The College Board has issued another of its reports on student loan debt, focusing this time on the 17 percent of students who graduate from four-year colleges with “high debt levels”—that is, more than $30,500 worth of education loans. The average debt load for those high -borrowing students, one out every six graduates with bachelor’s […]
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With great fanfare Columbia University recently announced that starting this fall it will offer an undergraduate major in the new interdisciplinary field of “sustainable development.” That makes Columbia the first Ivy League school to offer such a major, which sounds as though it ought to be a practical mix of hard science, “green” technology, and […]
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It’s retro-Sixties season at Syracuse University, as students hold protests and firm up plans to hold even more protests against the university’s plan to have James Dimon, chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co, speak at commencement on May 16. “Chase, “Chase, Chase, go away, don’t come back any day!” Syracuse students chanted at […]
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It’s retro-Sixties season at Syracuse University, as students hold protests and firm up plans to hold even more protests against the university’s plan to have James Dimon, chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co, speak at commencement on May 16. “Chase, “Chase, Chase, go away, don’t come back any day!” Syracuse students chanted at […]
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Yale University has been scrambling to cut its expenditures by $350 million a year in order to deal with a 25 percent decline in the value of its endowment after the recent collapse of the financial markets: from a 2008 high of nearly $23 billion to less than $17 billion currently. Budget-cutting measures at Yale […]
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A story in the March/April issue of the Washington Monthly about the demise last year, after its accreditation was pulled, of the financially and academically troubled Southeastern University in Washington, D.C., hit close to home. My home, actually, because I live just four blocks away from Southeastern’s decrepit single-building campus in Washington’s sleepy Southwest quadrant […]
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Van Jones, the Oakland, Calif.-based radical activist and author who was forced to resign his post as the Obama administration’s “green jobs czar” in September after it was revealed that he had signed a “truther” petition in 2004 calling for an investigation of President George W. Bush’s supposed collusion in the massacres of Sept. 11, […]
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It’s back: the “campus rape crisis.” The latest all-hands-on-deck alarm comes from the Center for Public Integrity (CPI), a nonprofit foundation based in Washington and specializing in what it describes as “investigative journalism about issues of public interest,” which teamed up with the investigative unit of National Public Radio (NPR) to issue a report in […]
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Alan Michael Collinge is back in his gadfly role agitating against the student loan industry. Collinge is the author of last year’s The Student Loan Scam: The Most Oppressive Debt in U.S. History—and How We Can Fight Back (Beacon Press) and founder of the website studentloanjustice.org, dedicated to, among other things restoring the bankruptcy protection […]
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President Obama has made reforming federal assistance to college students—with the aim of making it financially easier for more of them to obtain their degrees—-a centerpiece of his administration’s goals. In his State of the Union address on Jan. 27 he called for expanding the Pell grant program that currently serves about 7 million low-income […]
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College investments dropped 23 percent in 2009, the most disastrous year since the National Association of College and University Business Officers began compiling investment statistics in 1971. Two observations can be made about NACUBO’s report, issued last week: One is: The richer the institution, the harder the fall, generally speaking. Harvard, the nation’s wealthiest university […]
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The New York Times reports today on a new marketing gimmick for colleges seeking to boost applications during this recession-plagued time when every tuition-paying body in a classroom counts: the fast-track application form that allows some high school seniors seeking admission to bypass the usual fees of $50 or so, the tedious filling out of […]
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Why do our for-profit colleges seem so disappointing? Why are they plagued by high levels of student debt, high loan-default percentages, dismal graduation rates, and third-rate reputations that lead some employers to reject their graduates automatically? Sure, back in the old days there were plenty of commercial schools whose sole raison d’etre was apparently to […]
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Andrew Gillen of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity wrote this note to Charlotte Allen to clarify comments of his in Allen’s article today on student loans: Charlotte, I saw your article on student loans is up at Minding The Campus. I liked it, but at the very end, you have a long quote […]
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Shortly after his inauguration in January President Obama announced a proposal to get rid of a 44-year-old program known as the Federal Family Education Loan (FFEL) program. In the FFEL system, the federal government guarantees loans to students from private banks and similar institutions under a variety of programs (the best known is the so-called […]
