The Washington Post has a nice piece about a few sane students who are choosing cheaper schools: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/30/AR2009053001762.html Erica Espinosa, 18, who is graduating from Northwest High School in Germantown, was accepted at the University of Maryland at College Park, which costs $21,163 for tuition, fees and housing. She also got into several other four-year [...]
Here’s a moderately funny letter about the alumni solicitations that all colleges send out. It’s not enough to put you in debt during your time in school. They want to push you closer even afterwards. So allow me to set the record straight. I am not able to give you money right now because the [...]
The athletic departments have it hard in college. On some days, the President praises them for being an integral part of the mission to mold young minds and build character. On other days, the athletics are some kind of extra that’s somehow different. The weird poets can drink lakes filled with coffee and smoke endless [...]
We were going to just congratulate the NY Times for such a stupendous effort. They called every single student loan “forgiveness” program and asked them if there was a chance the their mechanism for forgiving loans would disappear like the program in Kentucky. We’re proud of them for pushing so hard. Now let us complain [...]
The NY Times’s Jonathan Glater has some bad news for any firefighter or teacher expecting the government to “forgive” their loan: the government is running out of money and reneging. Who’s still stuck with the tab? The former student. Said one: “I remember sitting in the financial aid office and them saying, ‘Pay for every [...]
The NY Times’s Ken Belson breaks the sad news to all of the hopefuls working on a degree in sports management: “I used to teach that sport was recession-proof, but this recession proved me wrong,” said Gary Sailes, who runs the undergraduate program in sports marketing and management at Indiana. “I tell students that this [...]
The Providence Journal’s Neil Downing wrote a nice story about the college debt crisis and focuses on yet another young man with more than $100k in debt from college. He’ll be paying for the next 30 years. The statistics keep saying that the average person graduates with $20k or so in loans. Perhaps. But the [...]
If this Baltimore Sun story is correct, that professor is frantically filling out grant applications because the Obama administration is pouring cash into the university research system. Buckets of cash. Heaping piles of cash. Whoo hoo!! This stimulus bill may unlock many secrets and build up the research infrastructure, but it’s going to hurt one [...]
We weren’t sure what to make of this heart-warming story from the Baltimore Sun about a woman who finally went back to school to get a degree when she was 72 years young. We were tempted to suggest that she had finally lost all of her marbles and this was a sign of early-onset Alzheimer’s [...]
The NYT’s Ron Lieber says that a big, new collection of rules for the credit card companies includes a regulation that requires a parent’s signature for anyone under 21. It’s not just a signature like the one on top of a bad test. Nope. The kid can’t even be the primary card holder. Sigh. I [...]
The Consumerist, a nice blog started by the Gawker crowd and then sold to Consumers’ Union. Their editors, Ben Popken and Meghann Marco, sat down and did a nice video interview with Austan Goolsbee. Here’s the second part that talks about student credit cards. I guess it’s nice that someone is watching the way that [...]
The Toronto Globe and Mail notes that Canadian Universities are actively recruiting Americans. And why not? The universities get about $6000 for the Canadian government for educating a Canadian. But they have no trouble charging $23k to an American. The newspaper has a table showing that Dalhousie College in Canada costs $23k but Boston College, [...]
Buried in this collection of scary stories from the Providence Journal about college debt run amok is a complaint from one indentured servant of Sallie Mae: Besides, his inquiries are answered by a call center in India, and his efforts are undermined by a language barrier, he said. In addition, the lender has repeatedly applied [...]
The WSJ has a nice list of 9 free options for college.
Let me begin by quoting Will Rogers: “All I know is what I read in the papers.” Now, let’s tackle the news that Sallie Mae is coming into agreement with the President on ending the subsidy of the private student loan industry, the one that lets them keep all the profit from the student loans [...]
Every month or so, we have a spare moment to plough through the usage statistics. We’re proud that many people find us by typing the words “college industrial complex” into the search engines. It’s the number one way they tune in. Great minds think alike. Twitter users also help. We would like to thank Josh [...]
The Onion reports on a young man who is proud to be the first one to loaf in the Ivory Tower. “this month the University of Minnesota senior will become the first member of his family to graduate from college without ever having to work hard, apply himself, or expend more than a bare [...]
Salon, that precious pet project of SF investment bankers, has an unintentionally funny advice column today from Cary Tennis: Only too late have I realized that one has to get good at something (besides passing tests) to be able to make a living. Everybody just assumed that because I was book-smart, I would be life-smart, [...]
The private student loan business is squawking about the unfairness of it all. They worked hard. They found a way to sucker students into taking on a mountain of debt. Now the U.S. government is coming in and cutting them out of the loop. Here’s a great quote from the Washington Post’s coverage: “The only [...]
I have high hopes for Michael Parra, the kid cited at the beginning of Michael Birnbaum’s hard-luck piece in the Washington Post. When a college counselor laid out the financial aid Delaware offered Parra, the student realized that half the package was loans, not grants as he initially thought. It wouldn’t work, Parra decided. Yup. [...]
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