Student loan debt

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SEE TWO TARGET

3 23 promote primary scotus fight, on track to 3 trillion?! $

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https://www.businessinsider.com/sam-alito-luxury-fishing-trip-singer-block-student-loan-forgiveness-2023-6

biz insider

no lnx

Conservative Supreme Court Justice Sam Alito, Jr. took a fishing trip with a billionaire who has donated to — and serves as chairman for — a group that asked the Supreme Court to block student-loan forgiveness.

That news comes as borrowers are waiting for the Supreme Court to announce a decision this month on whether or not to uphold President Joe Biden's plan to cancel up to $20,000 for federal student-loans.

On Wednesday, ProPublica published an investigation on a vacation Alito took in July 2008 at a luxury fishing lodge in Alaska that reportedly cost over $1,000 a day. He was accompanied by Paul Singer, a billionaire whose hedge fund appeared before the Supreme Court at least ten times following the fishing trip and won votes from Alito in some of those cases.

As ProPublica reported, Singer has given over $80 million to Republican political groups — including the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think-tank for which Singer has served as chairman since 2008. That group also filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court asking it to block Biden's relief plan — a decision the court is expected to hand down in the coming days.

"If the government's purpose were truly to reduce the harm of more frequent defaults, there are far more direct means available to that end," the Manhattan Institute wrote in its February brief referring borrowers who risked defaulted on their debt following the pandemic. "These include more aggressive measures to put borrowers on income-based repayment plans and, perhaps even more straightforward, waiving some of the legal consequences of missed payments."

"A $400 billion debt-forgiveness plan is a major policy decision that must be made by Congress, and Congress has declined to enact that policy," it added. "The administration's debt-forgiveness action should be vacated."

A spokesperson for Singer told ProPublica that Singer was not aware Alito would be on the fishing trip when he chose to attend, and that Singer "never discussed his business interests" with Alito during the trip. The spokesperson also said that Singer did not have "any pending matters before the Supreme Court, nor could Mr. Singer have anticipated in 2008 that a subsequent matter would arise that would merit Supreme Court review."

Meanwhile, instead of responding directly to ProPublica's questions on the investigation, Alito wrote an opinion piece published on Tuesday in the Wall Street Journal, in which the conservative justice denied the claims the investigation made and wrote that "I have spoken to Mr. Singer on no more than a handful of occasions, all of which (with the exception of small talk during a fishing trip 15 years ago) consisted of brief and casual comments at events attended by large groups."

"On no occasion have we discussed the activities of his businesses, and we have never talked about any case or issue before the Court," Alito wrote.

ProPublica also reported that Alito delivered a keynote address in 2010 for donors to the Manhattan Institute, during which Singer called Alito "a model Supreme Court justice" in his introduction. Of course, it's unclear how the Supreme Court will rule on Biden's student-debt relief plan — just as it's unclear how big of an influence donors could have on the impending decision.

Following ProPublica's report, advocacy group Student Borrower Protection Center sent a letter to Alito on Wednesday — obtained by Insider — that demanded he recuse himself from the two lawsuits seeking to block Biden's debt relief: Biden v. Nebraska, and Brown v. US Department of Education.

The SBPC wrote in its letter that the Job Creators Network, which represented the plaintiffs in Brown v. US Department of Education, received financial support from the Judicial Crisis Network — a group that Singer has donated to in the past.

"Paul Singer's direct and indirect financial ties to parties in Brown and amici in Brown and Nebraska raise serious questions about your ability to decide neutrally and impartially," the SBPC wrote.

Along with the conservative groups who filed amicus briefs on the issue earlier this year, Democratic lawmakers and advocates did the same — and expressed confidence in the legality of student-debt cancellation for millions of borrowers.

"As these diverse groups made clear today, student loan borrowers from all walks of life suffered profound financial harms during the pandemic and their continued recovery and successful repayment hinges on the Biden Administration's student debt relief plan," Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said of the briefs in January. "We will continue to defend our legal authority to provide the debt relief working and middle-class families clearly need and deserve."

POLITICS

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito wrote a WSJ op-ed instead of commenting for a story that revealed his ties to a billionaire who had 10 cases before SCOTUS

an 6 23

some ppl say BS:

Bernie Sanders and Rep. Pramila Jayapal introduced the “College For All Act” in tandem with Sanders and Rep. Barbara Lee reintroducing the “Tax on Wall Street Speculation Act”this past week. The first bill would eliminate tuition and fees at four-year higher education institutions for people and families making under $125,000/7 a year. It would also make community college tuition, and fees, entirely free to everyone.

The plan would also help Americans to refinance existing student loans at considerably lower interest rates while ending the practice of the federal government turning a profit off of student assistance. The second bill, originally introducedin 2021 and based on a similar bill Sanders put forward in 2008 as a response to the Wall Street bailouts connected to the housing crisis, looks to generate the revenues that pay for this plan.

Republicans, disagreeing with the concepts of free college and student debt relief, have offered up status quo plans while trying to push people away from going to colleges and toward trade schools. You can read Sen. Bill Cassidy’s worthless bill here. The right-wing media is now ginning up anti-student loan relief sentiment, directing Americans’ ire not at the predatory loan system or exorbitant higher education costs but at the students themselves. This means framing the conversation as one about Americans being taxed to pay for students who can’t pay back their loans.

While walking to his office, Sanders was asked byFox News Business correspondent Hillary Vaughn, “Is it really free if you're raising taxes to pay for it?” Sanders gave a very short and sweet masterclass on messaging:

“Well, given the fact that we have the billionaire class paying a lower tax rate than working families, I think it's appropriate that the wealthiest people in this country start paying their fair share of taxes.”

Vaughn attempted what passes for a hard-hitting followup at Fox: “People say that the Wall Street tax would hit average Americans saving for retirement.”

Sanders stopped to shut this bullshit down: “What people say that? People on Wall Street. Thank you

2 23

scotus hearing did not go well clarence 10k$?

someone said doj biden atty did well?

https://truenorthresearch.substack.com/p/how-one-rich-dude-targeted-colleges

...Why Do These Kochian/LibertarianTheories Matter?At the beginning of the 1970s, with**state subsidies covering 65%**of college costs in most states, higher education without massive debt was attainable for many low- to middle-income families in the U.S.

After pressures to limit public funding of higher education, federal student loans began togrow rapidly, with loan default ratesspiking in the 1980s. Even as college costs rose and family income stagnated, federal education subsidies didn’t fill the gap—in fact, the inflation adjusted value of the federal Pell grant for low income students actuallydecreased by 12% throughout the 1980s.

Today, after nearly 50 years of ideological and political maneuverings by Koch and his anti-government allies, public subsidies coverless than 30% of the costs of higher education, in general. Meanwhile, student loan debt in 2020reached $1.56 trillion.

The student loan debt crisis was not inevitable but it is a product of the kind of selfish public policy choices that have been pushed by Charles Koch in innumerable ways.

In next week’s final installment in this series, we will examine Charles Koch’s growing influence on campuses in the U.S. His agents have leveraged his donations to shape what is taught in universities and career paths for scholars aligned with Koch’s free market fundamentalism. Using many of the same tactics Koch’s lieutenant once warned against, Koch has seemingly exploited university funding gaps he and his allies helped create, and in their own words, now “the network is fully integrated.”...

an 4 23

no lnx

Joe Biden extends student loan payment freeze as 'baseless political lawsuits' threaten aid

Jessica CorbettandCommon DreamsNovember 22, 2022

Student debt relief campaigners on Tuesday welcomed U.S. President Joe Biden's decision to yet again extend a temporary pause on federal loan payments in response to Republican lawsuits targeting his cancellation plan.

"I'm completely confident my plan is legal. But right now it's on hold because of these lawsuits. We're not going to back down though, on our fight to give families breathing room," Biden said in a video, noting his administration has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to weigh in.

Stressing that "it isn't fair to ask tens of millions of borrowers eligible for relief to resume their student debt payments" while waiting on a court ruling, the president explained that Education Secretary Miguel Cardona is extending the freeze to no later than June 30, 2023. Payments would restart 60 days later.

Unveiled in August, Biden's plan would cancel up to $10,000 in debt for federal borrowers with incomes below $125,000 for individuals or $250,000 for households. Borrowers who received Pell Grants would have up to $20,000 forgiven.

After the GOP responded with a flurry of lawsuits, the Department of Education earlier this month stopped accepting applications for the relief program. However, tens of millions of Americans have already sent in their information, and the administration has pledged in emails to borrowers that "we will discharge your approved debt if and when we prevail in court."

Echoing Biden's confidence that the relief plan will ultimately take effect, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Tuesday that the pause "gives student loan borrowers more opportunity to pay down their debt and reach important milestones in life like opening a savings account, purchasing a home, and saving for retirement."

Student Borrower Protection Center executive director Mike Pierce similarly stressed that "this extension means that struggling borrowers will be able to keep food on their tables during the holiday season—and the coming months—as the administration does everything it can to beat back the baseless and backward attacks on working families with student debt."

Peirce added that "the Republican politicians set on keeping their constituents in debt should take note: Borrowers made this happen and borrowers will continue to fight until student debt cancellation is won."

Accountable.US spokesperson Liz Zelnick also praised the administration's extension—which came amid growing calls for one—while slamming the right-wing interests attempting to kill the program.

"President Biden's repayment pause is a weight off the shoulders of millions of Americans dealing with crushing student debt," she said. "The baseless political lawsuits attacking the administration's relief policies could not come at a worse time as corporate greed continues to drive up prices and the economy heads towards a recession."

"As President Biden prioritizes average Americans in this moment of economic uncertainty, conservative judges and politicians are doing all they can to protect the bottom line of greedy special interests," she continued. "This is a welcome step towards stimulating the economy and providing some economic relief to millions of Americans."

Student Debt Crisis Center president Natalia Abrams praised the extension and warned of the expected impacts of resuming payments.

"Restarting student loan payments is simply not affordable for millions of Americans," she said. "Federal student loan payments must not resume during this critical time—and the pause should continue until the president's student debt cancellation plan is secured."

"We applaud the president for doing the right thing. Too many borrowers, parents, and students have yet to recover from the financial harm caused by the pandemic and the possibility of a winter surge in Covid-19 cases is proof that this crisis is not over," Abrams noted, calling cancellation "essential to helping borrowers recover from the pandemic."

Braxton Brewington, a spokesperson for the Debt Collective, said that "the least the Biden administration could do is not collect on a debt they promised they would cancel."

"This pause extension is necessary, but also the bare minimum," Brewington added. "What 45 million borrowers truly need is a Biden administration that won't allow fringe lawsuits and right-wing courts to undermine economic relief that's already been approved."

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

'Just kidding': Biden Administration yanks student debt relief for millions as GOP states sue ›

'Profits over people': House Democrat hammers Republicans for suing to stop student loan relief ›

Jim Jordan ignites fury against GOP lawmakers after complaining about student loan debt relief ›

Scholars, attorneys and advocates urge Supreme Court to block GOP efforts to tank student debt relief - Alternet.org ›

:{About Attorney General Tom Miller | Iowa Attorney General:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:top;display:inline-block;max-width:100%;overflow:hidden;text-overflow:ellipsis;white-space:nowrap"):}:

Attorney General Tom Miller is serving in his 10th four-year term as Attorney General of Iowa. He is the longest currently serving attorney general in the nation. He was born in Dubuque on August 11, 1944, the son of the late Elmer and Betty Miller.

Kansas, dacaDerek Schmidt of Kansas,

Missouri,:{https://ago.mo.gov:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}::{ › about-us › about-ag-schmitt:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}:

:{Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:top;display:inline-block;max-width:100%;overflow:hidden;text-overflow:ellipsis;white-space:nowrap"):}:

Eric Schmitt was sworn in as the 43rd Attorney General for the State of Missouri on January 3, 2019. As Attorney General, Eric is focused on keeping Missouri families safe and upholding the rule of law. As the lawyer for all six million Missourians, Eric is fighting each and every day to protect opportunities for the next generation.

Nebraska,

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:{AG Peterson | Nebraska Attorney General Doug Peterson:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:top;display:inline-block;max-width:100%;overflow:hidden;text-overflow:ellipsis;white-space:nowrap"):}:

Attorney General Doug Peterson - To serve the citizens of Nebraska and Nebraska's elected officials with fidelity to our U.S. Constitution, State Constitution, and Nebraska law.and

South Carolina

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:{South Carolina Attorney General - Alan Wilson - AG:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:top;display:inline-block;max-width:100%;overflow:hidden;text-overflow:ellipsis;white-space:nowrap"):}:

South Carolina Attorney General - Alan Wilson. Youth suicide is the 2nd leading cause of death for our young people ages 10-24 in our nation and 3rd in South Carolina today. In South Carolina, the 2013 CDC's Youth Risk Behavioral Survey reported over ONE out of every EIGHT of our youth "seriously considered" suicide and that over ONE out ...

— are suing the administration of Democratic President Joe Biden over Biden’s plan to cancel up to $20,000 in student loan debt for individuals making less than $125,000 a year.

Six red states — Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, and South Carolina — are suing the administration of Democratic President Joe Biden over Biden’s plan to cancel up to $20,000 in student loan debt for individuals making less than $125,000 a year.

The Biden administration based its plan on a 2003 law. According to the Justice Department, the law, initially meant to help military members, says that Biden can reduce or erase student loan debts during times of national emergency.

The red states’ lawsuit, filed Thursday in Missouri, said that Biden’s plan was “not remotely tailored to address the effects of the pandemic on federal student loan borrowers.” The lawsuit adds that, since Biden recently declared the COVID-19 pandemic as over, he can’t use it as a justification for his wide-scale debt relief plan, ABC News reported.

“It’s patently unfair to saddle hard-working Americans with the loan debt of those who chose to go to college,” Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge said of her state’s lawsuit. “The Department of Education is required, under the law, to collect the balance due on loans. And President Biden does not have the authority to override that.”

The states argued that Biden’s plan inflicted a “number of ongoing financial harms” to student loan providers and also “will ultimately disrupt revenue to state coffers.” They also argued that Biden’s plan violates the Administrative Procedure Act, a law regulating how federal agencies ensure that presidential policies are well-reasoned and explained, the aforementioned publication reported.

