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.
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.
For those who believe Black people are already equal with white people, any policy that seeks to address anti-Black discrimination looks like an attempt to give Blacks an advantage.
Some presidential candidates' critiques promote unhelpful assumptions about who tuition-free and debt-free college would actually serve. (Spoiler: it's not millionaires and billionaires.)
It is time for colleges, states, and the federal government to prove their commitment to Black students with policy action—not just well-meaning statements and gestures.
The dominance of big money in our politics makes it far harder for people of color to exert political power and effectively advocate for their interests as both wealth and power are consolidated by a small, very white, share of the population.
This case study follows the Texas Organizing Project as it worked to build power and equity for working-class Black & Latino communities in greater Houston after Hurricane Harvey—ultimately implementing a winning 3-part inside-outside strategy.
12 years after entering college, white men have paid off 44% of their student-loan balance on average, according to an analysis released last year by Demos, a left-leaning think tank.
The Credit CARD Act is helping households pay down balances faster, with a third of low- and middle-income households that carry credit card debt reporting that new disclosures have caused them to pay down their balances faster.
A new report from the New York Fed suggests that even while the rest of household debt improved since March, driven by decreasing credit card and housing debt, student loans have worsened.
A new fact sheet from Demos, College on a Credit Card, investigates the relationship between educational expenses and credit card debt, and shows that putting college on credit can be a very bad deal.
The Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (CFPB) recently issued several try-at-home remedies to aid in the struggle against unruly debt collection firms. In a blog post, they introduced:
I value what my dad thinks about things like romance and politics, but I avoid talking to him about education. The university of his memory is generous and forgiving; the student-debt-financial complex of my current experience is not. Example: he could've discharged his education debt in bankruptcy if things didn't work out after he graduated in 1970. Should my career fail, student loans and I will continue to be quite monogamous.
Getting a bankruptcy court to erase student debt is an extremely difficult, expensive and time-consuming legal maneuver.
With today's big higher ed speech, it's becoming clearer what President Obama's most important legacy may be: He could be the guy who finally stopped runaways costs for two of life's biggest necessities: healthcare and higher education.
This would be a big deal, because -- quite apart from issues of access and fairness -- the United States is putting itself at a global disadvantage by squandering so many resources on grossly overpriced services in both sectors.
“More than half of education and related expenses at public universities is now paid for through tuition, up from about 35 percent in 2001,” wrote study author Robert Hiltonsmith, Demos’ senior policy analyst.
In essence, public universities are no longer public, he said: They have become de facto “subsidized private institutions.”
The nation’s yawning wealth gap is a major reason why minority students end up borrowing more for college. Structural racism has created disparities in home ownership rates, income and other wealth-building vehicles, providing minority borrowers with fewer resources to tap to pay for college, on average.
In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson vowed that no student wishing to attend college would "be turned away because his family is poor."
Half a century later, a shift in the way college is funded and the declining fortunes of minorities and poor families since the recession have created a college-debt system that the left-leaning think tank Demos calls "deeply biased along class and racial lines."
Because college is increasingly financed by debt taken on by students, it's creating a system that's impacting differen
