September 30, 2008 – 7:47 pm
Congress blinked on Monday and Wall street dove for cover. Then everyone woke up and found that the sun rose once again. Will private lending be hurt by the frozen credit markets? Perhaps, but it couldn’t get much worse. In any case, most of those loans are better off not being made. The students are [...]
September 30, 2008 – 7:42 pm
After a scary start, this article admits that only 3% of the students admit to using credit cards to pay for school. Let’s hope that it’s wrong about this percentage increasing. It’s a scary thought to be running up loans at credit card rates.
September 29, 2008 – 6:11 pm
The Chronicle of Higher Education is a good, balanced publication, but it knows its marketplace. Most of the subscribers are university administrators and so the reporters speak to them. This week’s top story focuses on the general issue of high costs, but it apologizes as often as is probes. Most of the students don’t spend [...]
September 29, 2008 – 1:43 pm
Roy Wenzl wrote this nice piece in the Wichita Eagle. Here’s a great quote: Reggie Robinson, the regents’ president and chief executive, offered another dimension. “Many of us in higher education may have contributed to the loss of money by talking a lot over the last few years about how much money you can make [...]
September 25, 2008 – 1:47 pm
The Irish university system has discovered the beauty of the student loan. The legislators can be annoyingly precise about the yearly tab for educating society. Pushing for big increases year after year starts to grate on the budget office. But the kids, hey, they don’t notice if you boost the fees if the amount is [...]
September 24, 2008 – 6:00 pm
Charles Murray is pretty controversial and, let’s put it mildly, not very optimistic or kind. While I’ve pushed the idea that most people spend too much on an education that never pays off, Murray just asserts that 80% will never be able to understand what they learn in a proper college. Then he comes to [...]
September 24, 2008 – 4:51 pm
Tune in here. All the fun stuff (lectures) with none of the pain (tests). But no pain means no gain.
September 24, 2008 – 1:30 pm
One student was told that he could have free pizza if he filled out a “survey”, a document that was really an application for a credit card. Whoo hoo. The first hit is always free.
September 24, 2008 – 1:24 pm
The conventional wisdom is that college opens doors and lets you do what you want to do. A new survey from Experience.com suggests that it’s not always true, at least right after college. Half of the students admit to choosing the better paying job because they want to make a dent in their loans. Hmmm.
September 23, 2008 – 4:02 pm
Zac Bissonette makes a great point on the term “financial aid”? Why are jobs and loans considered “aid?” Shouldn’t they be called work and loans? Yes, a few colleges do lower their price with outright grants, but most aren’t any different from car salesmen who try to sell you a loan.
September 18, 2008 – 11:46 am
The NYT reports that the Pell Grant fund may be running about six billion dollars low, an amount that sounds cheap after Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. This isn’t a bail out, though. These are grants given to college age kids. Sigh.
September 16, 2008 – 3:06 pm
We’re seeing more self-help stories aimed at the millions of students hurt by the credit squeeze. This story from USA Today doesn’t say much new, but the headline is telling. The journalists are already talking about the lenders “bailing”. Is it really an obligation of the lenders to show up and fund an increasingly expensive [...]
September 16, 2008 – 3:03 pm
As we’ve been predicting, the housing bubble’s collapse continues to squeeze college students. MSNBC took notice today and provided some good details from the trenches.
September 15, 2008 – 5:00 pm
U.S. News, the institution that’s built a strong foundation evaluating colleges, is running a story from one heretic saying, “A debt-free education is probably one of the greatest gifts you can give your child. But a fully financed nest egg will certainly make it easier to sleep at night in the decade leading up to [...]
September 15, 2008 – 4:53 pm
Read what Kathleen Connell wrote in the Christian Science Monitor right here. We couldn’t agree more. Here’s a sad quote from one student who still doesn’t really get it: “Though I believe my college education was a good investment, I doubt I will ever own a car or a house.” We know that life isn’t about [...]
September 15, 2008 – 4:48 pm
Princeton just opened their new science library. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, the price tag for the 87,000 square foot building is $74m and that’s just an old estimate from 2006. The bills are still coming in giving it a chance to hit that rosy number $1000 per square foot. For comparison, Bloomberg business [...]
September 15, 2008 – 4:42 pm
Melissa Mullins, a grad student pursuing a PhD in English, delivers a difficult message in this week’s Chronicle of Higher Education, “I’m more financially successful making blackberry handpies… than laboring for hours grading undergraduate essays.” (pg A39) She said her parents used to be excited that their daughter would be an English professor until they realized [...]
September 12, 2008 – 6:00 pm
This story is probably a stunt, or at least a cry for some kind of help, but the fact that it found traction shows the squeeze produced by high college costs.
September 9, 2008 – 2:50 pm
Many big universities put students in a bind: the students must take a number of required courses but there’s not enough room in the required classes. Ugh. So many students have started complaining about this problem that the University of Calgary is now offering the first guarantee in Canada, according to this article from the [...]
September 5, 2008 – 3:13 pm
The NYT reports that Andrew Cuomo is suing a company for enticing students with “free” iPods and other gadgets. Once the students get in, agree to boosted interest rates, and finally get to take Econ 101, they’ll learn that there’s no such thing as a free lunch.
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