Despite these claims, the White House has said it will continue with its plan, confident it can survive a court challenge.

“Republican officials from these six states are standing with special interests, and fighting to stop relief for borrowers buried under mountains of debt,” White House spokesman Abdullah Hasan said Thursday. “The president and his administration are lawfully giving working and middle class families breathing room as they recover from the pandemic and prepare to resume loan payments in January.”

an 'Keep borrowers in debt': Republicans plotting legal challenges to Biden’s student debt relief plan

Although some progressives believe that President Joe Biden’s plan to cancel some student loan debt doesn’t go far enough, a long list of Republicans — from U.S. senators to right-wing think tanks to state attorneys general — have accused the president of overreaching and are looking for ways to undermine Biden’s plan. The National Review’s Charles C.W. Cooke is even calling for Congress to “impeach and convict President Biden.”

Student loan debt has become a major problem in the United States, where it isn’t uncommon for students to graduate from college with six-figure debts that they will spend decades paying off with interest. This debt affects a variety of decisions that college graduates make as young adults, from deciding whether or not to have kids to being able to buy a house. Some older Baby Boomers, according to common complaints from Millennials and members of Generation Z, fail to comprehend the severity of the problem — as they graduated from college at a time when tuition was much more affordable than it is now.

Journalists Tony Romm, Jeff Stein and Danielle Douglas-Gabriel take a look at GOP reactions to Biden’s student loan debt plan in an article published by the Washington Post on September 1, stressing that some of those Republicans are considering lawsuits.

“Republican state attorneys general and other leading conservatives are quietly exploring a slew of potential lawsuits targeting President Biden’s plan to cancel some student debt — challenges that could limit or invalidate the policy before it takes full effect,” the Post reporters explain. “In recent days, a number of GOP attorneys general from states including Arizona, Missouri and Texas have met privately to discuss a strategy that could see multiple cases filed in different courts around the country, according to a person familiar with their thinking who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the confidential talks.”

Romm, Stein and Douglas-Gabriel continue, “Other influential conservatives — including Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and allies of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank — are mulling their own options as they ratchet up criticism of Biden’s debt-relief plan, two additional people familiar with the matter said. And a conservative advocacy group founded by a major Trump donor said it would file a lawsuit against the policy.”

The Post interviewed John Malcolm, who serves as director of the Heritage Foundation’s Meese Center. The Heritage Foundation, founded in 1973, has been around 49 years — and its Meese Center was named after Edwin Meese, who served as U.S. attorney general during President Ronald Reagan’s second term and is now 90.

Malcolm told the Post, “The conservative public interest law firms in our network are exploring filing lawsuits against this. They are doing background legal research, trying to find out who might be the most suitable clients for them. They have to find a client with the standing and the gumption to take on a lawsuit. There are several groups in our network who are exploring that right now.”

Biden’s plan would forgive up to $10,000 in federal student loan debt, or as much as $20,000 if the former student also received Pell Grants. Some liberals and progressives were hoping to see larger amounts of student loan debt forgiven, but the centrist Biden believes that $10,000 or $20,000 is a step in the right direction.

The Post interviewed some former college students who have a lot of student loan debt, and they were appalled that Republicans oppose even the modest amounts that Biden favors.

One of those interviewees was 31-year-old Ohio resident Michael Loomus, who dropped out of the University of Toledo and has been struggling to pay down the $11,400 that he owes. Loomus told the Post, “It just seems they are continuously trying to keep borrowers in debt. I don’t make a lot of money.… and before this, it just felt like I’d never pay off my loans.”

an 9 22 raga?

no lnx twt doc

'Just kidding': Biden Administration yanks student debt relief for millions as GOP states sue

Brett Wilkins and Common Dreams September 29, 2022

"The Biden administration told several million people they'd see their debt reduced by $10-20K, and a month later quietly wrote 'just kidding' on a website," said one affected borrower.

Progressives on Thursday decried the Biden administration's decision to exclude millions of people from its student loan relief plan, a move meant to thwart legal challenges like the lawsuit filed on the same day by six Republican-led states seeking to block President Joe Biden's proposal to cancel up to $20,000 of federal educational debt per borrower.

Politico reports worries over legal challenges from the student lending industry prompted the U.S. Department of Education to reverse course and no longer allow borrowers with Federal Family Education Loan Program (FFEL) and Perkins loans—which are guaranteed by the federal government but held by private lenders—to participate in the debt cancellation plan.

Biden announced last month that his administration will forgive $10,000 in federal student loan debt for borrowers who attended college without Pell Grants and who earn less than $125,000 individually, or $250,000 as a household. Borrowers who received Pell Grants will have $20,000 in federal debt erased.

The president's approval rating bounced by double-digits among young voters in the weeks after his announcement, which fulfilled a campaign promise and came just over two months ahead of the 2022 midterm elections.

However, student loan debtors expressed deep disappointment over Thursday's move, with one borrower and activist calling the administration's about-face a "gut punch."

Another, journalist Dell Cameron, tweeted: "The Biden administration told several million people they'd see their debt reduced by $10-20K, and a month later quietly wrote 'just kidding' on a website. Where's the legal threat over that?"

The administration's reversal came as six Republican-led states filed a lawsuit in a Missouri federal court Thursday arguing that the president's debt relief plan is "not remotely tailored to address the effects of the pandemic on federal student loan borrowers," a legal requirement under the administration's justification

According to The Washington Post:

The suit emphasizes that Missouri's student loan servicer, which is part of its state government, could see a drop in revenue because borrowers are likely to consolidate their loans under the Federal Family Education Loan program.

On Thursday, however, the administration said it would exclude FFEL from the loan forgiveness program... That change could help head off legal claims against the policy, although it will mean that roughly two million of the 44 million otherwise eligible borrowers will not qualify for relief.

Politico cites June federal data showing there were more than four million borrowers with $108.8 billion in privately held student loans.

"Republicans want to keep you in debt for the rest of your life and take away student debt cancellation," the Debt Collective, the nation's first debtors' union, tweeted in response to the suit. "It is an interesting strategy to adopt before the midterms."

an ah 9 22

“Republican state attorneys generaland other leading conservatives are quietly exploring a slew of potential lawsuits targeting President Biden’s plan to cancel some student debt — challenges that could limit or invalidate the policy before it takes full effect,” the Post reporters explain. “In recent days, a number of GOP attorneys general from states including Arizona, Missouri and Texas have met privately to discuss a strategy that could see multiple cases filed in different courts around the country, according to a person familiar with their thinking who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the confidential talks.”

The Post interviewed John Malcolm, who serves as director of theHeritage Foundation’s Meese Center.The Heritage Foundation, founded in 1973, has been around 49 years — and its Meese Center was named after Edwin Meese, who served as U.S. attorney general during President Ronald Reagan’s second term and is now 90.

The Post interviewed some former college students who have a lot of student loan debt, and they were appalled that Republicans oppose even the modest amounts that Biden favors.

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/tucker-carlson-calls-student-debt-relief-reparations-being-paid-drug-addicted-robots-no

quite a lot of RW BS on student loan forgive, bannon , tucker called reparations?; mebbe a string of dem wins/bills ~ 2022 red wave;

also try culture/class war BS rich college kids vs hard working real am, socialism

https://www.mediamatters.org/steve-bannon/steve-bannon-rails-against-student-debt-forgiveness-then-brags-about-his-ivy-league

biden not cancelled 10K as promised? 4 22 8 22 10-20K$

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/06/education-department-student-debt-cancellation-corinthian/

cannot make 1st payment

https://www.alternet.org/2022/04/half-student-loan-borrowers-payment/

// social safety net ~ strict fr libtard?

an 3 22

With barely a whimper, free community college for all Americans bit the dust, at least for now.

Already stripped from the pared-down Build Back Better bill proposed by the Biden administration in October, free community college will not re-emerge as a free-standing bill in 2022.

An initiative that has been implemented successfully in 19 states as different as Arkansas and California, you might think that two years of free college might have been a model for elevating successful local initiatives as federal policy.

But apparently it was one thing for states to shoulder the burden of creating an educated workforce and another for the Biden administration to make that investment.

First Lady and community college professor Dr. Jill Biden was tasked with presenting the disappointing news to the 2022 Community College National Legislative Summit last week. She spoke of the human cost of this failure.

"These aren't just bills or budgets to me, to you, right?” Biden told colleagues who had hoped for a $45.5 billion infusion of federal money. “And it was a real lesson in human nature that some people just don't get that."

It’s no surprise that Senators Joe Manchin (D-WV), Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) and their Republican allies don’t “get that.”

They believe that a $45.5 billion investment in technicians, health care workers and other skilled laborers we desperately need is an unaffordable “handout” that weakens Americans’ moral fiber.

New Hampshire’s Republican Governor Chris Sununu also rejected the plan. Students who didn’t pay, he argued, would not commit seriously to education.

The bill had other enemies. One was inside the house all along.

Private colleges and universities, and at least one major, public four-year institution, saw the plan as a direct threat to their bottom lines.

As early as last October, the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universitieswithheld its support because the idea was “untested” and government could better help students by increasing Pell Grants.

But federally funded free community college is neither new nor untested: many were free for almost a century.

Part of an education reform plan, two-year colleges would, University of Chicago president William Rainey Harper argued in the 1890s, make Morrill Act public education funds available to more Americans.

These “junior colleges” would be situated in public high schools and would relieve four-year colleges and universities from teaching basic college-level skills and general education courses.

As an example of what this could look like, Harper divided his own tuition-driven university into a “junior college” and a “senior college” in 1892. But it was a high school principal, in Joliet, Illinois, who, in 1901, took up Harper’s challenge to first offer college-level courses for free and then establish an independent, public junior college.

The junior college movement expanded heterogeneously before World War II. Some, as in California, were public and free, and usually an extension of high school. Others, like the private, tuition-driven Harcum Junior College in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, established in 1915 to educate middle-class women, were intended as a launching pad for a university education.

But by the mid-century 20th century, that status of community colleges declined in many states. As college enrollment expanded dramatically under the 1944 GI Bill, Harvard president James Bryant Conant argued that junior colleges — now known as “community colleges” because of their democratic to local education — were primarily for students with modest, vocational goals.

Similarly, all community colleges were never free, but they were free in places where the desire for economic growth and democratic social mobility merged.

Native Floridians paid no tuition until 1969. Similarly, post-secondary schools in California, the largest educational system in the country, offered post-secondary education to in-state students for free until 1978.

Its 73 community colleges also served as feeder schools to four-year institutions. By providing skilled labor, free community and four-year colleges fueled both states’ growth as national hubs for the aerospace and military industries.

Although the United States is currently faced with worker shortages across its skilled labor force, there is hard evidence that reviving tuition-free community college could be the remedy.

In 2008, Knoxville, Tennessee, made this move, a program that became statewide in 2014, funded by a combination of taxpayer dollars and private donations. Mentorship and apprenticeship programs that complement course work have boosted poor students into well-paying jobs.

So, what are the barriers to supporting two-year schools?

First, as their opposition to the Biden plan reveals, public and private four-year colleges and universities remain fatally dependent on tuition dollars that would be diminished if students who wanted a four-year degree could complete two of them for free.

Despite the economic vulnerability that became evident during the first months of the covid crisis, these institutions and the politicians that support them have no immediate plan to replace tuition with more sustainable income streams, like taxes.

As importantly, Joe Manchin’s anxiety that Americans will become moochers, and Chris Sununu’s belief that students will only be disciplined learners if they have skin in the game, reflect a national divide on whether public goods should be shared or earned, and whether the nation benefits from educated workers.

But voters, not surprisingly, break along ideological, class, age and racial lines.

A recent Pew study reveals that 85 percent of Democrats, and only 36 percent of Republicans, believe public colleges should be tuition-free.

But over half of non-college educated Republicans under 50 do support taxpayer-funded community colleges. So do Americans under 30 by an overwhelming 73 percent.

And while only 51 percent of white Americans are in favor of canceling tuition, Black (86 percent), Hispanic (82 percent) and Asian American (69 percent) citizens support democratic access to post-secondary education.

And best of all, tuition-free community college does have a track record. It creates satisfying and sustainable lives for American families, and a robust economy that can respond to the needs of tomorrow.

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Timothy Noah/October 26, 2021

How Four-Year Colleges Helped Kill Free Community College Tuition

One of the best ideas in Build Back Better is dead, and the higher-ed lobby deserves some blame.

Do you know anybody who doesn’t love community colleges? Me neither. They furnish job training that businesses no longer bother to provide. They provide skills that K-12 education is supposed to teach but often doesn’t, and they’re a bridge to a four-year college degree. Democrats love them. Republicans, though mostly hostile to higher education, make an exception for community colleges. “Community colleges,” says Peter Granville, senior policy associate at the Century Foundation, “are some of the most appreciated and widely approved institutions remaining in the United States.”

During the 2020 campaign, candidate Joe Biden promised two years’ free tuition and fees at community college or at a public four-year university. After the election, that was whittled down to funding tuition and fees only at community college, where you can get an associate degree in two years. Over 10 years, the federal government would pay 75 percent of the average national cost (currently that’s $3,700); states would pay the rest. Then that got whittled down to a five-year program in which the feds would pay 100 percent of the average national cost and then ratchet their contribution down gradually to 80 percent by 2028.

Last week, that got whittled down to nothing. The program is out of the Build Back Better reconciliation package. And one of the reasons, it turns out, is that four-year colleges lobbied against it.

That isn’t the only reason free community college tuition got bounced from the bill. It isn’t even the primary reason. But it’s the most shocking reason. Which may explain why I couldn’t get anybody to confirm precisely which four-year colleges lobbied on this. One source very reluctantly told me of hearing secondhand that it was a public university that resides in a state I won’t name. My telephone and email queries to relevant parties at this university went unanswered, which certainly raises suspicions. But that’s as far as this cloak-and-dagger caper took me.

