Policy makers are also exploring ways to maintain a safety net for seniors with defaulted student loans, while still ensuring the Education Department gets the money it’s owed. Sens. Elizabeth Warren and McCaskill, Democrats from Massachusetts and Missouri, respectively, sent a letter to the GAO earlier this year asking for more information about the financial and loan status of seniors losing their benefits.
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.
"Debt-free" might not sound as sexy as simply "free," but O'Malley's approach could in fact create a more effective mandate for radically reducing the cost of college in the United States.
Education-loan borrowing among students pursuing an associate’s degree has increased significantly in the past decade, particularly among low-income students. For the 2011-2012 academic year, 55% of students who received Pell Grants and earned associate’s degrees also graduated with debt, according to a 2015 report from Demos, a progressive policy group in Washington, D.C.
“The decline in state funding for state colleges and universities is the main driver of what’s increasing costs,” says Mark Huelsman, senior policy analyst at Demos, a liberal think tank. He’s the author of a 2014 proposal for increasing public higher education funding that he says has drawn interest from several presidential primary candidates.
The missing link in the inequality debate is not financial stability, but financial domination of the broader economy, what has come to be called “financialization.” Financialization, as a new Demos report demonstrates, is not only measurable by risk and volatility or by the mere expanding volume of financial activities; rather, it should also be measured by how the non-financial economy—the economy of jobs and wages, production and enterprise growth—is increasingly dist
“This view that college pays off and that most people pay off their loans, is narrow and tragically flawed,” Heulsman said in his opening remarks. “This is a crisis of equity, it’s a crisis of opportunity and we’ll argue it’s a crisis for the economy.”
...while fast food may be an extreme case, it is hardly the only industry – in New York or nationwide – where front-line workers are underpaid and inequality is metastasizing. In fact, our economy is increasingly built on job growth in the most unequal industries: a trend that concentrates more and more income at the top and makes it even more difficult for working people to share in the benefits of economic growth.
That’s why the push to raise wages won’t stop with fast food –or with New York.
Chanting "$15.00 and a union," thousands of federal contract workers walked off their jobs yesterday, led by the Senate's cafeteria workers who serve Senators their food. They were joined by Senator and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, and members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, led by Keith Ellison (D-Minn) and Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz). Sanders announced they were introducing legislation to raise the federal minimum wage to $15.00 an hour.
The implications of a state labor board's July 22 decision to raise the minimum wage for fast-food workers to $15 an hour from $8.75 are clear: Other industries with low-wage workers could find themselves facing a similar pay hike soon.
Next up is likely the retail industry, followed by home care, child care and even adjunct professors, said Amy Traub, a senior policy analyst at Demos, a liberal think tank.
"The patchwork of wage hikes by locality and industry, as well as the falling unemployme
But it is the recent, explosive growth of Uber and other "sharing economy" companies that have attracted the most concern.
HomeJoy recently announced it would shut down in the face of four lawsuits alleging it should treat the people who clean homes on its behalf as employees rather than as independent contractors not entitled to the same workplace protections.
"If a technologist wants to disrupt an industry that has middle-class jobs and replace them with insecure, not-as-good jobs, there has to be a conversation about that,"
Declining state appropriations for higher ed is responsible for more than three-quarters of tuition hikes between 2001 and 2011, the analysis found. Increased spending on administration and building projects accounts for only about 12 percent of the tuition increases over that time. During the recession, when many states scrambled to cope with shrinking coffers, lawmakers slashed spending on public universities. But appropriations haven't returned to prerecession figures despite an improving economy.
Raising the minimum wage at least somewhat is a wildly popular idea for most Americans. According to a January 2014 Pew poll, 73 percent of Americans—including 53 percent of Republicans—supported raising the minimum wage from its current level of $7.25 to $10.10 an hour.
The use of credit reports prevents people from getting jobs they are qualified for and "can have a discriminatory impact," Amy Traub, senior policy analyst at Demos, a left-leaning think tank said. "Our research shows credit reports don't provide information that is actually useful for employers, don't show who is going to be a trustworthy or reliable and does not prevent theft or fraud."
“If we begin to think of education as a part of the economic mobility system, then we can begin to think of education’s implications for children long after school,” Elliott, who also serves as the founding director of the Center on Assets, Education, and Inclusion (AEDI), explained at a recent New America event.
Today's very high threshold for default rates allows tons of colleges to mask poor student outcomes and doesn't take into account the difficulty students are having with repayment itself. But moving beyond the extreme scenario of student default — which means a borrower has been unable to pay their loan back for at least 9 months in the case of federal loans — is important to developing a more nuanced understanding of post-graduation hardship.
While every single Democratic member of the Legislature has signed on as a sponsor of this bill, not a single Republican has been willing to break from party orthodoxy and let common sense trump caustic partisanship.
Imagine the benefits to our state economy and Wisconsin families if millions of dollars in interest on student loans paid by borrowers every year to the federal government and Wall Street banks would instead stay right here.
The St. Louis Fed findings add to the growing body of evidence that higher education benefits some groups more than others, which may help to exacerbate the yawning racial wealth gap instead of shrink it. Black and Hispanic students are more likely to approach college with lower levels of wealth on average and are, therefore, more likely to have to borrow to attend school, according to a report earlier this year from Demos, a left-leaning think tank.