December 30, 2008 – 1:17 pm
There’s nothing like a cool phrase to lend legitimacy and make it acceptable to charge big fees. In the past, kids who couldn’t hack the idea of college would sort of disappear into the workforce. Perhaps they didn’t like the place that admitted them. Or maybe they were just turned off by the competitiveness. Sometimes [...]
December 29, 2008 – 12:47 pm
One of the joys of writing a blog is watching the spam comments pile up awaiting moderation. The humorous part is watching the kind of spam we attract. In the old days, the spammers just buried the world with dubious claims. Now, they’re smarter but not smart enough. We’re getting “comments” that say very little [...]
December 29, 2008 – 12:32 pm
Kathy Kristof of the LA Times saves the best quote for the end of her long exploration of the crooked lenders who stuffed hefty loans on the back of the students: ”No one tells you to be careful of taking on too much debt when you’re in school,” she said. “It’s just the opposite. They [...]
December 25, 2008 – 1:38 pm
The faculty is drawing the daggers for Shirley Ann Jackson, at least according to some of the people quoted in this Times Union story by Marc Parry. Why is she laying off so many lab managers and workers when she’s pulling in such a big salary and keeping so many staff members who seem to [...]
December 23, 2008 – 7:07 pm
A nice story by Christine McConville and Jerry Kronenberg from the Boston Herald tells a scary story about a nice girl who did what she was supposed to do: go to college. But somehow, the price kept going up. She said her debt was supposed to boil down to $300 a month. But somehow the [...]
December 22, 2008 – 3:44 pm
A story from the Las Vegas Sun says that more Nevada students are looking at the University of Nevada, a story that sounds plausible. There were some interesting numbers which sounded less plausible but certainly possible: UNLV students graduate to make $46k a year while Brown students graduate to make $56k a year and Princeton [...]
December 18, 2008 – 6:11 pm
Kevin Cullen of the Boston Globe has a short piece today about Ian McVey, a young man who ran up a big debt going to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute before joining the Marines, heading off to Iraq, and becoming another statistic. When his father tried to settle the debts, two out of three institutions wrote off [...]
December 17, 2008 – 2:49 pm
Deferring the payment on a student loan is one of the classic features chosen by students. After all, there’s usually not much income while in college. That’s why you take out a loan. But now NJ is in a tough spot. In order to get anyone to buy the bonds, the state promises that there [...]
December 17, 2008 – 2:41 pm
The smart people of Alabama are starting to ask why is the state college so expensive. Why should an average person pay 51% of their income to college? The problem is that college isn’t always a ticket to the middle class. If there’s too much debt involved, it’s closer a ticket to penury. The question [...]
December 16, 2008 – 10:01 pm
Newsday reports on the New York State tuition costs for state schools. Don’t watch the left hand while the right hand is in action. Gov. David Patterson showed some of his political skills as he matched a boost in tuition ($600) with the availability of new, lower-interest rate loans. Don’t pay attention to rising prices, [...]
December 15, 2008 – 11:07 pm
It should come as no surprise that the Chronicle of Higher Education is flogging the Big Education’s request for more cash: In a letter sent on Friday, the Association of American Universities lists six recommendations to “help college students and universities weather the economic downturn and boost the nation’s economic recovery.” The group says that [...]
December 12, 2008 – 3:28 pm
This story by BusinessWeek’s Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Ben Elgin begins with the usual subtext: private student loans are good and we need to do something to help those poor students pile on more debt onto their backs. But then it takes a weird turn: Consider Nick Keith. He enrolled in a two-year culinary school, taking [...]
December 11, 2008 – 1:13 pm
The WSJ’s Philip Shishkin delivers a collection of coping strategies of students who happened to be born at the wrong time. Most are forced by bad luck to switch colleges just so they can find a cheaper path to a diploma. While this is much more painful than sitting around the malt shop having a [...]
December 11, 2008 – 12:47 pm
I’m not a big fan of the Collapse movement and their penchant for seeing the worst in the reshuffling of society. Eventually, we’ll find a way to organize the flow of capital again. But sometimes they do a good job of illustrating a short-term phenomenon. In this posting, Orlov illustrates why the richest colleges will [...]
December 11, 2008 – 1:30 am
See it here. Among the best ideas are “Charging only for amount learned.” If it were only so easy.
December 8, 2008 – 8:10 pm
Most of the time, this blog is obsessed with the college debt taken on by students. But today, Harvard sold off $1.5b in bonds in a private placement at rates between 5% and 6.5%. While it’s hard to compare apples to oranges in these interest rates, it might be worth noting that Harvard’s rate for [...]
December 7, 2008 – 7:08 pm
Let’s look at Ben Patterson’s brain as being half full, perhaps thanks to the hard work of the folks at the University of Wisconsin. In his editorial, he notices the big problem from the debts weighing on the shoulders of the graduating students. He says, wryly, “You would think the student would be the one [...]
December 5, 2008 – 9:27 pm
Most of these are really courses, not full-fledged majors. But here’s a cute list of 10 worthless degrees. I think “surf science” is good, but maybe one day they’ll slice the salami even thinner and give us Queer Musicology for Surfing UFO Science.”
December 5, 2008 – 12:55 pm
The follow up story on college costs from the NY Times includes a wide range of comments, most of them asking the same questions we’ve asked. Why is it so much more expensive now? My favorite is this one from someone named David in NYC: Why is there no call to have the University Presidents [...]
December 4, 2008 – 8:49 pm
This vapid editorial comes with the title “How to curb college costs”, but it doesn’t deliver much except some fist shaking at the high salary of the president of the University of Washington. (His isn’t even the highest!) They do mention cutting amenities like the fancy new weightrooms and packing more kids in the class, [...]
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