The main reason the free community college tuition proposal got bounced from the bill, President Biden told a CNN town hall last week, was that West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin “and one other person [have] indicated that they will not support free community college.” Manchin was the main obstacle; the “other person” presumably was the reclusive Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, though at least some supporters of the bill thought Sinema was still gettable. Manchin, who last summer stated in a memo, “No additional handouts … or transfer payments” unrelated to families and health, and none of the latter unless they were means tested, hardened his opposition to the tuition proposal in the last few weeks. According to the Century Foundation’s Granville, the proposal Manchin was instrumental in killing would have furnished West Virginia with $40 million annually in tuition benefits extended to 22,000 students. (Sorry, kids!) Sinema’s opposition was perhaps less firm because Arizona would, according to Granville, get $400 million annually in tuition benefits extended to 237,000 students.

No Republican was ever going to vote for the reconciliation bill, with free community college tuition and fees or without it, because Republicans hate Democrats much more than they love community colleges. Some Republicans opposed the free tuition program on principle. New Hampshire’s GOP Governor Chris Sununu told The Wall Street Journal that if students didn’t pay part of their tuition, they wouldn’t hit the books. Never mind that if they didn’t get to go to community college, it’s a certainty they wouldn’t hit the books.

Or maybe Sununu’s opposition wasn’t principled at all. The proposal favored states where tuition charges for community college are lower than the national average. Those states would end up with a surplus that they could spend on four-year public colleges. In New Hampshire, by contrast, tuition charges are nearly twice the national average. Under the proposal, states where tuition charges are above the national median would get no surplus and would have to dedicate more state funds to making up the difference. (Sinema’s Arizona—again, per Granville’s calculations—would get $227 million in surplus funds; Manchin’s West Virginia, where community college tuition and fees are a whisker below the national average, would get a tiny surplus of about $1 million.)

The final community college proposal wasn’t exactly cheap, but neither was it intimidatingly high: $83 billion over five years. That’s less than one-quarter the cost of the provision in the reconciliation bill that provides free preschool, according to The New York Times.

But that’s not what’s eating me. What’s eating me is that private four-year colleges lobbied against the plan. Why on earth would they do that?

“They want paying customers,” explains Max Lubin, chief executive officer of RISE, a group that organizes student-led campaigns to reduce or eliminate the cost of attending college. If community college were free, some students would choose community college over a four-year college. The competition would be especially bothersome to for-profit colleges, which compete most directly for this population.

What about four-year colleges that effectively double as community colleges by offering associate degrees? “They would rather get Pell money,” Lubin said. “That’s free money. Then they can hike tuition anyway.” (Community colleges that participated in the free tuition program would be restricted in how much they could raise tuition.) “Pell money” is Pell grant money, which is given to lower-income students. Biden’s Build Back Better plan was supposed to increase the maximum Pell grant, currently $6,495, by $1,400, but that got whittled down to $500. Biden has hinted the final bill may bump that up a bit to make up partly for the loss of free community college.

The National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities didn’t lobby against free community college tuition, according to its president, Barbara K. Mistick. But it didn’t lobby for it, either. “Our efforts have been squarely focused on advocating for increasing the Pell Grant,” she told me by email. Mistick isn’t exactly enthusiastic about free community college. She told The Wall Street Journal last week that it was an untested program that would require building a new bureaucracy. “If you want to have the greatest impact, if you want to touch students in every single sector, the Pell program would do that,” she told the Journal. “You don’t want to do something that is going to take years.”

For four-year colleges, opposing free community college may be penny-wise and pound foolish. Several people pointed out to me that some of the students who acquire a free associate degree will transfer to four-year institutions; many in this group might never have attended college at all. Also, tuition and fees at four-year colleges are so much higher than at community colleges that unless a four-year college gives the student in question a free ride (thereby, in Sununu’s eyes, tempting said student to goof off), it’s a stretch to say it’s competing with community colleges at all. (Average tuition at a public four-year college is $10,560 for in-state students and $27,020 for out-of-state students, and at a private four-year college, it’s $37,650.) And don’t forget that states that don’t charge an arm and a leg for community college stood to receive surpluses that they could then have spent on their public colleges.

Yet four-year colleges and universities lobbied against free community college. It speaks volumes that the specific organizations that did so have gone into hiding. So does the silence we’re mostly hearing from four-year colleges on the demise of this very good idea. To me it sounds like a dowager’s murmur: “Not our class, dear.”

Timothy Noah @TimothyNoah1

Timothy Noah is a New Republic staff writer and author of The Great Divergence: America’s Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It.

Read More: Politics, The Soapbox, Education, Higher Education, Community College, Build Back Better, Reconciliation, Joe Biden, Joe Manchin, Lobbying

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where are gop rw 1st amend absolutists?

this is also LEGAL suppression:

i'm sure FIRE is on the case; accred by who?

an 1 22

Baker College, one of the largest private schools in Michigan, is threatening legal action against a former faculty member who spoke to ProPublica and the Detroit Free Press for an investigation published this month.

Jacqueline Tessmer, who taught digital media for 14 years at Baker’s campus in Auburn Hills, told the news organizations that students often came to the nonprofit college unprepared to succeed and exited without degrees or good jobs but with heavy debt from loans. “Baker College has ruined a lot of people’s lives,” she said in the story.

A Jan. 19 letter to Tessmer — sent by the law firm Plunkett Cooney on behalf of Baker — demanded she retract her statements, which it described as “false and defamatory.” It did not specify what, if anything, was false. Arguing that Tessmer was in violation of a nondisparagement clause in a settlement she reached with Baker in an employment dispute, attorney Courtney L. Nichols also demanded that she “agree voluntarily to remit payment to Baker College for the damages it has suffered as a result of your violation(s), including attorney fees.” The letter did not include a dollar amount.

Since publication, Baker has not contacted either news organization to contest the validity of her statements. Before publication, the Free Press and ProPublica informed Baker that Tessmer would be quoted and shared her comments. Baker did not specifically address those quotes or Tessmer’s time at the college.

Baker’s letter to her after publication gave her seven days to respond. Tessmer said in an interview this week she stands by her comments and will not meet the college’s demands.

She said she didn’t see how it would be possible to make a retraction even if she wanted to, given that she expressed her opinion “based on what I did in service to the college” and her comments were only “a couple of sentences in a giant article.”

“I could be quiet, but is it really going to matter at this point?” she added.

The story on Baker examined the college’s low graduation rates, its aggressive marketing and the oversight of a Board of Trustees that has included former presidents of the school.

In addition to the letter to Tessmer, Baker responded to the article by emailing students, writing a letter to the editor in the Free Press, and placing a statement on its website that disparaged the story and touted the school’s achievements. Officials have defended the 111-year-old college as an affordable open enrollment school whose practices are reviewed by regulators and accreditors.

Neither Baker nor its lawyer has responded to a request for comment on the legal threat.

Tessmer’s relationship with Baker ended in a lawsuit she filed for breach of contract and retaliation. The school disputed her claims in a countersuit, and the case ended in a settlement in 2014. The letter from Baker’s lawyer also suggested that if Tessmer had spoken about the settlement, she would be in violation of it.

“This is what they do,” said Tessmer, now self-employed. “They scare. They huff and they puff, and it works a lot of the time. I mean, it’s worked on me.”

The letter to Tessmer said that if she did not comply, “Baker College will consider its available recourse.”

As of Thursday evening, Tessmer had not heard again from the law firm.

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Pennsylvania resident and pizzeria owner Pauline Bauer, one of the many far-right Donald Trump supporters facing charges in connection with the January 6 insurrection, has been resorting to over-the-top antics ever since her arrest. And this week, journalist Scott MacFarlane reports in a Twitter thread, a judge became fed up with Bauer and "ordered U.S. Marshals" to take her "into custody."

Bauer, who was arrested by the FBI in rural Kane, Pennsylvania on May 19, is facing charges that include violent entry, disruptive conduct and obstruction of Congress. Prosecutors, journalist Kelly Weill reported in the Daily Beast on July 11, allege that when Bauer broke into the U.S. Capitol Building onJanuary 6, she threatened violence against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and said, "Bring Nancy Pelosi out here now…. We want to hang that fucking bitch."

Nonetheless, Bauer has stayed out of jail — until now. This week, MacFarlane reports, Bauer was "screaming" when the frustrated judge ordered that she be taken into custody. The judge said, "The problem is she's not going to do what I direct her to do…. Ms. Bauer is now going to be incarcerated."

In the courtroom, MacFarlane notes, Bauer refused to surrender her U.S. passport while awaiting trial. The pizzeria owner told the judge, "I have (a) right to my self-determination" and insisted that she was not subject to the court's supervision.

According to MacFarlane, Bauer told the judge, "(The) FBI has been watching me ever since Day One.... They know where I'm at 24 hours a day.... I'm not a danger to society.... I am an asset to my community."

Bauer, MacFarlane explained, will be jailed in Washington, D.C. And because she will be behind bars, she will not be unable to attend the "Justice for January 6" demonstration that is scheduled to take place in D.C. this weekend. Organizers of the demonstration are claiming that the January 6 insurrectionists did nothing wrong when they stormed the U.S. Capitol Building in a failed attempt to prevent Congress from certifying now-President Joe Biden's victory over Trump in the 2020 election.

Bauer has insisted on representing herself in court and refused to work with an attorney. During a June 11 proceeding held online via Zoom, she told the court, "I do not stand under the law. Under Genesis 1, God gave man dominion over the law."

McFarlane said that Bauer had previously claimed to be a "sovereign citizen," part of an ideological movement of people who believe they are not subject to U.S. laws. But on Friday, he reported, she claimed to have never said she was a sovereign citizen.

big basis for occupy, esp student?

We moved quickly into starting to have general assemblies, having more and more people come out, trying to figure out what this looks like in the context of a midsize Southern town. Durham at the time had, you know, just over 200,000 people. But it was also beginning to go through some serious economic struggles, gentrification, housing displacement. There were a lot of people in Durham who were really struggling. And so, we really resonated with the message that was coming out of New York and with the same conversations that people were having about income inequality, about housing inequality.

I ran for office just four years after Occupy, in 2015. And I think at first it was kind of a leap of faith. I didn't really have a sense that I was going to be able to change things from an elected position. I was hoping that there was an opportunity there. And I think our movement was started to turn more and more toward the idea that electoral politics could provide some opportunities for us to make change and to leverage resources for the benefit of working-class and communities of color.

And I've been able to do that in ways that I didn't expect. I think the transition has been — it's been difficult in ways, but it's also been very empowering and exciting to be able to put my organizing skills and movement skills to work in a different context. And I think bringing more people into the electoral world, through some of the work I'm doing with a national organization called Local Progress and just folks in my community talking to other movement people, younger people who might be interested in moving into the electoral realm someday, I've felt like I've been able to gain skills and knowledge and then pass those skills and knowledge on to other people within the movement. So, it feels — it's felt really rewarding — difficult, of course, at times, but ultimately I feel like I've been able to do something good in this position, and I'm excited about passing the torch on to somebody else.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to a few months later, November 2011, during the Occupy protests, about a thousand students marching in New York City outside a meeting where CUNY trustees — that's City University of New York trustees — voted to authorize annual tuition increases. This is Julian Guerrero of Students United for a Free CUNY.

JULIAN GUERRERO: [echoed by the People's Mic] Me, myself, I'm in debt $70,000. I actually got a letter from Sallie Mae saying that if I don't start paying today $900 a month, they're going to have more aggressive attempts at collecting my debt. And so, I'm going to burn this right here and now.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that's Julian Guerrero of Students United for a Free CUNY, using the whole idea of the mic check and the open mic and the mic repeats that we've come to see that are so familiar. Astra Taylor, you are a key member of the Debt Collective. Talk about how that movement has evolved to today.

ASTRA TAYLOR: Now, the Debt Collective is an organization for debtors that fights for the cancellation of all kinds of debt and the provision of the services, the public goods we all need to survive and thrive. It has its roots directly at Occupy Wall Street.

So, just like Nelini felt that space to talk about her condition honestly, you know, for many of us who were in debt, Occupy was a similar space, where we could see that we were not alone — and that is actually the Debt Collective's slogan: "You are not a loan" — A space L-O-A-N, right? — a space where we could come together. And debt was actually part of the protests around the world at the time. Tuition hikes sparked protests in Latin America. And later, in Quebec, there was a wave of protests.

And so, you know, we followed the threads of debt, once the parks were cleared, because how we were thinking about it at the time was, you know, "Yes, we're occupying Wall Street, but Wall Street occupies our lives. And how does it do that? Often in the form of debt. We're forced to debt finance things that should be publicly provided." And it was at Occupy Wall Street that we had the collective epiphany. We started to recognize that our debts, which were so burdensome, could actually be a potential source of power, a source of leverage.

And by consistently organizing, we've moved the needle on that issue. I think, you know, we now are in a world where leading politicians talk about student debt cancellation. The Debt Collective has won billions of dollars of student loan cancellation for debtors. And that demand started at Occupy Wall Street. And the media was very skeptical. They mocked the demand. They said, "It's never going to happen. Isn't Occupy so naive?" Well, look where we are today. We've really moved the debate. And so, I think that's a really concrete, concrete result of this movement.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to the issue of police repression of Occupy protests across the country. On November 18th, 2011, campus police officers at the University of California, Davis pepper-sprayed peaceful student protesters. Video of the police attack went viral.

PROTESTERS: Don't shoot students! Don't shoot students!

The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching!

Shame on you! Shame on you! Shame on you! Shame on you! Shame on you! Shame on you!

ELLI PEARSON: I wasn't aware I was going to be pepper-sprayed until people told me to protect myself. And then I have friends who were pepper-sprayed who said they did not know that that was happening and that that was coming. And we were actually expected — we were expecting to be shot in the back with something, because they were behind us. And we really had no idea what was going to happen.

AMY GOODMAN: That's UC Davis student Elli Pearson speaking on Democracy Now! after she was pepper-sprayed. And you have the whole coordination. It later came out — I remember that piece in The Guardian by Naomi Wolf, "Revealed: how the FBI coordinated the crackdown on Occupy," the destruction of Occupy Wall Street and other places all over the country, well over a dozen cities. Nelini Stamp, if you can talk about what you understand took place, and how the police dealt with you?

