September 8, 2010 – 4:00 pm
Tamar Lewin from the NY Times offers a fairly straight-forward report of how the for-profit colleges are lobbying against the new rules that would limit how much debt they could shove off on the shoulders of the taxpayers. The for-profits are sending their administrators to shake hands, grin, and tell the Feds to keep the [...]
September 8, 2010 – 11:34 am
Or that’s the kind of message that I’ve picked up by this morning after detecting two major sources of irony in this random hyped up blog post on Gizmodo. Here’s a sample: The Western World keeps cutting its science research budget because of the economic crisis. As China rises—funneling tons of money into science—our obtuse politicians [...]
September 7, 2010 – 5:06 pm
As if we need to be reminded of this, Catherine Rampell over at the NY Times, tells us that the tech sector is slow to hire, choosing to send more jobs overseas. Rosamaria Carbonell Mann, one of the examples quoted by Ms. Rampell, has a masters degree in computer science but is finding it hard [...]
September 7, 2010 – 11:57 am
The headline doesn’t refer to the students, just the professors at the University of North Texas. The sweatshop fascists at the top of the pyramid are cracking down hard. The professors are going to be required to be on campus FOUR HOURS A DAY!!! OMG. And that’s not just one special day when the professors [...]
September 4, 2010 – 12:55 pm
The NY TImes’s great columnist Ron Lieber spends some time talking with our debt-ridden youth, the ones who are discovering that a crippling debt may be just as bad as herpes when it comes to scaring away potential spouses. Allison Brooke Eastman lost her fiance after telling him first that she owed about $100,000 to [...]
September 3, 2010 – 6:57 pm
Here’s a wonderful poster from collegescholarships.org and byJess.net: Infographic by College Scholarships.org
September 3, 2010 – 3:50 pm
This op-ed piece by Robert Reich, the former Clintonista with a dreamy, optimistic heart, is a grab bag of ideas for getting the country out of the “Second Depression”, or as the more optimistic politicians like to say, the “Great Recession”. Buried in his list of solutions is a typical, dreamy academic call for public [...]
September 3, 2010 – 12:15 am
Andrew Gillen over at the College Affordability Clubhouse just produced a better estimate of the unreported or shadow debt. That is, the amount that parents borrow or raid from their 401k. The standard numbers usually focus on the kid not on the family unit and so they can hide much of the debt that the [...]
September 2, 2010 – 5:32 pm
We upgraded to a new version of WordPress and added CAPTCHA blocking that was a bit too successful. Not only were the spammer locked out, but everyone else too. My apologies.
September 2, 2010 – 2:18 pm
Perhaps you’re paying tuition to an “upscale law school” in New York. Perhaps you’re guaranteeing the loans of someone going to an upscale law school– something that taxpayers are doing in many shapes and forms. Well, one glance at this Craig’s List job will tell you how some of that money is being spent: Gotham [...]
September 1, 2010 – 9:08 pm
One of the neat things about the web is that we don’t need to just accept everything we’re told. The well-titled blog ButIDidEverythingRight just quoted some of Duke Law’s statistics. Apparently 100% of the people from the Class of 2009 had jobs at graduation. But is that really true? I don’t have much time to [...]
September 1, 2010 – 12:22 pm
I love Camille Paglia and think she’s spot on in many of the points that she makes in this short piece for the Chronicle of Higher Edumacation: “When middle-class graduates in their mid-20s are just stepping on the bottom rung of the professional career ladder, many of their working-class peers are already self-supporting and married [...]
August 31, 2010 – 9:00 pm
Mark Kantrowitz, Financial Aid guru, set up a student debt counter that tries to estimate the amount of student debt that’s out there. It’s pretty cute and a good first step, even though it’s wildly inaccurate. The website admits that it’s just for entertainment because the numbers vary at the beginning of terms, but I [...]
August 31, 2010 – 2:42 pm
There’s so much bad news these days that I thought it was worth highlighting this story from Iza Wojciechowska over at InsideHigherEd. While tuition is skyrocketing at many state colleges, some states are keeping the thumbscrews tight on the schools. Let’s praise these politicians because they’ve got to resist tothe blather from the entitled blowhards at the [...]
August 31, 2010 – 2:24 pm
That’s $20b with a b as in billion. Mark Yudof, the genius who inherited this trainwreck of entitlement, is quoted by the LA Times’s Larry Gordon as saying, “If we do nothing, in four years, the University will be spending more on retirement programs each year than we do on classroom instruction.” Yet I’m sure [...]
August 31, 2010 – 2:01 pm
Ah, Wall Street. They say that hope springs eternal and it seems that there are still some on Wall Street who are hopeful that for-profit schools will pull out of the nose dive and generate great returns. Steve Eisman scared everyone with talk of the collapse, but then we found out that he was just [...]
August 30, 2010 – 9:29 pm
Mr. Bissonnette does a great job of packaging the smaller-cheaper-better message that I try to yap about on this blog. His latest article for the Huffington Post says that the smartest kids aren’t going to Harvard or Yale, they’re going to community college for next to nothing. If only I had some money to hire [...]
August 30, 2010 – 9:26 pm
This article from Kathleen Pender at the SFGate.com almost sent my heart reeling. For some time I’ve been trying to be relatively optimistic about the depth and breadth of the student loan problem. I’ve always assumed that this is a problem for the bottom part of society, the kids who would be better off in [...]
August 30, 2010 – 9:01 pm
One of the most brilliant inventions of the college industrial complex is the “heads we all win, tails you lose” attitude. If you’re a success, the school takes credit and brags. If you fail, well, it’s your fault and you still owe 100% of the loans, btw. Bill Gates blew out of Harvard pretty quickly [...]
August 30, 2010 – 5:34 pm
While I think that rankings like the ones from US News are silly and don’t help the student very much, I think that most kids understand many of the limitations. The Deans and administrators, though, hate them except when they give their school a high rating. Christopher Matgouranis over at the College Affordability Club wrote [...]
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