Search Demos.org

Adjusted for inflation, state support for each full-time public-college student declined by 26.1 percent from 1990 to 2010, forcing students and their families to shoulder more of the cost of higher education at a time when family incomes were largely stagnant, according to a report released on Monday by the think tank Demos.

I have often thought, “If education is expensive, try ignorance.”

In the past three decades, college costs have risen significantly faster than inflation and are now at roughly 25 percent of the average household's income. This isn't true just for private schools.

Tuition at public four-year colleges and universities rose 112.5 percent between 1990-1991 and 2010-2011. Here's a big part of the explanation:

Last summer, a Western Beef store in the East Tremont section of the South Bronx became the first supermarket in the city to receive funding through the city’s Food Retail Expansion to Support Health (FRESH) program. The FRESH initiative provides financial and zoning incentives to entice supermarket chains to build new stores in neighborhoods that lack access to fresh, wholesome foods.

Ahead of Rio+20, advocates are coalescing around the idea that we need to change the way we measure what is important to achieve true sustainable development. Currently countries measure economic growth, which is often equated with progress, through GDP. However, growth in GDP is increasingly not resulting in progress.

The newest GDP release shows an increase of 1.5 percent in the second quarter of 2012, down from a 1.9 percent growth in the first quarter and three percent growth in 2011. But, as Demos continually asks in our Beyond GDP work: What exactly is GDP measuring?

One of the main reason alternative indicators are important is that they take things that we value on a visceral level, like the environment, and put them into the universal language of capital.

One of the big questions environmentalists struggle with is whether there should be a price on nature. For some things, like the cost savings that are realized through cleaner air or water, there is a rote calculation that can be done to price out environmental and health benefits. But, if you think of nature as an independent entity having a worth beyond what it can provide to humans, how do you put a price on it? How much is the Amazon River or the Himalayan mountain range worth?

It seems there is little real relief on the horizon.

“If you’re coming out of college with an average number of $20,000 to $25,000 in debt and there’s no job out there, you’ve got a real problem,” said John Quinterno, a researcher who has studied the consequences of student debt.

Many Florida families have been paying up to 25 percent of median income for public in-state college costs — out of reach for some middle-class parents who have taken recent pay cuts or lost jobs, according to a new study.

While Latinos acquire slightly less student-loan debt than their white counterparts, on average $49,700 as opposed to $54,000, this does not mean that they are in any better position when – or if – they finish school. Many Latinos opt to work through college instead of taking on a large debt burden, Maldonado said, and that leads to a longer amount of time spent in school and a lower chance of actually graduating.

According to statistics from the public policy organization Demos, 31 percent of Latino students drop out of college.

Thanks to certain progressive senators and Democratic presidential hopefuls, interest in debt-free college is at an all-time high. But what happens next is very much uncertain — people don’t even agree on what debt-free college means, much less how (or whether) to make it a reality. Demos, which put the idea on Washington’s radar via a white paper last May, is now trying to tackle both issues — by wrangling a common definition of the idea, and starting to codify it via Higher Education Act reauthorization.

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.

We need a systematic approach to tackle the student-debt crisis. We can easily find one if we look in the not-too-distant past.

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.

With college tuition costs at an all-time high, Demos, a D.C.-based public policy organization, recently proposed a debt-free college initiative.

“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.