NELINI STAMP: Yeah. I mean, you know, it was interesting, because the first — very early on, that first weekend, I remember going to an officer and saying, "Can my friend's car be there?" And they were like, "Yeah. Y'all will be gone by Monday."

And increasingly, as soon as we started — one of the first direct actions, regular direct actions, we did at Occupy Wall Street was the opening and closing bell. We would march for the opening bell and closing bell of the Stock Exchange and Wall Street. And that first Monday, we started getting shoved and pushed. And every single day that we were out there, things escalated to then a few arrests, to then a few more arrests. And I think things really changed on the Saturday.

There was a few things that I feel like people don't understand, what happened those first two weeks, also in the nation. Troy Davis was executed by the state of Georgia — a huge case of misjustice and racial reckoning again. There was a huge debate in the city of New York around stop-and-frisk. And so, all of these tensions were underlying. But there was also this idea and original, you know, sentiment to say that the cops are the 99%, too, because most of them were not making — if we were really a uniting movement. So, it was this really interesting juxtaposition that was happening those first two weeks.

And that Saturday — we did weekly actions on Saturday, and I don't remember if it was the 24th or the — I usually used to remember all of the dates in my mind. We took the streets. And it was civil disobedience like New York hasn't seen in a really long time. And I remember getting to Union Square, and all of a sudden they had this orange netting all around us, which I think is now illegal in the city of New York for cops to do. But they had orange netting, and pepper spray was just going everywhere.

And that was kind of the — I think that was a radicalizing moment for a lot of our white comrades at Occupy Wall Street, who never had to deal with the police as those of us who come from communities of color in New York had to, or those of us who have a history of — when I was younger, I remember seeing Amadou Diallo's murder on every single thing, and people marching on the Brooklyn Bridge. And so, for those who didn't have that background or that personal experience, they finally did have that. And that's when I think there was this awakening of a lot of young white folks or more affluent folks who didn't come from overpoliced communities actually saying and trying to hold the police accountable.

So, what you see is, right after Occupy Wall Street, you see Ramarley Graham gets killed in the city of New York, and then Trayvon Martin gets killed in Florida, and people start to act up, you know? I flew down to Florida, because they wanted somebody to train them in direct action, and helped co-found the Dream Defenders. We marched for miles to Sanford. And then you see a big march in June of 2012 with 50,000 people that said, "End stop-and-frisk." And I don't think that would have been — that would have had the new people involved as it did, if we didn't have so much, like, repression from the state. And I think part of it was to make people not come out, to make — people were really threatened by Occupy at that time. And I think that that's what ended up happening, and it was really beautiful to see people get involved and actually call out police brutality after that.

AMY GOODMAN: Nelini Stamp, I want to thank you for being with us. This has to end this discussion today. Nelini Stamp of Working Families Party in Philadelphia; Astra Taylor of the Debt Collective, speaking to us from Asheville; and Jillian Johnson, mayor pro tem of Durham, North Carolina — all three involved in the Occupy movement 10 years ago. And we continue to cover it when we look at the bills that are in Congress right now and so much more. I'm Amy Goodman. Thanks so much for joining us

Disturbingly Kafkaesque': Judge slams Betsy DeVos for denying 94% of student debt forgiveness claims

Igor Derysh Salon

October 22, 2020

Arguing that Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos had undermined the agreement, a federal judge on Tuesday denied approval for a class action settlement over the Trump administration's handling of a student debt forgiveness program.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/house-republicans-paint-a-labor-vision-thats-straight-out-of-the-19th-century-robber-barons-era/

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Ten House Republicans who fashion themselves policy wonks are out with their diagnosis of what ails the American worker. Their proposed cure is a future that would be brutish, nasty and short.

The Hobbesian, dog-eat-dog policies the Republican Study Group proposes would enhance the power of those born to privilege, just so long as nothing knocks them off their comfortable perch.

The report proposes:

No forgiveness of student loans even though our federal government authorized students to borrow huge sums to attend worthless commercial schools that went bankrupt, leaving them with no degree, just debt. The Republican plan lacks even the mercy provisions for debtors written into Hammurabi's Code almost 4,000 years ago, which wiped away debts when storms, war or corruption ruined a borrower's finances.
A turn away from comprehensive higher education, especially liberal arts, to focus on technical skills and employability.Forget about developing the rigorous and thoughtful minds that enable young people to become informed citizens.
Throughout, the report makes recommendations that would require a larger federal government workforce to police workers, students, poor people and immigrants.
Empower workers by further weakening, if not eliminating, unions. TheRepublican Study Group report calls for workers to have more freedom to negotiate directly with their employers, a solution in search of a problem. "Our approach would unleash the full potential of the American people by refocusing labor policy to provide workers more control over their own future," [SEE CA PROP 22 BS ADS I HAVE TIME/FREEDONM TO TAKE CARE OF MY AA GPA]the report states. Given that individual workers are mostly commodities, that's the equivalent of urging that each grain of wheat in a silo be free to negotiate whether it goes into the grist mill first or last.
Get tough on the poor and immigrants, who are portrayed as greedy thieves who shirk work, especially during the coronavirus pandemic. The poor and hungry get the blame for high levels of what the report artfully calls "improper payments" despite evidence that mostly these are screwups by federal agencies, not applicants. Not a word, by the way, is said about thieving defense contractors, farmers and other business operators even though a link in the report is full of examples where such businesses benefit from fraud, waste and abuse.

The 66-page report, Reclaiming the American Dream: Proposals to Empower the Workers of Today and Tomorrow, is amazingly slipshod. Frankly, the study group, lead byRep. Mike Johnson (R-La.) and its staff should be ashamed that they published such low-quality work.

Many hypertext links in the End Notes don't work, including the first. Others point to web pages that generate a "404" page missing response. While some End Notes refer to official data, many point to ideological marketing organizations like the Heritage Foundation and polemics based on *a priori*assumptions.

Anti-Unions Claim

Bizarrely, the report characterizes unions as holding down the compensation of members. That's absurd since the whole point of collective bargaining is to ensure that workers get fairly paid for their contribution to their employer's financial success.

Consider this lie on Page 32: "Under current law, union contracts set both a wage floor and a wage ceiling. As a result, individual workers cannot be given raises, including performance-based raises, by their employer."

No law is cited because none exists. And not one example of a contract that prohibits merit pay is cited in the report or in the right-wing newspaper article to which it links. I've negotiated a labor contract and I've read countless such collective bargaining agreements, none of which had prohibition of merit pay or bonuses. It's possible they exist, but the Study Group fails to show any evidence.

How revealing, though, that the Republican Study Group describes its imaginary prohibition on merit pay and bonuses as entirely a problem with unions rather than employers. The incentive to hold down pay lies with companies, not unions.

The report's attacks on labor unions as a detriment to members comes right out of the Donald Trump playbook in which making stuff up or distorting it without any respect for facts is the name of the game. Just make the claim and damn reality.

Contradictory Approach

Throughout, the report makes recommendations that would require a larger federal government workforce to police workers, students, poor people and immigrants. Many more auditors and investigators would be needed to investigate anyone who relies on what remains of America's tattered social safety net.

Implementing the proposed changes also would require massive investments in technology, primarily computers to both operate federal programs and to find people who abuse these benefits.

Neglecting to propose these expansions of investigative staff and computer systems makes the study group report empty rhetoric that reveals its members' mindset, favoring much more top-down power and punishment.

Attacking Working-Class Leisure

The report attacks not working, something a wealthy nation could reasonably aspire to achieve. "Among the civilian labor force, less than half of those who fail to complete high school are participating in the labor force," the report states, accurately.

Heaven forbid that people not work. This is on a theme with Trump, who throughout his 2016 campaign complained that too many Americans were not working.

Of course, there are many reasons people don't work, especially the "poorly educated" whom Trump often says he loves.

Those reasons include staying home to raise children, which Republicans used to hail as a virtue. Then there's caring for elderly parents or a disabled spouse or just enjoying leisure instead of chasing every last buck.

Unmentioned in the report are government policies that have driven down wages for the "poorly educated," an issue examined in my 2014 anthology DIVIDED: The Perils of Our Growing Inequality. For the many people whom nature or education made fit only for unskilled work, wages are now so low that it doesn't pay to get a job and can actually make you worse off.

We would have more people working if we moved to the shorter workweeks and mandatory paid vacations found in, say, Germany. That's anathema to the Study Group's perspective.

Tough Luck for Scammed Students

Another bizarre claim is that forgiving the debt of students swindled by corrupt fake colleges "would actually drive up the cost of college tuition and send the message that students who make irresponsible borrowing decisions will ultimately be bailed out by the federal government."

What of the responsibility of Congress, under both Democratic and Republican majorities, and presidents from both parties who enabled fake colleges and who put in place the harsh student loan rules that are also examined in my 2014 anthology DIVIDED. My 2008 bestseller Free Lunch tells of a student loan company that bought a Gulfstream jet to ferry members of Congress around gratis, the kind of institutional bribery that can distort the priorities of lawmakers.

Nowhere does the Republican Study Group propose the most obvious answer to America's higher education affordability issues. To prepare our young for the increasingly complex world of the future, we could simply restore the mid-20th century policies of making public higher education tuition-free or nearly so, an investment of tax dollars to build a prosperous and durable future.

Not everything in the report is without merit. The federal government operates, the study group says, 90 social welfare programs. Consolidating and simplifying those programs is a worthy goal. The report, though, is antagonistic to such programs, making any reader reasonably suspicious of changes the Study Group would seek.

This misunderstanding of the American students' and workers' needs should come as no surprise considering the signatories of this report. Nine are male. All ten are white.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/a-cruel-experiment-how-46-million-people-were-trapped-by-student-debt

The democratic principle of tuition-free education in our country pre-dates the founding of the United States. The first public primary education was offered in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1635, and its legislature created Harvard College the following year to make education available to all qualified students. Even before the Constitution was ratified, the Confederation Congress enacted the Land Ordinance of 1785, which required newly established townships in territories ceded by the British to devote a section of land for a public school. It also passed the Northwest Ordinances, which set out the guidelines for how the territories could become states. Among those guidelines was a requirement to establish public universities and a stipulation that “the means of education shall forever be encouraged.” After the nation declared independence, Thomas Jefferson argued for a formal education system funded through government taxation.

Jefferson’s vision took form over the course of more than a century, as state and local governments began creating primary schools and then high schools. The federal government became involved in higher education in the 19th century with the creation of land grant colleges and other institutions, used primarily to teach agriculture and education after the Civil War. These institutions created opportunities for people who had long been locked out of the learning process, including formerly enslaved African Americans and impoverished people of all races.

State universities and colleges rapidly expanded as well. By the middle of the 20th century, low-cost or tuition-free education was available in many American states. After the Second World War, the federal government once again turned to education to promote opportunities for its citizens and economic growth for all. The G.I. Bill paid educational expenses for 8 million people, without regard to individual wealth, which helped create a robust middle class and contributed to the vibrant growth economy of the 1950s and 1960s. While those opportunities were still denied to many people as the result of racism, efforts were underway to improve educational access for people of color.

The Reagan era ushered in a belief that government programs, including education, stood in the way of people’s dreams and should be severely cut back. Public goods came to be seen as investments, ones that were purely economic in nature. For these reasons, among others, a nation that had expanded publicly funded education for centuries decided to reverse course. Instead of funding higher education on the principle that it benefits us all, the country began shifting the cost to individual students. in the 1950s, as part of the National Defense Education Act, student loans were created as an experiment in social engineering. Concerned about competition with the Soviet Union, policymakers wanted to increase students’ capabilities in math and sciences. To do that, the country needed more teachers. So, lawmakers offered loans to college students, with the opportunity to have half the loan canceled after 10 years if they became teachers.

The experiment failed. Researchers have not been able to prove that the student loan program led more people to become teachers, despite multiple attempts to do so. The experiment was also cruel. Over the years, the student loan program was expanded, with the claim that a student’s personal investment in their education was an “investment” that would pay off in higher wages. Banks and other private lenders were brought into the process and given considerable incentives and subsidies to issue student loans, without considering the burden being imposed on the student. This financial opportunity was given to banking interests that were already wealthy, with little thought of the resulting damage to an economically sustainable future.

Proponents of financializing the cost of higher education argued that it was cheaper to lend money to students than it was for federal and state governments to provide grants for their education, even after paying subsidies to the private sector for their loans. An entire industry grew up around this process. State and nonprofit guaranty agencies were created to insure the loans. These agencies got paid, no matter what: when loans were issued, when loans became delinquent, when borrowers defaulted, and when they collected on defaulted loans.

In response, most states created guaranty agencies so they could make money from people who needed to borrow to pay for ever-increasing tuitions and fees.Now, states had an extra incentive to cut funding for public higher education. Not only would they save on expenditures, but they could increase the need for students to borrow, which increased their revenue. In many cases, these guaranty agencies don’t handle the loans themselves.They pass the work on to private debt collectors who take collection fees and are aggressive in their handling of cases.

The system took on a life of its own. By the mid-1990s, student loans had surpassed grants in funding students’ higher education. But a system built on debt financing only works if borrowers pay back their loans. That led Congress to make the system even crueler with the Bankruptcy Amendments and Federal Judgeship Act of 1984, which exempted student loans from bankruptcy proceedings and subjected borrowers to draconian collection tools. These tools included wage garnishment without a court order and the seizure of Social Security checks and tax refunds. The Clinton and Obama administrations attempted to lessen the burden slightly by allowing the federal government to lend directly to students while introducing income-based repayment options, but the system’s fundamental cruelty remains unchanged today.

It is time to recognize that the cruel experiment in financing higher education through student loans has failed. It has captured 46 million people and their families in a student loan trap, including people who received vocational training, and has weakened the financial strength of higher education. Inescapable debt is a major driver of social collapse. It has made the racial wealth gap worse and weakened the entire economy, as debt holders are prevented from buying homes or consumer goods, starting families, or opening new businesses. It’s time to restore funds for higher education and cancel student debt for the victims of this failed experiment.

Learn more at Freedom to Prosper.

