The fourth quarter of the Obama presidency has been relatively active when it comes to higher education. Last year alone, the Administration announced a proposal to make two years of community college tuition-free, finalized and released a treasure trove of data on earnings and loan repayment data by college as a substitute for its once-vaunted plans for a College Ratings system, came out with a Student Aid Bill of Rights, and issued regulations intended to streamline the confusing set of student loan repayment options.
“Super PACs likely encouraged more candidates to get into the 2016 GOP presidential race,” said Jay Goodliffe, a political science professor at Brigham Young University. “Even if their polls were not initially good, or there were other setbacks, the super PAC could help keep them afloat.”
While that may not be the goal in Tennessee, there is evidence that tuition freezes do lead to other cuts in higher education. One only needs to look to Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker for evidence, says Mark Huelsman, senior policy analyst at Demos, a public policy think tank. “Scott Walker froze tuition for in-state students, but he decimated student support and faculty support,” says Huelsman.
European countries also differ substantively from the US in terms of the percentage of college attendees that their debt free models serve.
"Germany has a lower percentage of students go on to college than we have here in the US," Mark Huelsman, a senior policy analyst at think tank Demos, told ATTN.
The vast riches of schools like Stanford and Harvard have created dilemmas about how their endowments should be directed. One slate of candidates for Harvard's board of overseers is calling for the school to spend some of its $37.6 billion endowment to cover tuition for all students. Lawmakers have also mulled requiring colleges with at least $1 billion in their endowments to spend at least one-quarter of the endowment's income on financial aid.
The Bennett Hypothesis likely explains tuition increases at some colleges, particularly for-profit universities, which are trying to maximize revenue, and graduate programs for which students can take out federal loans up to the cost of the program, said Mark Huelsman, a senior policy analyst at Demos, a left-leaning think tank. But not every type of higher education institution responds to increases in aid in the same way, he said.
As a result of having limited savings or other assets to cover the cost of college, African American families borrow heavily to pay for it. Researchers at the liberal think tank Demos found 4 out of 5 black graduates take out loans to attend public colleges, compared with less than two-thirds of whites.
African American students who borrow come out with more debt than their peers, often facing dismal job prospects. College-educated blacks have twice the unemployment rate of their white counterparts.
While students could always use more information about their loans and the cost of college, focusing too heavily on financial literacy as a route to curbing student debt “overcomplicates the discussion,” said Mark Huelsman, a senior policy analyst at Demos, a left-leaning think tank. College graduates are struggling with debt in large part because it simply costs a lot more to go to college these days, a fact of life students can’t get around even if they’re armed with more information, he said.
That might prompt U.S. colleges to look to other countries for recruitment. Tuition from non-U.S. students can be as high as three times the rate paid by students attending their state colleges, according to The Journal. American families are increasingly struggling to pay college costs that have risen far faster than the rate of inflation. Cuts in state support for higher education are largely to blame for the tuition spikes at public universities in recent years, according to a report last year from the left-leaning think tank Demos.
There’s some data to indicate that borrowers of color are more likely to find themselves dealing with a debt collector over unpaid student loans. Black students are more likely to borrow to attend college than their white counterparts and, when they do, they’re more likely to take on more debt, according to a study released last year by Demos, a left-leaning think tank.
Increased rates of delinquency, particularly among poor and minority citizens, also expose borrowers to job market discrimination. Some employers use credit checks as part of their hiring process, a practice that many argue is unduly burdensome and prevents Americans from getting the jobs they need to effectively pay off their student loans.
Over the last decade, an increasing number of cities and states passed laws limiting the use of credit checks in hiring, promotion, and firing. These laws have been motivated by the reality that personal credit history is not relevant to employment and that employment credit checks prevent otherwise qualified workers with flawed credit from finding jobs, and that unemployed workers and historically disadvantaged groups, including people of color, are disproportionately harmed by credit checks.
Mark Huelsman, a senior policy analyst focusing on higher education at the nonpartisan think tank Demos, is also critical of the Department of Education: “The problem that we’ve seen over the past year and a half is that the effort to ensure that Corinthian’s fall wasn’t a total catastrophe is not being met by the effort to make sure that the students who were defrauded — and we know now that they were defrauded — have a very easy, simple, expedited process for debt relief.” Forprofit colleges, he notes, make most of their money from the federal government either through student loans or
Further, African American students take out more loans — and more often — to finance their undergraduate education than any other ethnic group. A report by the public policy organization Demos found that 80 percent of black students take on debt, compared with 63 percent of white and Latino students. African American students also accrue more debt, at an average of $28,692, which is nearly $4,000 more than the average for all students. High dropout rates for African American students — 39 percent — exacerbate the problem, the report suggests.
That might prompt U.S. colleges to look to other countries for recruitment. Tuition from non-U.S. students can be as high as three times the rate paid by students attending their state colleges, according to The Journal. American families are increasingly struggling to pay college costs that have risen far faster than the rate of inflation.
Washington College’s initiative could encourage students to finish school, said Mark Huelsman, a senior policy analyst at Demos, a left-leaning think tank. “It’s certainly a good thing,” Heulsman said. “It can provide an incentive for students to complete and we know that the student debt crisis is fueled in large part by those who take on debt but don’t graduate.”
Some 63 percent of white students who graduate from public four-year colleges and universities borrow to do so, but 81 percent of black graduates go that route, according to a study of student debt by Demos, a public policy research organization. When it comes to associate's degrees, 57 percent of black students borrow, versus 43 percent of whites — and the black students borrow an average of $2,000 more.
Lobbyists are often frowned upon for doing the bidding of major corporations. A list of the organizations that spend the most on lobbying, maintained by the websiteOpenSecrets.org, is full of corporations like Boeing, General Electric, and AT&T, as well as associations like the National Association of Realtors.