Bankruptcy attorneys warn that student loans could be the next crisis
A group of bankruptcy attorneys who predicted the mortgage fiasco that helped cause the current economic downturn said today that rising student debt could fuel another crisis just as big. Nearly half the members of the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys (NACBA) said in a survey conducted last month that the number of their [...]
Jon Marcus talks about Arne Duncan and higher-ed costs, accountability
Jon Marcus, who writes about higher education for The Hechinger Report, attended an event yesterday at Emerson College in Boston at which U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and U.S. Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.) spoke about higher-education costs and accountability. Marcus appeared on the public-television program Greater Boston on WGBH-TV, Boston, to discuss the issues.
Obama is “incentivizing”—not regulating—universities, ed secretary says
U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said today that the Obama administration isn’t trying to regulate university tuition by linking federal funding to the rate at which college costs increase. In his state-of-the-union address on January 24th, President Barack Obama proposed that federal financial aid be tied to the pace of tuition increases. Institutions whose tuition [...]
Interview: Jon Marcus talks about free universities and their impact
Jon Marcus, a contributing editor at The Hechinger Report, recently had an article in The Washington Post about how a wave of free online universities could change the traditional U.S. higher education system. From his story: Several new companies and organizations with impressive pedigrees are harnessing the Internet to provide college courses for free, or [...]
Oklahoma considers dropping high-school exit exams
Oklahoma’s landmark 2005 legislation, which mandated that all high-school students pass exams to be eligible for graduation, may be killed off before it even takes effect. The law, Achieving Classroom Excellence, requires seniors to pass sophomore-level tests in English, algebra and two other subjects—biology, algebra II, geometry, U.S. history or junior-level English—starting with the Class [...]
The new G.I. Bill: Big money, big challenges [podcast]
In September, Hechinger Report writer Jon Marcus reported for The Washington Post that universities were heavily recruiting veterans to get a piece of the $11 billion made available through the new post-9/11 G.I. Bill, but providing little of the additional support that many veterans say they need. Marcus was a guest on the public-radio program [...]
Calculating how much college actually costs
Days after the College Board announced that tuition at America’s public universities increased 8.3 percent this year, higher-education institutions quietly met a weekend deadline for reporting what students actually pay, after grants and other financial aid are taken into account. The “net price” accounts for tuition minus scholarships, grants, and income from on-campus jobs, on [...]
Tuition soars as Obama cuts student-loan payments
President Barack Obama’s announcement this week that he will reduce student-loan payments comes as Americans are approaching one trillion dollars in student-loan debt and the number of people defaulting on their college loans is steadily rising. The College Board reported yesterday that higher-education costs, including for public universities, are at an all-time high. But while the “Pay as You Earn” plan will make [...]
New report: Dropout rates five times higher for poor students
Sen. Tom Harkin’s ( D-Iowa) new proposal to reform No Child Left Behind is the latest attempt by policy makers to fix the country’s “dropout factories,” identified in the bill as schools with lower than a 60-percent graduation rate. But a new report has found a silver lining amid the crisis: The number of dropouts [...]
Federal government to grant money to successful charters
In a vote of confidence for charter schools it deems “high quality,” the U.S. Department of Education announced grants totaling $25 million to charter school networks they believe have proved successful at raising student achievement. “Several high-quality charter schools across the country are making an amazing difference in our children’s lives, especially when charters in [...]