Mary Green Swig is a senior fellow at the Advanced Leadership Initiative at Harvard University and co-founder of Freedom to Prosper.

Steven L. Swig is a senior fellow at the Advanced Leadership Initiative at Harvard University and co-founder of Freedom to Prosper.

David A. Bergeron is a senior fellow for postsecondary education at the Center for American Progress. Bergeron previously served as the acting assistant secretary for postsecondary education at the U.S. Department of Education.

Richard “RJ” Eskow is senior adviser for health and economic justice at Social Security Works. He is also the host of The Zero Hour, a syndicated progressive radio and television program.

This article was produced by :{Economy for All:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/the-end-of-the-liberal-arts-dream/

curtis white salon

Most people know that student debt is a problem, and most people agree that “something should be done about it.” The consensus opinion appears to be that something should be done because it’s “not fair” to young people. According to a recent poll conducted by the Pew Charitable Trust, 80% of Americans believe that “the government should make it easier to repay student loans.”

Even so, there is very little understanding of why student debt has become so burdensome in recent decades. It’s as if we thought student debt were an unhappy fact of nature, like a weather front that has passed through leaving us with no option but to put on a warmer coat if we can find one, and if we can’t find one, it’s welcome to the Brave New World of Cold and Indifference.

And yet, it was not so long ago that things were very different. I was born in a working class suburb of San Francisco in 1951. At that time, public education was good, teachers still had some social prestige, universities were affordable (cheap actually), and few students graduated with debt. It was possible for me to sally forth without the threat of young adult bankruptcy.

In other words, at that time students were freer to choose what they wanted to study and freer to explore careers. As for me, I was free to be a student of literature and philosophy at the University of San Francisco. I learned to play the classical guitar up the hill at Lone Mountain College. I was also a longhair war resistor and draft counselor in the chaplain’s office. And I was mostly sure that I wouldn’t be punished for these decisions, or not punished any time soon.

unhappily, the university as I knew it no longer exists.Through the decades of Reaganomics and neo-liberal austerity, an elite determination was made that the state should no longer pay for public higher education; henceforth, universities would be funded through personal debt. Tuition to public colleges and universities became a bloated “user fee” for access to a government-affiliated service, like gaining access to a parking lot. Novel arguments gained force:students were just another type of consumer, and “student demand” should determine the content of the curriculum. What was lost in such market logic was the fact that programs in the arts and humanities—not just in universities but at all levels of education—had become the primary way in which we were allowed to think about who we are, where we are, how we got here, and what, if anything, we’d like to see changed. In the place of that worthy process, we were left with what David Harvey described succinctly: “The traditional university culture, with its odd sense of community, has been penetrated, disrupted, and reconfigured by raw money power.”

In both the public and private sectors, the corporate university has been slowly growing for many years, but it has now become more brazen in its destructive tendencies. For an example that is close to me personally, the Board of Trustees at Illinois Wesleyan University (IWU) in Bloomington, Illinois, announced in May of 2020 that it was considering the elimination of many long established programs all of which were in the liberal arts and social sciences. I say this is personal because my wife, Georganne Rundblad, taught sociology at Wesleyan for twenty-five years, and many of the faculty there were among our friends.

Without the consent of the faculty, the Board of Trustees sent pre-termination letters to twenty-five faculty members and instructional staff in philosophy, anthropology, music, foreign languages, sociology, art, and religion — in total, about a quarter of IWU’s faculty.A liberal arts university without philosophers is a contradiction in terms, but a Wesleyan university without a department of religion is an exercise in self-mockery. No doubt, IWU will continue to claim that its “primary focus” is in “opening students’ minds,” but the college of business will have to do most of the opening.

That, too, is already happening. Those departments that were not eliminated were said to be in need of “transformation.” Provost Mark Brodl told faculty member Scott Sheridan that “philosophy will support business and accounting, computer science and data science.” In another example of what Harold Bloom called the trahison des clerks, university president Georgia Nugent (a classicist by training) said that the department of art will “move more in the direction of art and design,” including graphic design and product design. In other words, before the arts can transform students, commerce will first transform the arts. Andy Warhol saw it coming: art is a can of soup.

Of course, there’s no reason to think that this is the end of these transformations, these latest shudders of what Bill Readings called “the university in ruins.” (Readings: “The contemporary University is busily transforming itself from an ideological arm of the state into a bureaucratically organized and relatively autonomous consumer-oriented corporation.”) Remaining faculty and programs can’t sleep comfortably, wondering who and what will be cut next, a year from now, five years or ten. University boards can wait — they’ve been waiting patiently for fifty years. For fifty years American universities have moved toward a sense of mission that a businessman can recognize, respect, and, most importantly, donate money to.

But from the perspective of the liberal arts itself, a liberal arts university that doesn’t recognize the value of the liberal arts shouldn’t transform anything. It should shut its doors, fold it all up. Better that than becoming what Illinois Wesleyan has become: a watery version of the Wharton School of Business.

Wesleyan trustees felt no need to provide a rationale for their actions beyond the crude idea that the affected programs were not cost efficient and that financial exigency threatened them in the near future, somehow — never mind the university’s $200 million endowment. They offered no educational reasons for the changes, and no argument for how the changes were consistent with the values of the institution. Like the bandits in John Huston’s “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” they said, “Reasons? We don’t need no stinking reasons.”

The feelings of faculty and alums are raw now because they feel, rightfully, betrayed. One member of the IWU Alumni for the Liberal Arts, Molly McLay, wrote to me:

I am infuriated by the lack of humanity and empathy in this process. Most of my professional work revolves around understanding, responding to, and preventing trauma. I truly think this experience at IWU has been a collective trauma.

Affirming McLay’s thought, Scott Sheridan, a professor of French and Italian at Wesleyan, commented to me:

I feel like I’m just caught in the middle of an administration that has lost its bearings, that is changing the rules on me late in my career. I’ve bought into the ivory tower model, I’ve done everything asked of me, and now when the economy has tanked, Covid is blazing, higher ed is collapsing, and the University has damaged my professional reputation, I find myself completely cast aside, looking at the necessity not only to retool my professional objectives but to rethink my life.

Professor Sheridan has lawyered up.

Finally, and elegiacally, Professor of English Michael Theune commented to the Chicago Tribune, “It is a bad day. The faculty’s control of the curriculum has been taken away.”

The motto over Wesleyan’s portal should no longer be “Scientia et Sapientia,” knowledge and wisdom. I propose that it should read like the legend over Dante’s Inferno: “No Admittance Except on Business.”

After the second world war, there was an enormous investment in public education. For the first time, the children of the working class had an opportunity to study subjects, like literature, that were formerly a privilege for the children of the affluent. We studied the humanities and the social sciences and in so doing found ways to critique and resist corporate culture and all of its murderous inequalities. In the 1960s, universities became best known for their “student protests.” The protests may now be in the streets and not on campus, but many of the protestors of the present—marching with Black Lives Matter, or against gender bigotry, or against the world as organized for the benefit of oil companies—got their intellectual chops in universities taking courses like Professor Rundblad’s “Sex and Gender in Society” or “Race and Ethnic Relations.”

But all this time our masters have been paying attention, and they have seen clearly and correctly: for many, many students, going to college was and remains a liberalizing experience (thus Biden’s enormous lead over Trump among college-educated voters). Our plutocrat masters concluded, “So this is what happens when you let the working class and minorities go to college. They study things of no value to us, and they learn to hate us.”

As a consequence, slowly, decade after decade, universities were starved and students were put in debt.Meanwhile, the wealthy came to the rescue and became university trustees. In these fallen days, the ideal trustee is someone who has money or knows people with money, ideally both. (The chair of Wesleyan’s Board of Trustees is Timothy Szerlong, former president of worldwide field operations at CNA Financial Corporation.)

The ultimate benefit of all this for our oligarchs, the 1%, is a new but very powerful form of social regimentation. Their message to students: “If you want a job, you will study what we want you to study, or else you will live in debt.” We could call this naked coercion, but for students it is their first adult taste of American Un-freedom.

In 1969, the year before I entered the University of San Francisco, I was working at a McDonalds in the East Bay. The franchise owner liked me and offered me a scholarship to McDonald’s Hamburger University. I laughed. I shouldn’t have.

Curtis White is a novelist and social critic. His most recent book is “Living in a World That Can’t Be Fixed,” published by Melville House.

parents who co-sign have to pay off, delay retirement?!

booktv 5/20

Michael Arceneaux, "I Don't Want to Die Poor"Essayist Michael Arceneaux detailed his economic struggles with student…

sotu

gov't school dog whistle to evang?

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/betsy-devos-approval-rating-is-28-percent-as-voters-back-investigations-into-student-debt-scandal-poll/

https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/the-people-with-the-least-resources-are-now-shouldering-the-greatest-burden/

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‘The people with the least resources are now shouldering the greatest burden’

Written by Janine Jackson / FAIR January 24, 2020

Janine Jackson interviewed educator Kevin Kumashiro about student debt forgiveness for the June 28, 2019, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Janine Jackson: “Bernie Sanders’ Student Loan Debt Plan: Unworkable.” “Sanders Student Loan Debt Forgiveness Plan Makes Little Sense.” “Canceling Student Loan Debt Doesn’t Make Problems Disappear.”

Gee, corporate media, tell us how you really feel.

While Big Media’s coverage has lots of room for arguments against proposals from presidential candidates Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, and

Our next guest says if we’re thinking big, let’s think really big about the role of education—who gets it, and why—in US society. Kevin Kumashiro is former dean of the School of Education at the University of San Francisco, founder of Education Deans for Justice and Equity, and author of, most recently, Bad Teacher!: How Blaming Teachers Distorts the Bigger Picture. He joins us now from California. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Kevin Kumashiro.

Kevin Kumashiro: Janine, thanks so much for having me.

7 ways $1.6 trillion in student loan debt affects the U.S. economy

JJ: When you’re watching corporate media debate on an issue you care about, it’s hard to know whether to spend time combating the particular myths and misinformation in the conversation as it is, or to simply have a different conversation, with different premises and, frankly, participants.

If people are saying they oppose “government handouts,” for instance, you may feel a need to say, “Well, what about handouts to corporations?” But then you’re still stuck in this frame of seeing government as a separate force, apart from people, that’s giving things and taking them away, rather than a system that’s meant to be working to serve the common good.

Can we begin, though, with your overall take on the plans put forth by Sanders and Ilhan Omar, by Warren and Julián Castro, among others, as compared to the status quo?

And then what do you make of the arguments, those that we are hearing, against those plans?

KK: I think it’s really exciting that student debt relief is being elevated to the level that it is. It’s about time that we’re having this conversation. As you’ve mentioned, we know that there is over $1.6 trillion in student debt currently; that affects about 45 million people in this country. And this is a number, this is an amount, that has actually ballooned over the past couple of decades.

So one of the things that I think the proposals force us to think about is, what are our priorities right now, and how should that be reflected in our national budgets? Budgets reflect priorities, and if we were to fairly tax the rich and the corporations, and if we were to invest in education rather than in instruments of violence and repression, like prisons and war and so on, I think we would be able to create a budget that reflects that. This is absolutely affordable.

One of the things that I like to argue, however, is that as ambitious, as controversial, as some people think that these proposals are, I actually would say that they don’t quite go far enough, in the way that we’re talking about it still.

And what I mean by that is, right now, the debate seems to be, how do we make education more affordable?—as if education is a commodity, where those who have the wealth can afford to buy the best.

And what I would say is, “Yeah, we could engage in that debate, but maybe the bigger debate is, should education be seen and treated as a commodity in the first place?” Right?

Education, I think many of us would argue, is so fundamentally important, not only to individual wellness and livelihood and success, but also to the health and well-being of the community and the society, right? It strengthens democracy, it strengthens participation, social relations, global health. And so one of the things we should be thinking about is how education should be a fundamental human right for everyone. And what did it mean to invest in that? Where pre-K through college, you have the right to get the level of education that you need to be successful and happy in the world. And I think that’s where I would like to see the conversation going. And, hopefully, that’s a reframing that we are heading towards.

JJ: Well, I have seen sympathetic portrayals of people trapped in student loan debt. USA Today, on June 26, had an article evoking how people can get caught up, and how they are left open to predations from scam debt-consolidation companies, for instance. And then on another tack of the issue, the Washington Post had a data-driven piece about the negative impacts on the overall economy of student loan debt, which is something that I know that you’ve thought about, and that noted that the $1.6 trillion in debt that US families are carrying has doubled since the mid-2000s, which you also just said, and which a lot of newspaper articles leave out.

I would also say that media are doing a pretty good job of leaving most of the moralizing to the op-eds—you know, things like “I Worked as a Janitor to Keep My Student Loans Low. Wiping Debt Punishes Students Like Me,” which was in USA Today.

But what I’m not getting is what you’re talking about, which is the idea that, in reality, this is a bigger question about the role of education in society. I wonder how you see us moving the conversation from this specific conversation about Warren, about Sanders, and those plans; how do we push it to that bigger dialogue that you’re looking for?

KK: Yeah, it’s a great question, because overlapping with the ballooning of student debt over the last two decades is something that’s fueled that ballooning, which is the disinvestment by the public sector in public education.

So higher education is a great example, where it’s hard to call public universities public universities, because such a small percentage of their budget actually comes from the public sector. So what we’ve seen in the past 20 years is a massive decline, in some cases half, maybe even more than half, lost—in terms of what the states used to be contributing to, for example, state-run universities.

And where does that shortfall now get taken up? Well, some of it gets taken up in fundraising. And some of it gets taken up in corporate sponsorships. But the vast majority of budget shortfalls gets taken up by tuition increases. So there’s a direct connection between disinvesting in public institutions—in other words, making them less public—and seeing the students take on the burden.

And when we talk about the difference between public and private education, I think it’s also important to think about who do these universities serve. Right? Public universities serve a far more racially diverse population, they have more first-generation students, more working-class students, more immigrant students; they’re actually serving the students most in need.

And I think for many public universities, that was the vision, right, is that they would actually be the universities for the people; they were a counter to the elite private universities.

