cap on Federal Student Loans: There is…
Writing for the Huffington Post, Shahien Nasiripour reports that “Borrowing for College Is Set to Hit a Five Year Low.” More specifically, for the first time since the 2009-2010 academic year, student loans are likely to total less than $100 million. That sounds like good news. But it actually reflects very little change. In fact,…
This is a chart from the Federal Reserve Board in New York representing household debt in the U.S. in the third quarter of 2014: Over the last decade, student debt has clearly increased both in raw dollars and as a percentage of household debt. The implications of that increase have, however, been much less clear…
It is hard to say exactly what the long-term impact of the Occupy Wall Street movement will turn out to be. Will it seem in retrospect a very impassioned but transient response to a very serious economic crisis caused largely by the unprincipled marketing of mortgage-backed securities of very dubious value? Or will it be…
Several days ago, I posted several pie charts showing student-loan debt as a percentage of total personal debt in 2003 and in 2013. Business Insider has represented the same federal data as a bar graph of the first- and third-quarter data from each year between 2003 and 2014. What this graph allows one to see is that…