The share of student loan borrowers who entered repayment owing $20,000 or more doubled — from 20% to 40% — between 2002 and 2014, according to a report published Wednesday by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. What’s more, the share of borrowers entering repayment with $50,000 or more in debt tripled during the same period, the CFPB report found, jumping from 5% to 16%.
Two years ago, 54 percent of Republicans told Pew colleges had a positive impact on the direction of the country, according to that survey. That fell to 43 percent last year and 36 percent this year. Democrats, meanwhile, have gradually become more positive about higher education, with 72 percent this year viewing higher ed as having a positive effect, up from 65 percent in 2010.
Even so, observers on both the left and the right said the Education Next findings are interesting but not necessarily surprising.
“If we care about getting more people to and through college, we can’t do it on the cheap,” said Mark Huelsman, a senior policy analyst at Demos, a left-leaning think tank. “We’re not going to get the outcomes we want, unless we put in the public investment necessary to do so.” [...]
Mark Huelsman, a senior policy analyst at Demos, a left-leaning think tank, described the propensity of elite institutions to admit wealthy students or those with a familial connection as “the affirmative action we just don’t talk about.”
Some, like Mark Huelsman, a senior policy analyst at Demos, a left-leaning think tank, say the rankings’ incentives push colleges to take steps that often come at the expense of educating a wider swath of qualified students.
“If you’re a college and you’re offering a very low level of prospective debt to students, that means nothing if the people who overall have more unmet financial need, or are more likely to have to borrow, can’t get into your institution,” said Mark Huelsman, a senior policy analyst at Demos, a left-leaning think tank.
Rankings can also subtly push colleges away from spending on financial aid for needy students and, instead, toward things rewarded by the rankings, like small faculty-to-student ratios, Huelsman said. [...]
Some are heartened to see functioning-for-free college popping up in places like New York and elsewhere. Mark Huelsman senior policy analyst at Demos, a left-leaning think tank and the author of an influential white paper on free college, said he hopes they’ll serve as “laboratories” for policymakers to understand both the benefits and the limitations of different free college program designs.
Democrats have all kinds of ways of addressing this problem. One would be to cultivate the class identity of white voters by embracing populist rhetoric that paints “the billionaire class” as an out-group they can define themselves against. Another would be to invest more resources into registering nonwhite voters. According to the Census Bureau, 74 percent of non-Hispanic whites are registered to vote in the United States.
“You’re going to have deductions and credits that primarily benefit the middle- and upper-class go away, but it’s not done in benefit to the working class,” said Mark Huelsman, a senior policy analyst at Demos, a left-leaning think tank. “It’s just done as a revenue raiser.”
Demos, a liberal think tank, and the Institute on Assets and Social Policy at Brandeis University found African Americans are far more likely to have student debt, regardless of income. Black families, after decades of being shut out of traditional ladders of economic opportunity, have the fewest resources to cover the costs of college or to protect against the risk of borrowing.
“You hear the apocryphal story of being able to work your way through school, because it was true,” said Mark Huelsman, a senior policy analyst at Demos, a left-leaning think tank. “If you were a student in 1980 and you took on a full-time summer job and a part-time job in the school year, your college costs would be covered and your living expenses would be covered.” [...]
No-loan policies at selective institutions can be eye-catching for low-income students that may not have viewed those schools as a viable option said Mark Huelsman, a senior policy analyst at Demos, a left-leaning think tank. But they do little to increase equity in higher education because the group of low-income students educated at these schools is so small, he added.
“There were fewer jobs available. So you had students or older workers wanting to retrain for a job,” said Mark Huelsman, senior policy analyst at Demos, a national public policy advocacy group.
Last fall, Point Loma began offering some of its 4,500 students money to pay for college in exchange for a percentage of their future earnings. The model, known as an income share agreement, requires colleges and students to take a chance on each other, a shared responsibility that attracted Point Loma. [...]
[M]ark Huelsman, a senior policy analyst at the think tank Demos, who focuses on student debt, says “we’ll see more and more” programs like Mission Scholarships. “There’s everything right with an institution looking at a labor market shortage” and trying to ameliorate it. “Free education is an obvious carrot.” [...]
Overseas students subsidize other students and programs, as they often pay higher fees, said Mark Huelsman, a senior policy analyst at Demos, a left-leaning think tank. “Many colleges and, in particular, public colleges have relied on international students paying full-freight in order to make up for budget shortfalls elsewhere,” he said. [...]
The high-priced ads, which could reach an audience of more than 100 million, are just the latest indication that catering to student loan borrowers can be big business. Companies are now offering credit cards with rewards geared to student loan help and tools to help borrowers monitor their debt. Employers are even looking to lure talent with benefits packages that include student loan help.
A new analysis comparing how much members of Congress paid for their schooling to the costs of today’s students backs him up. When the members of the House of Representatives went to college, the average cost for a year of school was $8,487 in today’s dollars, according to the study published Thursday by Demos, a left-leaning think tank.
In every state except Wyoming, the share of revenue that public colleges receive from tuition — aka students and families — has grown since 2001, according to an analysis released Thursday by Demos, a left-leaning think tank. And in 24 states, tuition covered more than half of public colleges’ revenue in 2016. Compare that to public colleges of the past, which got much of their money from state and local funding, and kept the costs for families relatively low. In some cases, they were even free.