And so when we see public universities less able to serve their mission of reaching this much more diverse, underserved population, because we’re disinvesting in them, why are we not surprised, then, that the people with the least resources are now shouldering the greatest burden, in terms of trying to get education?

So, yeah, I think pushing the conversation, in terms of saying, “Well, what is the responsibility of society to educate its next generation? And how do we build up institutions where everyone can really benefit from that?”

And let me just say one more thing to even push the conversation a little further. One of the things that I like to argue is that we should not be debating, how do we give equal access to the institutions, to higher education, as it currently exists. That actually isn’t what we should be debating.

Because the reality is that higher education is not equitable right now. The current state of higher education is that it’s sort of like public schools—you have a handful of very elite institutions that serve the more elite population. And then you have a vast number of underfunded, under-resourced institutions that are serving the masses.

We don’t want to give equal access to that. What we actually want to do is level the playing field, by saying that the institutions themselves need to be more equitable.

So when I talk about reforming education, and thinking about the funding of education, I don’t argue that we simply need to equalize how individuals finance their education. I actually argue that we need to be thinking more equitably about the funding of the system, and how that then changes the hierarchy that currently exists between educational institutions. We need to be changing the system of education, not simply individual access.

JJ: And some of the opponents on this particular issue of debt forgiveness, they, I think, have a more comprehensive vision, because some of them are the same people who are also fighting affirmative action—in higher education, in particular; some of them are the same who are against the very idea of public education that you’re talking about.

And I feel like latent in a lot of debate is the idea that education is supposed to be unobtainable for many, because otherwise, it’s not as valuable as a stratifier, as a screen. And among other things, to pick up on that you just said, that’s not the historical vision of education in this country, is it? I mean, if you look back at the history, education had a democratizing impulse behind it.

KK: So that’s such a great reminder, is that the history of education in this country is a very complicated and contested one. And when we look throughout the last century and a half, for example, what we can see is that different groups have argued for competing purposes of education.They’ve put forth different arguments of what education should be about.

So what I like to argue is that, let’s start with kind of public schools, K–12, elementary, secondary schools. When we first created public schools in this country, we didn’t create them for everyone; we created them for only the most elite. And as we were forced to integrate more and more, we just came up with more and more ways to divide and sort them, such as through segregated schools, or tracked classrooms or labeling, discipline and disenfranchisement.

And so, when we think about the achievement gap, or this gap in performance among students, many people say that that’s a sign that schools are failing. I like those who make a slightly more provocative argument, that actually the achievement gap is a sign, in some ways, that schools are succeeding, that they were doing exactly what they were set up to do.

So one of the things that we need to be arguing is not that we simply need to tinker with the system because it’s not really working well. What we actually need to recognize is that the system was built on really problematic assumptions, ideologies and exclusions from its very beginning. And our job is not to wish them away; our job is actually to dive into that contradiction and that messiness, and to say, “Well, how do we work in institutions that maybe were never intended for us, but still make them into the liberatory, revolutionary, democratizing institutions that they have the potential for?” Right?

Alongside the history of sorting and stratifying, you have a equally long history of people arguing that schools can be a democratizing force, and have been very forceful and persuasive at changing policies and institutions to move us in that direction. Schools have always been the site of struggle.

And this is another moment when we need to dive in and say, “Yes, we need to struggle, and we need to put forward a much bolder vision than we’re currently pursuing.”

JJ: Just finally, to return to media: I think part of what resists the bigger and more comprehensive thinking that you are encouraging—I mean, obviously, if you’re thinking about access to education, a natural question is, “Well, what jobs are there for people?” You know, assuming they we had access to education, it has to be a part of a bigger picture.

And part of how media resist that conversation is the way they atomize topics of coverage. So you’ll find this story over here about student debt forgiveness, but it won’t even talk about how people plan to fund that; it’s sort of separated, and so it becomes this idea in isolation.

And that, I think, inhibits not just public understanding of any given issue, but also our imagination, and our ability to believe in the possibilities of change.

KK: Yeah, I love that way of putting it, because it reminds me that education, so often, is talked about with really narrow boundaries, the way we think about what education should be all about. Many people are fixated on the idea that it’s about job preparedness.

And, yeah, of course education is in some ways about preparing us for our future role in the economy. But I like to say that education is also about teaching us to think, and teaching us to question, and teaching us to build a better tomorrow and a better society.

In other words, education isn’t simply to help us succeed in the world as it is. Education is actually about helping us to imagine and create the world that doesn’t yet exist. And that can be most scary to precisely the people that you’re talking about, the corporate elite, the most powerful, the most dominant.

Why? Because they benefit the most from the system as it is, right? And so it’s not surprising that they’re going to be the most vocal and the most forceful and violent in attacking the proposals that can fundamentally transform schools.

But that’s exactly what we need to be doing. That’s exactly what we should be expecting. And I think, in many ways, that’s exactly what we’re seeing. So all the more reason we need to dive in with much more confidence, but also with much more complexity, as we push the envelope.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Kevin Kumashiro. His most recent book is Bad Teacher!: How Blaming Teachers Distorts the Bigger Picture. You can follow his work at KevinKumashiro.com. Kevin Kumashiro, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/here-are-4-reasons-why-millennials-dont-have-any-money-robert-reich/

no lnx vid

Here are 4 reasons why millennials don’t have any money: Robert Reich

Written by Robert Reich / Robert Reich's Blog January 12, 2020

The same forces that are driving massive inequality between the top 1 percent and the rest of us are creating a vast generational wealth gap between baby boomers — my generation — and millennials.

Millennials aren’t teenagers anymore. They’re working hard, starting families and trying to build wealth. But as a generation, they’re way behind.

They’re deeper in debt, only half as likely to own a home, and more likely to live in poverty than their parents.

If we want to address their problems, we need to understand those problems.

Number one: Stagnant wages. Median wages grew by an average of 0.3% per year between 2007 and 2017, including the Great Recession – just as millennials were beginning their careers. Before that, between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s, wages grew at three times that rate.

Second: As wages have stagnated, the costs of essentials like housing and education have been going through the roof. Millennials own fewer homes, the most common way Americans have built wealth in the past. Education costs have soared. Adjusted for inflation, the average college education in 2018 cost nearly three times what it did in 1978.

Third: As a result of all of this, Debt.That expensive college education means that the average graduate carries a whopping $28,000 in student loan debt. As a generation, millennials are more than one trillion dollars in the red. In addition, the average young adult carries nearly $5,000 in credit card debt, and this number is growing.

Fourth: Millennials are finding it harder than previous generations to save for the future.Among Fortune 500 companies, only 81 sponsored a pension plan in 2017, that’s down from 288 twenty years ago. Employers are replacing pensions with essentially “do-it-yourself” savings plans.

All of this means that fewer millennials are entering the middle class than previous generations.Most have less than $1,000 in savings. Many young people today won’t be able to retire until 75, if at all.

If we don’t start trying to reduce this generational wealth gap — through policies like debt relief, accessible health insurance, paid family leave, affordable housing, and a more equitable tax code for renters — millions of young Americans will struggle to find financial security for the rest of their lives.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/betsy-devos-held-in-contempt-and-gets-100000-fine-for-gauging-defrauded-students/

no lnx

Betsy DeVos held in contempt and gets $100,000 fine for gauging defrauded students

Written by Laura Clawson / Daily Kos October 25, 2019

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos was held in contempt of court and slapped with a $100,000 fine (which the government will pay) for continuing to collect loan payments from students who were defrauded by the now-closed for-profit Corinthian Colleges. U.S. Magistrate Judge Sallie Kim had ordered the Education Department to stop collecting on loans owed by around 16,000 former Corinthian students, an order the Education Department mostly ignored.

In issuing the rebuke, Kim said that “the evidence shows only minimal efforts to comply with the preliminary injunction.” In some cases, the government even seized tax refunds or wages to collect the money that the former students were not supposed to have to pay.

When Sen. Elizabeth Warren confronted DeVos over this issue at a Senate hearing earlier this month, DeVos tweeted, “Loan servicers made an error on a small # of loans.”

Again, 16,000 borrowers are involved. Blaming loan servicers is the Education Department’s strategy for responding to the contempt citation, because, as usual, when rich people like Betsy DeVos get called out on their abuses, they scream that it’s unfair and demand to evade accountability, even as they insist that students who were literally defrauded by a for-profit college should get no relief.

The Education Department is refunding “at least 3,200” of the borrowers, but 3,200 is a long way from 16,000. The $100,000 fine will go to help some of the students. The judge is also requiring the Education Department to provide monthly updates on what it’s doing to make things right, and if the agency continues dragging its feet, she might “impose additional sanctions, including the appointment of a Special Master to ensure compliance with the preliminary injunction.”

AN 619

Sanders plan would wipe out all $1.6 trillion in US student loan debt by taxing Wall Street speculators

// UC slush fund?

Cal State University blasted for $1.5 billion bankroll while hiking tuition

Nick Cahill / Courthouse News

https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/bribing-shady-faculty-isnt-the-only-way-parents-get-busted-trying-to-get-their-kids-into-college/

Wanting your children to succeed in life is a goal that all parents share, and one road to a prosperous future has always been through higher education. However, for the average middle-class family, this can be a real financial challenge even when both parents are working, sometimes more than one job, to make ends meet. If college seems to be getting more and more expensive, that’s because it is.

As an example, take a look at these shocking facts. In 1974, the median American family earned just under $13,000 a year. A new home could be had for $36,000, an average new car for $4,400. Attending a four-year private college cost around $2,000 a year, while a public university averaged $510 a year. To put these figures in current dollars, we’re talking about a median family income of $62,000, a house for $174,000 and a sticker price of $21,300 for the car, $10,300 for the private college and $2,500 for the public one.

How these costs relate today is telling when you realize that median family income has risen slightly to about $64,000, while median home prices have increased by about two-thirds, car prices have remained steady, but the real outlier is higher education. Tuition at a private college is now roughly three times as expensive as it was in 1974, costing an average of $31,000 a year; public tuition, at $9,000, has risen by nearly four times. This is a painful bill for all but the very richest. For the average American household that doesn’t receive a lot of financial aid, higher education is simply out of reach.

Student loan debt is increasing because government grants and support for postsecondary education have failed to keep pace with increases in college costs. Subsequently, much of the burden of paying for college has shifted from the federal and state governments to families. The government no longer carries its fair share of college costs, even though it gets a big increase in income tax revenue from college graduates.

Ever-increasing tuition costs at state and private colleges and universities, coupled with the lack of adequate wage increases, make it a real struggle for many families to provide a college education for their children. With this struggle comes risk, and debt is often a consequence, the penalties for which can be more severe than just debt collection calls and a bad credit score. Young college graduates these days who receive incredibly expensive degrees also leave with an average of $35,000 in student debt, and the parents are the ones who are increasingly being held responsible, putting their very freedom on the line in the process.

With college being so expensive, it might come as a shock to some parents and students when they start the financing process to learn that one form—the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA)—may largely determine their financial fate when it comes to federal student aid. FAFSA forms are prepared annually by all current and prospective college students in the United States to determine their eligibility for student financial aid. During the process, there might be an overwhelming temptation to “fudge” the numbers on the FAFSA to get more money to help pay for your child’s education. However, getting caught could spell big trouble.

Filing a fraudulent claim for student financial aid is a direct violation of federal law, specifically 20 U.S.C. section 1097, which makes it a federal offense to knowingly and willfully obtain student aid funds by means of making false statements to the government. Unfortunately, federal student loan fraud is a growing trend, with more and more parents of college students being prosecuted for giving misinformation on the FAFSA. If you are convicted of this federal offense, you may have to pay a substantial fine, serve time in prison, or both. A recent decision by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, US v. Carlos Javier Ezeta(Case No. 12-10304, May 23, 2014), illustrates how you can be charged with committing financial aid fraud.

Between 2008 and 2011, Carlos Javier Ezeta worked as a counselor and professor at the College of Southern Nevada. Motivated by his interest in helping the Hispanic community, Ezeta often assisted Spanish-speaking students in their college applications and course selections. He also helped the students obtain federal financial aid by falsifying several FAFSA applications. Based on false representations made on the forms, student aid money was dispersed to several students, including some who had not completed high school, received a GED, or passed an “ability-to-benefit” test.

The U.S. Department of Education requires that at least one of these conditions be satisfied in order for an applicant for federal student aid to be eligible. On the forms, Ezeta falsely reported that the students satisfied the education requirements and submitted the forms without the students’ knowledge that they contained false information. Eight applications were generated, and six students obtained funding in the amount of $8,709. One application was intercepted before money could be dispersed, and another was never sent because the student had yet to obtain a phony certificate of high school completion. In all, the falsified documents sought financial aid amounting to over $37,000. An undercover sting operation was launched, and Ezeta eventually admitted to falsifying the applications. Although he did not personally obtain any funding, Ezeta was arrested and charged with four felony counts of financial aid fraud in violation of 20 U.S.C. section 1097(a). The Ninth Circuit Court concluded that although Ezeta did not receive any money himself, criminal liability under federal law extends to knowingly and willfully causing the funds to be disbursed to a third party by fraud, false statement, or forgery.

The law is clear and the consequences severe on this statute, which prohibits anyone from knowingly and willfully embezzling, stealing, or obtaining by fraud, false statement, or forgery any funds provided for higher education purposes. If the amount of the funds provided is $200 or more, you could be charged with a felony. If you are convicted of a felony violation of financial aid fraud under federal law, you could be imprisoned for up to five years, fined a maximum of $20,000, or both. Plus, you’d have to return any aid you had received. If the funds are less than $200, you face a misdemeanor charge. A misdemeanor violation under 20 U.S.C. 1097(a) carries a sentence of not more than one year in prison, up to a $5,000 fine, or both. While this law has been in existence for decades, the prosecution for federal student loan aid is growing steadily.

Federal law also prohibits the acceptance of a loan made under false pretenses. If you are convicted of intentionally providing false information in order to obtain a federal student aid loan, you face a misdemeanor, punishable by up to one year in prison, a maximum fine of $10,000, or both. Because fraud is considered a crime of moral turpitude, a phrase used in criminal law to describe conduct that is considered contrary to community standards of justice, honesty, or good morals, a federal fraud conviction can also result in disciplinary proceedings—such as loss of a professional license (including a teaching license)—and may also lead to your deportation if you are not a US citizen.

