Many Americans believe that we have achieved black-white racial economic equality, but the data continue to show that we have a long way to go. For centuries, we have had policies to help white families build wealth at the expense of black families.
To summarize, the House Republican tax plan would get rid of several incentives—from the ability to deduct student loan interest as well as tuition, to the Lifetime Learning tax credit—which provide middle-class students and borrowers with some relief at tax time.
While some fairly valuable tax breaks for students have been kept from the chopping block, the Senate GOP’s tax bill could go a long way toward decimating funding for public colleges and universities, and community colleges in particular.
Rather than excluding students, progressive states like New Jersey have an opportunity to lead and expand the universe of the possible on issues like free college.
Put simply, how do we square that “college is worth it” from the increasing body of evidence that student debt is not necessarily good debt? The unsatisfying answer, of course, is that it depends.
The media shouldn't be scaring students away from going to college, because the alternative of not going is worse. Unfortunately, our move to a debt-for-diploma system is doing a good enough job of that itself.
President Obama is expected to announce an Executive Order that would extend the protections of Income-Based Repayment (or more specifically, Pay As You Earn) to student borrowers who took out loans before 2007 or stopped borrowing by 2011.
Brookings Institution researchers Beth Akers and Matt Chingos set the internet in a tizzy today with some “counterintuitive” research on student debt, with the takeaway for some being that student debt is not, in fact, the burden that the media (and policymakers) would have you believe. There are some pretty big caveats to their findings.
Nestled in Part H (section 499!) in the Democrats’ laundry list of ideas is an idea that has by far the most potential to solve one of the most vexing problems in higher ed: the rising cost of college.
The state-appointed Detroit Emergency Manager has commenced a program of shutting off the water of a large portion of the 138,000 delinquent accounts, up to 90,000 of which are poor households and largely African-American.
"The steady erosion of state investment in public higher education over the last few decades reflects a stunning abdication of responsibility on the part of states to preserve college affordability."
Sticker price matters because sticker price inflation dictates how much the federal government spends. High sticker price is one of the main reasons the feds dole out almost $170 billion in grants, student loans, tax incentives, and work study money each year.
President Obama should sign a Good Jobs executive order to encourage contractors to improve workplace benefits and respect their employees’ rights to bargain collectively.
It’s hard to make broad causal inferences about student debt and homeownership among recent graduates, because there are simply too many factors in play.