When the Senate went to college, they paid an average of just over $11,443. If they attended the exact same institutions today, they’d pay an average of $32,279.
Public colleges and universities took in $62 billion in tuition in 2013. These are schools that educate three of four American college students, and eliminating that entirely could be done just by rearranging what we already spend on student financial aid.
Today, Vice President Biden and others from the Obama administration, are meeting with human-resource executives from companies that are part of the president’s effort to address the problem of long-term unemployment, including Citigroup Inc., CVS Caremark Corp. and Boeing
This past Friday, in a speech to the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, the Federal Reserve Chair, Janet Yellen, spoke out on the evils of economic inequality in the United States. She noted that the steady growth in inequality over the past several decades represents the most sustained rise since the 19th century.
While Corinthian and its campuses may downsize or disappear completely, we should be concerned the students who attended its campuses and are currently in no man’s land.
Today, President Obama announced a proposal to make two years of community college tuition-free. It’s a big deal. But it would be just as powerful a signal if we promised students a debt-free system of public higher education, one that could be financed entirely through part-time or summer work and modest savings.
Policies like this would incent states to return to an era when college could be funded through a summer job, part-time employment, and maybe modest savings when available, for the largest and most diverse generation of students in our history.
In the case of for-profits, not only has the government been unable to properly force institutions to account for their behavior, but it has been unable to stop providing the majority of money that keeps these colleges standing in the first place.
Credit checks are one of many barriers faced by Black job seekers; and the implicit biases of employers have proved hard to legislate. That's why New York City just joined other cities and states in banning credit checks.
The most important fact about higher education is that only a minority of people go to college. That fact would change if college was affordable for more people.
We’ve allowed the price of college and its attendant debt to rise well beyond the point where it is actually helpful in getting people through college.
Common retail practices perpetuate racial inequality, fostering occupational segregation, low pay, unstable schedules, and involuntary part-time work that disproportionately harm people of color in the retail workforce.
Entire movements are based around these economic realities: the minimum wage is too low to live on. Eligibility for overtime pay must be broadened so that workers are fairly compensated for all of the time they work. Basic workplace standards need to be improved.
The New York fast food wage board today recommended a wage increase in a series of steps to $15 an hour by 2018 in New York City and by 2021 in the rest of the state.
Treating these issues as mutually exclusive obscures part of why student debt is a major issue for so many, and what debt-free college would hope to achieve.
Executive action on paid sick days for employees of federal contractors would be in keeping with Obama’s steps to raise workplace standards for contract employees.
Hillary Clinton just released a bold plan to return the United States to debt-free public college for future students and relieve the burden for existing borrowers.