Falsifying an Application for Financial Aid is risky and foolish. In the example above, the defendant seemed to have good intentions. After all, he simply wanted to help students from the Hispanic community to pay for their college education. However, as the court pointed out, a crime committed with a “good heart” is still a crime. Additionally, the court noted the professor stood to benefit indirectly from his wrongdoing since the unlawfully obtained funding provided to his students would go to the college where he was employed.

According to Fox Business (July 2015), one commenter in the College Confidential forums said her parents were planning to claim they were separated in an attempt to maximize their chances of financial aid. “I was definitely NOT on board with this but they refuse to listen to anything I’m saying,” the student wrote.

In 2014, the Boston Globe reported that a father of a former Harvard student pleaded guilty to charges of falsifying income information to get more than $160,000 in financial aid. He apparently filed false tax returns, which likely carries additional penalties. In another example, a college professor and counselor was charged with fraud after he allegedly falsified applications for students he said he was just trying to help. And there is the case of a mother and daughter who pleaded guilty in 2014 for making false statements to federal agents in connection with an investigation of student aid fraud. The mother reported no income for a period during which she reportedly received over $521,000 in income.

So, if you’re thinking of falsifying your FAFSA, just don’t. And if you think you can’t get caught, think again. College financial aid administrators are more skilled and experienced at detecting lies than families are at perpetrating them. In fact, about one-third of all FAFSA applications are selected for verification by the Department of Education. If yours is chosen, additional documentation will be required. An example of a red flag: the tax return shows dividends and interest on investments, but little or no assets are reported on the application.

Then there are other examples such as parents who pretend they are separated. Separation is prevalent enough in society today, but in the instances where there is an informal separation, the parents must be living apart for this to be a legitimate claim, and you have to be ready to show divergent utility bills or some other form of proof that the parents are occupying two separate households. That’s just one of the ways in which a lie like this can be discouraged, or uncovered.

Not telling the truth about which parent a child is living with in order to get more financial aid is another common occurrence. You can get caught easily in this lie, as well. It can slip out accidentally if a student reveals contradictory information about his or her living arrangements to a teacher or authority figure. And this is fraud. Schools are aware of this and have a compulsory responsibility to look into any instances where they suspect fraud.

A college education is expensive, and parents and students who want to avoid student loan debt may be tempted to fudge facts. But it’s not worth it. If federal student loans aren’t enough to cover your total student loan bill, you have other options. Private student loans are available for students and parents, but private loans (unlike federal student loans) will most likely require a credit check to determine your interest rate, and a cosigner if the borrower has a limited or nonexistent credit history. You can get a free credit report summary every month on Credit.com to see where you stand. If you have great credit, private student loans may even get you a better interest rate than Parent PLUS loans, so doing your research, improving your credit, and monitoring your progress are key.

From Bernie Sanders to Elizabeth Warren to Kirsten Gillibrand to … lots of others, Democratic candidates in 2020 seem to have plans to lower the cost of education and make it possible for more Americans to attend college without drowning under a mountain of debt. Democrats recognize that education is critical to obtaining a good job, and that the cost of education in 2019 means that students are often saddled with loans that can not only erase the benefits of that education for years, but take those new college graduates out of the market for homes, or restrict their ability to move. In short, high costs for college not only means misery for graduates, it harms American companies at every level by depriving them both of workers and consumers.

So, naturally, Donald Trump is making it worse.

While Trump’s tax break for billionaires is just that—a plan that awards Trump himself tens of millions in tax breaks and means that some of the largest, most profitable companies in the country pay no tax at all—it punishes working class and middle class students. As *The New York Times* reports, students attending college on scholarships or financial aid packages are being taxed at a rate higher than Trump pays on his eight-figure income, with rates going up to 37%. That means that some of the students who most needed the money the most, but who made it into college on academic or athletic scholarships, or those who assembled an aid package that let them barely climb over the cost hurdle … are finding their mailboxes full with bills from the IRS. And, unlike Trump, they can’t get away with ignoring tax law.

Somehow, when they were crowing about this tax plan, Republicans failed to brag about how it was going to sock low income and middle class students for tens of thousands so that billionaires and corporate CEO’s could take home maximum benefits. It it seems like skimming from students wouldn’t make much of a difference, this isn’t just a slap on a few. This Trump tax hits about 1.3 million undergraduates and 15,000 grad students. And that’s not all. This “mistake” by Trump and the Republicans in designing their tax plan, is also taxing tribal funds paid to Native Americankids to help them get an education … or simply to live. That’s quite a mistake.

But was it a mistake? The reason all these students are being hit is because the Republican law didn’t just include the special “kiddie tax” rate that was originally established to punish wealthy parents who tried to avoid taxes by hiding money under the names of small children, it expandedthat tax. The new law increased the age limit from 14 to 23 and removed language that limited the application of the tax. That makes punishing low income and middle class students seem a lot less like an accident, and more like a plan.

Democratic Representative Elaine Luria is leading an effort to roll back the expanded “kiddie tax.” Republicans may claim that the fact that low income students are finding financial aid packages taxed at the same rate as the maximum paid by wealthy toddlers whose parents try to hide a few million under their blankets is a mistake—just something they overlooked in their headlong rush to express mail trillions to the wealthiest people in the world—but somehow getting them to agree to fix this mistake is “not far along.”

https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/mistake-in-republican-tax-plan-taxes-1-3-million-scholarship-students-more-than-millionaires/

https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/public-service-loan-forgiveness-is-in-trouble/

https://www.c-span.org/video/?458861-1/land-fee

quite good

MARCH 18, 2019

Land of the Fee

Devin Fergustalked about his book, Land of the Fee: Hidden Costs and the Decline of the American Middle Class, on the hidden transaction fees that Americans regularly pay and the impact these costs have on the middle class.

richard wolff 519 share-cropper student loan tuition

Right-wing outlets like The Wall Street Journal editorial page are touting a deeply flawed new study attacking electric vehicles.
Trump Fed pick Stephen Moore repeatedly said that he liked working at Fox News because he met "a lot of beautiful women" there. Moore has also praised slave-owning Confederate general Robert E. Lee and hates climate science so much that he even attacked Ivanka Trump.
Tucker Carlson's wild new talking point is that abortion is somehow a tool of "corporate" oppression.
A Fox host blamed bank regulation for high tuition and the student loan crisis.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/elizabeth-warren-announces-plan-to-end-student-debt-and-provide-free-public-higher-education/

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/heres-how-trump-devos-and-mulvaney-helped-banks-and-colleges-steal-students

Trump Administration hid a study documenting financial abuse of students by some banks working hands-in-glove with colleges, the latest example of how instead of “draining the swamp” Donald Trump is turning official Washington into a paradise for swamp monsters.

The suppressed fee gouging report was made by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau or CFPB.

Students attending colleges which have marketing agreements with banks and other financial institutions paid much higher overdraft and account fees than students at schools with no such deals, the study found.

“Wells Fargo charged students the most of all those with college campus marketing agreements—an average of $46.99 per account per year, while banks without such deals charged students an average of $11.93 in fees,” Kate Berry of American Banker reported.

Some nonprofit credit unions also engaged in fee gouging. The University of Kentucky Federal Credit Union, for example, charged $37 per account annually, the study found.

One lender has charged $600 just to issue loan checks.

The Trump administration wants to kill the CFPB, as we have documented in nine previous DCReport articles. Lacking authority to do that, Team Trump has turned the bureau into a protection agency for the worst banking practices, damaging millions of consumers. Hiding findings of abusive practices and disloyalty to customers are key parts of this Trumpian strategy.

We know of the study only because it was mentioned last August in a scathing resignation letter by Seth Frotman, a CFPB assistant director and student loan ombudsman. Frotman accused Mick Mulvaney, who is Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget as well as acting director of the CFPB, of suppressing the report because it showed large banks knowingly ripped off students by charging high or inappropriate fees.

Frotman’s resignation letter charged that under Mulvaney the bureau was “shielding bad actors from scrutiny” while both undercutting enforcement of laws to protect consumers and undermining the bureau’s independence.

Referring to his extensive travels and especially his talks with military families who were conned by financial product sales agents,Frotman wrote that “American families need an independent consumer bureau to look out for them when lenders push products they know cannot be repaid, when banks and debt collectors conspire to abuse the courts and force families out of their homes and when students loan companies are allowed to drive millions of Americans to financial ruin with impunity.”

Mulvaney offered a cavalier response in a CNBC interview. Mulvaney said that he had never even heard of Frotman and had been told that while ombudsman Frotman never complained about the issues raised in his resignation letter. He avoided dealing with the substance of the issue—lender disloyalty to customers.

The study was pried loose by Allied Progress through the Freedom of Information Act, a nonprofit consumer watchdog created in 2015, during the Obama Administration, by Karl Frisch, a lifelong communications adviser for Democratic candidates and progressive organizations.

The fees in the study Mulvaney suppressed are modest compared to a test of student loan fees I made in 2008. The cost to a bank of sending a payment electronically is so minute that many banks charge nothing for the service.

After failing to get NelNet, a student loan servicer, to discuss its fees, I took out a Sallie Mae student loan for one of my children, an action I described in my 2012 book The Fine Print. NelNet divided the loan into two payments, one for each semester. It levied a $300 fee for the cost of issuing the first check. I repaid the loan immediately to avoid a second $300 charge.

Responsibility for protecting students from lenders falls to the CFPB under the law creating it. That law was sponsored by Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat whom Trump loathes. The duty to police colleges so they do not help banks abuse students falls to the federal Department of Education, where Betsy DeVos, the education secretary, has repeatedly taken the side of bankers against the interests of students, as well as parents and grandparents who co-sign student loans. Some of her anti-student actions are detailed in It’s Even Worse Than You Think, my book about the Trump administration.

Hiding the study until it was flushed out using the 1966 Freedom of Information Act is just the latest example of how Trump has aggressively worked to do the opposite of what he promised in his inauguration speech:

“What truly matters is not which party controls our government, but whether our government is controlled by the people… January 20th, 2017, will be remembered as the day the people became the rulers of this nation again. The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer. Everyone is listening to you now. You came by the tens of millions to become part of a historic movement the likes of which the world has never seen before. At the center of this movement is a crucial conviction: that a nation exists to serve its citizens.”

A core finding of the suppressed report is that marketing deals between colleges and banks enrich the banks at the expense of students.

“The bureau and other government entities have expressed concern over the relationship between revenue sharing provisions in contracts and fees charged to student accountholders,” the report says. “These provisions raise questions about potential conflicts of interest, including whether revenue sharing encourages higher-fee financial products that crowd out competition from providers of accounts for which student accountholders” would pay less.

Bank representatives say the report is hooey.

The report found that 573 colleges had marketing agreements. About 1.3 million students paid $27.6 million in fees to 14 banks and credit unions in the 2016-17 academic year, the report states.

In a form of what is apparently a legal kickback, 116 colleges were paid $16.7 million by banks and credit unions to promote financial accounts in 2017, deals designed to capture young customers whose financial resources would be expected to grow over time. PNC Bank paid colleges $7.6 million, U.S. Bank paid $3.2 million and Wells Fargo paid $2.1 million.

Significantly, lower fees were paid by students at the 457 colleges which did not get kickbacks. The estimated 839,000 students at colleges without marketing agreements paid $11.93 on average in fees, compared with $36.52 for the 482,000 students who used accounts at colleges with marketing agreements.

These fees differences indicate there is no enforcement of a 2015 Obama era rule by the Education Department requiring colleges to exercise reasonable diligence to make sure that under marketing agreements with banks students pay fees “consistent with or below prevailing market rates.”

trump transition team:

The placement of all these lobbyists as de facto — or actual — high-level agency staffers “raises the appearance that you could be attempting to influence public policy in favor of your former client,” said Meredith McGehee, chief of policy, programs and strategy at Issue One. “This isn’t saying that lobbyists are bad or evil, it’s simply saying the reason that you should have rules governing lobbyists in government is because they have been paid by private interests to promote the interests of their employer.”

It makes a difference whether an individual lobbied last year of 10 years ago, McGehee said. Revolving door restrictions are written with time limits, because it’s understood your relationships with clients and freshness of information cool over time.

One former for-profit college lobbyist has already resigned from his beachhead position at the Department of Education, where he worked for about a month. Taylor Hansen lobbied for Career Education Colleges and Universities until July 2016, where he focused on trying to weaken the “gainful employment” rule that puts for-profit schools’ federal funding at risk if their graduates don’t earn enough to pay back their student loans.

*ProPublica* reported that soon after Hansen started working at Education, the agency began delaying deadlines for the gainful employment rule and is reviewing the implementation of the rule. Hansen told ProPublica he didn’t work on gainful employment while at the department.

OpenSecrets Blog contacted the federal agencies with former lobbyist beachhead members about their ethics policies. The Department of Homeland Security was the only one to get back to us, and its response was vague:

“Ethics training, consistent with U.S. Office of Government Ethics regulations, is provided to all political appointees,” said DHS spokesman David Lapan in an email. “DHS ethics attorneys conduct reviews for potential conflicts of interest and provide guidance to employees.”

Nine beachhead members were registered lobbyists as recently as last year; eight of them have filed forms with the Senate deregistering from that work. General Mills has not filed paperwork that shows Erika Baum ending her lobbying gig at the food company, although she is now an executive assistant to the Secretary of Transportation, according to ProPublica‘s data and lobbying records....

ref

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-20/betsy-devos-hands-victory-to-loan-firm-tied-to-adviser-who-just-quit

Americans who default on some of their federal student loans are likely to pay more after Education Secretary Betsy DeVos reversed an Obama administration directive limiting some fees. But it turns out the Trump administration decision has some beneficiaries — including the father of a key DeVos lieutenant who just quit.

DeVos's decision, announced Thursday in a memorandum to the student loan industry, allows companies known as guaranty agencies to charge distressed student debtors fees equivalent to 16 percent of their total balance, even when borrowers agree within 60 days to make good on their bad debt.

