September 30, 2009 – 12:06 pm
According to this piece by Daniel Patrick Sheehan and Matt Assad, the universities are going after binge gambling with just as much fervor as they devoted to binge drinking. Since that plan worked so well, I’m sure this one will be even better. I guess I can’t be too cavalier about gambling because somewhere out [...]
September 30, 2009 – 11:54 am
The Feds are pushing a charging age of 21 and requiring credit card companies to get a parent as a co-signer of any credit cards. (Or offer some proof of the ability to pay like, say, a big bank account.) That’s good news for college students even if they might think they can control their [...]
September 29, 2009 – 12:04 pm
Sarah Harper has a nice insight that college debt is rather unsustainable, a word that’s just the kiss of death these days. We were all bamboozled when the college debt masters started calling student loans “good debt” and that might be true for a reasonable amount of debt for a degree that leads directly to [...]
September 29, 2009 – 11:54 am
The Baltimore Sun reminds us yet again that education debt changes our future. While everyone talks about how education opens doors, the article explains that young doctors are often pushed into high paying specialties because, well, it’s the only way to pay off their outrageous debt. “Sure, I would love to serve more people in [...]
September 28, 2009 – 12:29 pm
Is it $600,000, $800,000 or $540,000? And does that include the $10k per month as a housing stipend? Deborah Solomon at the NY Times tries to get to the bottom of it with an interview with Mark Yudof, but I don’t think anyone really knows. Even Mr. Yudof might not know because who can keep [...]
September 28, 2009 – 12:21 pm
I picked up this tidbit from Elizabeth Bryan’s excellent twitter stream which pointed here: Public colleges have seen a tidal wave of applicants because of the economic downturn. The acceptance rate for the Fall 2009 class was 10.8% at this particular institution. That would put the school’s acceptance rate lower than that for the University [...]
September 28, 2009 – 11:55 am
The great columnist and arbiter of word usage will be missed. Our favorite part of the NY Times obituary by Robert McFadden reads: He was a college dropout and proud of it, a public relations go-getter who set up the famous Nixon-Khrushchev “kitchen debate” in Moscow, and a White House wordsmith in the tumultuous era [...]
September 23, 2009 – 12:26 pm
That’s just one great quote from Sara Olson’s piece for the Chicago Tribune about the new fancy dorms at Purdue. Also note: “47-inch flat-screen TVs, entertainment centers custom-designed by Amish carpenters, free WiFi, and kitchenettes with ceramic tile.” The good news is that not every student needs to pay the inflated prices. There’s not one [...]
September 23, 2009 – 12:23 pm
Usually, college students are bright, sunny, cheerful and blithely unaware of the various evils waiting out in the real world. That’s what you get when you spend billions on fancy athletic centers, climbing walls, arts complexes, and more. The kids don’t have time to worry and fret. But Janae DeRusso, a junior majoring in public-relations, [...]
September 23, 2009 – 12:16 pm
A nice column from Robert Katz in the University of Minnesota Daily paper cuts through some of the fog produced by those statistics claiming that the average debt is only around $25k. He points out: ”The six-year graduation rate at the U is 60%. Chances are that most students who have not graduated after six [...]
September 21, 2009 – 11:56 am
Ah, the irony. Alicia Torres, a fine young woman considering joining a religious order, has some problems. 94,000 problems to be exact. She owes $94,000 to Loyola college, a branch of the Roman Catholic church in a way, but a stand alone school in many others. In any case, she can’t take a vow of [...]
September 21, 2009 – 11:48 am
Russ Wiles from the Arizona Republic touches many of our standard themes in this short piece wondering whether college debt is a good idea: ”Not enough people think about student loans in a business way, as a return on investment,” Sullivan said. “If you borrow to go to Yale to become a social worker, it’s [...]
September 21, 2009 – 11:31 am
The Baltimore Sun’s Childs Walker writes today that Johns Hopkins and the University of Maryland have too many incoming freshmen. More people showed up than they expected would want to pay the $54,000+ in tuition, not to mention fees, textbooks, and beer money. The article suggests that the colleges expected more “melt” than actually occurred. [...]
September 20, 2009 – 5:31 pm
I must control my urge to deploy sarcasm. I must. But what’s a blogger like me to do when confronted by the news that Occidental college, once the cradle of our President, is pushing a course devoted to studying stupidity in all of its different manifestations. “With the application of critical and postmodernist theory – [...]
September 18, 2009 – 1:41 pm
Someone asked us what I think of AcceptEdge.com, a new service that’s drawing some notice for selling statistical guesses about what colleges will welcome your precious snowflake. We like the image from TechCrunch because it inadvertently suggests that something’s just a bit broken about using GPA and SAT scores to draw implications about a school.Do you see that [...]
September 14, 2009 – 11:43 am
Time magazine has a list of small ways that colleges are trying to save money after losing some much in the stock market collapse. Most seem like cosmetic gestures that may add up but won’t address the fundamental problem. For instance: “CARLETON COLLEGE Will save $3,800 by skipping shrimp and wine at annual faculty parties” [...]
September 12, 2009 – 11:43 am
It’s not fair to compare apples to pickles, but I thought it would be fun to pull two bits out of this long hand-wringing article by Daniel de Vise about the decline in state funding of state colleges. First, the VA governor cut the state funding by 15%. Second, GMU is suggesting that there may [...]
September 11, 2009 – 12:08 pm
As much as I like to pick on the big, fancy, research-loving colleges and their obsession with tuition increases, I’ve got to admit that they seem like saints next to the for-profit career colleges. The standard colleges may pour on the debt, but the for-profit schools really soak their students. 60% graduate owing more than [...]
September 11, 2009 – 12:01 pm
Sometimes these posts write themselves. I don’t need a punch line at the end of this one to summarize just what California thinks of its students. <a href=”http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/09/11/MNAB19L7Q9.DTL”> The UC system wants to raise tuition 15% this year and 15% the following year. </a>
September 9, 2009 – 7:41 pm
Imagine you’re a big part of the college industrial complex. You’ve been milking those bright-eyed 18 year olds for a long time. So you finish a study, crunch some numbers, and figure out that kids in selective colleges are more likely to finish those in not-so-selective ones. Even if kids with really good SATs go [...]
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