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It was a “win for students,” the New York Times headline announced last week. Russell Athletic, a leading manufacturer of college-logo sportswear, had agreed to rehire 1,200 Honduran workers who lost their jobs when Russell closed one of its eight factories in Honduras in 2008 after negotiations over a collective-bargaining agreement reached a stalemate. Students—U.S. […]
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In May the Illinois State’s Attorney’s office issued a stunningly unusual subpoena. It asked for the student grades, grading criteria, class syllabi, expense reports, and even e-mail messages of undergraduates taking an investigative reporting class at Northwestern University. The class tied into the Medill Innocence Project, a program administered by Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism […]
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A recent report from Britain concludes that U.K. universities are “dumbing down” their requirements for majoring in foreign language in order to attract more undergraduate students. “The most widely-reported trend was towards a ‘greater emphasis’ on cultural and film studies, the report said, resulting in a decline in literary studies,” the U.K Telegraph reported regarding […]
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Does a black professor deserve tenure because his college hasn’t granted tenure to very many black professors in the past? To provide a role model for black students? To help the school achieve ethnic diversity faster than it otherwise might? To ensure that the proportion of black professors matches the proportion of black college students? […]
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Total enrollment in colleges and universities is expected to rise to 20.6 million by the fall of 2018, according to a new projection from the U.S. Education Department’s National Center for Education Statistics. That’s a 13 percent increase over the 16 million or so enrolled in 2007, according to the report. The greatest percentage growth […]
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Community colleges stand to be major beneficiaries of the massive Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act passed by the House on Sept. 17, with about $9 billion in federal dollars to be directed their way if the bill becomes law. Community colleges, as locally based, take-all-comers institutions that typically offer two-year degrees for minimal tuition, […]
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Here’s a fun job: adjunct professor, as described by University of Akron adjunct Maria C. Maisto writing in a Sept. 10 manifesto in Inside Higher Education: I teach English composition — one of the most labor-intensive teaching assignments out there. This semester I’ll have to respond to 85 students on two different campuses and almost […]
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Some faculty members in the University of California system plan to stage a walkout starting on Sept. 24—which also happens to be the first day of classes at several of the system’s 10 campuses. The aim of the walkouts is to protest an $813 million cut in state funding for the university system during the […]
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Cuyahoga Community College expects to see nearly 30,000 students enrolled for credit on its three campuses in Cleveland when it opens for the fall semester late in August, with an additional 30,000 taking non-credit courses for job-training “personal enrichment” (instruction in art, photography, and other hobbies). According to campus officials, the 30,000-strong for-credit student population […]
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Average scores on the SAT dipped a bit for high school seniors who graduated in the class of 2009, and the usual suspects—our friends at the National Center for Fair and Open Testing (FAIR) are already using the lower scores to attack the whole idea of standardized testing, a platform that includes not only the […]
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Last November the University of Texas at Austin issued an alarmed Gender Equity Task Force report indicating that, as the university stated in a press release, “on average, a lower percentage of tenured and tenure track faculty are women than at other schools.” In fact, the percentage of women at UT-Austin wasn’t that much lower […]
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Yet another statistical study reveals that the high school-age offspring of black immigrant families enroll in America’s elite colleges at a vastly higher rate proportionate to their numbers than the offspring of U.S.-born blacks, and even at a slightly higher rate than whites. This latest study, published in the journal Sociology of Education (abstract here), […]
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Most colleges and universities plan to tighten their belts during this recession year, what with shrunken endowments, curtailed donor gifts, and students and parents suddenly feeling too strapped to pay high tuition costs. Yet for a lucky few institutions—institutions with connections to members of Congress—this year will provide some unusual financial bonanzas, thanks to a […]
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A recent report from Education Sector shows that about half of America’s college undergraduates go into debt these days in order to work toward their degrees. In 1993 only 32 percent of college students took out loans to pay for their educations, so these latest figures, from 2008, based on the U.S. Education Department’s National […]
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The talented education bloggers at The Quick and the Ed have turned their attention to a topic dear to the hearts of us at Minding the Campus (see my March 31 opinion piece for the Washington Examiner): the reluctance of colleges and universities to take serious steps to cut costs in the face of shrunken […]
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