The reversal is almost certain to hand United Student Aid Funds Inc., the nation's largest guaranty agency, a victory in its two-year legal battle against her department. The fees could translate into an additional $15 million in annual revenue for the company, filings in a related lawsuit suggest. Until Jan. 1, United Student Aid Funds was led by Bill Hansen, who served as Deputy Secretary of Education under President George W. Bush. His son, Taylor Hansen, a former for-profit college lobbyist, was until three days ago one of the few DeVos advisers with professional experience in higher education.

The younger Hansen resigned from the Education Department on Friday, department spokesman Jim Bradshaw said in an email. Hansen couldn't be immediately reached for comment on his departure.

Ben Miller, senior director for postsecondary education at the Center for American Progress, a persistent critic of the new Republican administration, said on Twitter the rule change was "an early Father's Day gift in the Hansen household." Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, was equally blunt: "There's no question" that Taylor Hansen's family ties posed a conflict of interest.

Tens of millions of dollars in revenue was at stake for companies such as United Student Aid Funds, which until 2015 had regularly charged borrowers the fee.A senior executive there last year warned in a court filing that the Obama administration's decision to prohibit the fees-and to remind the industry that such fees had long been banned-generated "potentially massive retroactive liability" for companies such as United Student Aid Funds in the form of federal fines and lawsuits from aggrieved debtors. The company reckons it levied as much as $119 million in these fees from 2007 to 2015, or about $15 million annually.

Meanwhile, other companies active in student loan matters faced the prospect of having to reverse years of assessed fees and unravel tens of thousands of borrowers' accounts to recalculate their balances, according to a legal filing last year by the National Council of Higher Education Resources, a Washington trade association. Had the Obama administration's decision stood, a federal judge warned in 2015 that the entire student loan industry faced the prospect of being sued for allegedly violating anti-racketeering laws by imposing the fees.

DeVos's decision is likely to put those concerns to rest.

With almost all senior positions at the Education Department vacant — and few political hires with professional experience in higher education — the younger Hansen may have wielded significant influence on DeVos's policies. With his departure, the department has yet another post to fill.

"We have no idea what Betsy DeVos thinks about or wants to do on higher education policy. If one of the key people advising her is someone whose close family member is hoping to charge defaulted borrowers a lot more money, that's not a good sign of her agenda," Miller said before the department announced Taylor Hansen's exit.

Both the Education Department and Bill Hansen's current organization, of which he is chief executive, Strada Education Network (formerly known as USA Funds), said there's no impropriety.Taylor Hansen recused himself from "all matters" related to United Student Aid Funds' lawsuit challenging the Obama administration directive, Bradshaw said. "He served ably and without conflict and decided his service had run its course," Bradshaw said Monday, declining further comment. But it's unclear whether Taylor Hansen's recusal extended to internal department discussions over the appropriateness of the fees. Bradshaw didn't answer additional questions, and Taylor Hansen didn't respond to emails, phone calls, and a message sent on social network LinkedIn seeking comment.

Bob Murray, a spokesman for Bill Hansen, said no one representing the company had asked Taylor Hansen to intervene on its behalf in its dispute with the department. Furthermore, he said, United Student Aid Funds is now owned by Great Lakes Higher Education Corp. Murray said that Bill Hansen declined to comment.

United Student Aid Funds said in court filings that the Obama administration unfairly changed longstanding Education Department policy when it announced in 2015 that fees added to quickly resolved defaulted loans were illegal. For example, according to industry lobby National Council of Higher Education Resources, the department had never flagged the fee as inappropriate in any of the more than 135 audits or reviews it conducted of companies such as United Student Aid Funds since 1992. The feds, the group said, "knowingly acquiesced for years." In the eyes of the industry, DeVos is simply righting a wrong by reversing Obama's move.

Bill Hansen nonetheless benefits from DeVos' decision. Strada is still liable for potential costs stemming from United Student Aid Funds' lawsuit against the Education Department, as well as a related class action lawsuit filed by borrowers over the same issue, said Richard George, chief executive of Great Lakes.

United Student Aid Funds reached a proposed settlement in January to resolve the proposed class action, filed by Minnesota resident Bryana Bible in 2013 on behalf of borrowers charged what she alleged to be illegal fees. The deal calls for 35,516 borrowers, and their lawyers, to split $23 million to partially reimburse them for as much as $119.1 million in fees assessed over eight years that, under Obama administration guidelines, they shouldn't have been charged. A federal judge is due to decide on the proposed settlement in June.

The now-permissible fees could also beneficially impact Strada's future revenue under an agreement that calls for Great Lakes to give Strada grants partly based on how United Student Aid Funds' loans perform, a person familiar with the matter said. When annualized, the fees represent about 13 percent of United Student Aid Funds' average annual income over the past five years, according to its financial reports.

For struggling borrowers, said Rohit Chopra, a senior fellow at the Consumer Federation of America who previously advised Obama's Education Department and was the top student loan official at the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, "this just adds insult to injury."

Business Briefing from St. Louis Post-Dispatch

\no lnx

https://www.alternet.org/ending-secrecy-student-debt-crisis

Gamblers and reality TV stars can claim bankruptcy protections when in financial trouble, but 44 million student loan borrowers can’t. Unemployed, underpaid, destitute, sick, or struggling borrowers simply aren’t able to start anew.

With a default rate approaching 40 percent, one would expect armies of distressed borrowers marching in the streets demanding relief from a system that has singled out their financial anguish. Distressed student debtors, however, seem to be terror-struck about coming forward to a society that, they say, ostracizes them for their inability to keep up with their finances.

When we spoke to several student borrowers, almost none were willing to share their names. “I can’t tell anyone how much I’m struggling,” says a 39-year-old Oregon physician who went into student loan default after his wife’s illness drained their finances. He is terrified of losing his patients and reputation if he speaks out about his financial problems.

-

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2017-fannie-freddie-friends/

In education news,the top federal consumer watchdog for student loans has resigned and accused the Trump administration of siding with predatory lenders over the nation’s student loan borrowers. Seth Frotman worked as student loan ombudsman under Mick Mulvaney, the acting head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. In his resignation letter to Mulvaney, Frotman wrote, “Unfortunately, under your leadership, the Bureau has abandoned the very consumers it is tasked by Congress with protecting. Instead, you have used the Bureau to serve the wishes of the most powerful financial companies in America.” Frotman’s resignation comes as outstanding student loan debt has topped $1.5 trillion.

econ update 8/24/18

1.5trillion $ more than credit card, study, lead to house foreclosure, more damage than benefit // prison vs college cost? corp profit? irrational

cnbc no lnx tips

Why buying a home can be almost impossible with massive student loan debt

Eighty-three percent of people ages 22 to 35 with student debt who haven't bought a house yet blame their educational loans.

Owning a home, the most common way Americans build wealth, can become a distant dream for many crushed by student debt.

Annie Nova | @AnnieReporter

Published 11:07 AM ET Thu, 19 April 2018 Updated 8:55 AM ET Fri, 20 April 2018

In the late 1990s, Ed McKinley fell in love with a $65,000 house by a lake in New Hampshire.

The owners let him move in early and pay rent until the buying process was completed.

Inside his new home, McKinley installed a modern stove, painted the walls and began to redo the floors.

Then came the bad news.

"The mortgage company decided that my income-to-debt ratio was a little bit higher than they were comfortable with," McKinley, 59, said.

They were referring to his $34,000 in federal student loan debt.

He had to pack up and leave.

"It's crushing," McKinley said, choking up. "I have a very strong desire to own a piece of land that I can put my signature on."

Student loan debt has become a major barrier to home ownership in America.

Some 45 million people in the United States carry student debt. The average borrower owes more than $30,000, according to Student Loan Hero, a website for managing education debt. Almost a fifth owe more than $100,000, according to the National Association of Realtors.

People's monthly student loan payments can eat up a large slice of their income, threaten to push down their credit scores and make saving nearly impossible — all huge impediments, of course, to landing in a house.

For every 10 percent in student loan debt a person holds, their chance of home ownership drops 1 to 2 percentage points during their first five years after school, according to the Federal Reserve.

More than 80 percent of people ages 22 to 35 with student debt who haven't bought a house yet blame their educational loans, according to the National Association of Realtors.

Student debt could hold back economic growth, Fed chief says Student debt could hold back economic growth, Fed chief says

"Student loan debt holders do want to own a home, that's part of their American dream," said Jessica Lautz, managing director of survey research at the National Association of Realtors. "It's just really hard to get there right now."

To be sure, people who receive more education also tend to earn higher incomes, possibly offsetting some of the financial distress of student loan debt, said Jonathan Spader, a senior research associate at the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University.

"You have these competing influences of greater access to education versus reduced ability to buy a home because of student loan debt," Spader said.

Challenge one: Debt-to-income ratio

Almost one-fifth of people with student debt who apply for a mortgage — like McKinley — are denied because of their "debt-to-income ratio," what a person owes versus how much they make, according to the National Association of Realtors.

The median income for student loan borrowers is $59,746, according to analysts at the Harvard joint center. For borrowers under 30, the average monthly loan payment is $351, according to Student Loan Hero.

"The bank looks at it as 'unsecured debt,'" said Doug Amis, a certified financial planner at Cardinal Retirement Planning in Cary, North Carolina. "With a mortgage, you have the asset of the house. If you stopped paying, you could foreclose on the house. But you can't go and foreclose on an education."

In other words: Banks know you'll most likely be stuck with your student debt until you pay it off.

"The mortgage officer wants to see that your overall expenditures on housing and debt — including student loans and car payments — is not more than 36 percent of your income," Amis said. "That's really going to limit things if you're only making $50,000 a year."

In certain areas where the cost of living is higher, that debt ceiling is pushed up.

Challenge two: Credit score

Eight percent of student loan borrowers are denied a mortgage because of their credit score, according to the National Association of Realtors.

Mike, a government worker in Yukon, Oklahoma, said banks offering loans would line up at his law school at the University of Toledo. (He asked to use his first name only because of his job with the government.) He graduated in 2008, with more than $200,000 in debt, into the Great Recession.

He couldn't find a job and soon defaulted on his student loans, like 40 percent of borrowers are expected to do by 2023, according to the Brookings Institution.

He felt helpless.

"I just ignored it, there was no way — they were wanting $1,200 a month," Mike said.

His credit score sank into the low 500s, which is considered very poor by credit data company Experian.

"If I went into any bank in Oklahoma, they would just laugh at me," Mike said.

Challenge three: Down payment

And he's not alone, 85 percent of student loan borrowers say difficulty in saving has delayed their ability to buy a house, according to the Realtors association.

"It's challenging with student loans to be able to put together $40,000," said Grant Simmons, vice president of search marketing for Homes.com.

(The median home price in America is $241,700.)

Stephanie Pennycuff graduated from Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis with $43,000 in student debt.

She works at a nonprofit, helping formerly incarcerated people transition into their communities, making around $30,000. Her monthly student loan payment is $450.

That's made accumulating money almost impossible.

"Pretty much one paycheck a month goes to loans," Pennycuff, 28, said. "Every time I manage to save up a couple of thousand dollars, something happens and it's immediately drained back to nothing. I can't put down any sort of payment on a home."

Navient Corp	$258,560
College Loan Corp	$116,000
NelNet Inc	$72,477
Sallie Mae	$31,176

See Top Colleges

Use the menus below to change the school categories.

Private for-profit, 2-yearPrivate for-profit, 4-yearPrivate for-profit, less-than 2-yearPrivate not-for-profit, 2-yearPrivate not-for-profit, 4-yearPrivate not-for-profit, less-than 2-yearPublic, 2-yearPublic, 4-yearPublic, less-than 2-year UnclassifiedResearch UniversitiesPredominately Associate's Degrees CollegesPredominately Bachelor's Degrees CollegesReligious SchoolsMedical & Nursing SchoolsTech & Engineering SchoolsBusiness SchoolsArt SchoolsLaw SchoolsMaster's CollegesTribal Colleges

Percentage of Students Who Received Pell Grants »

Highest

1.	71.9%	Clark Atlanta University
2.	58.6%	Union Institute & University
3.	50.7%	California Institute of Integral Studies
4.	50.6%	American International College
5.	50.5%	National Louis University
6.	50.5%	Barry University
7.	49.8%	Liberty University
8.	49.0%	Regent University
9.	48.9%	Trinity International University-Illinois
10.	48.3%	Howard University

Lowest

115.	6.7%	Washington University in St Louis
114.	10.8%	Wake Forest University
113.	11.2%	University of Notre Dame
112.	11.3%	California Institute of Technology
111.	11.4%	Tufts University
110.	11.5%	Villanova University
109.	11.6%	University of Dayton
108.	11.9%	Yale University
107.	12.3%	Alliant International University-San Diego
106.	12.5%	University of Chicago

Avg. Cost for Low-Income Students »

Lowest

1.	$2,473	Harvard University
2.	$2,841	Stanford University
3.	$3,186	Brown University
4.	$3,630	Princeton University
5.	$3,918	Yale University
6.	$5,128	Massachusetts Institute of Technology
7.	$6,468	Rice University
8.	$6,696	California Institute of Technology
9.	$6,905	Vanderbilt University
10.	$7,529	Dartmouth College

Highest

114.	$30,500	Clark Atlanta University
113.	$29,820	Catholic University of America
112.	$29,089	Tulane University of Louisiana
111.	$29,010	The New School
110.	$28,524	American University
109.	$26,809	Hofstra University
108.	$26,745	University of Dayton
107.	$26,742	Immaculata University
106.	$26,717	Azusa Pacific University
105.	$26,588	Drexel University

Avg. Discount for Low-Income Students »

Highest

1.	96%	Harvard University
2.	95%	Stanford University
3.	95%	Brown University
4.	94%	Princeton University
5.	94%	Yale University
6.	91%	Massachusetts Institute of Technology
7.	89%	Vanderbilt University
8.	89%	California Institute of Technology
9.	88%	Dartmouth College
10.	88%	Rice University

Lowest

114.	10%	Union Institute & University
113.	14%	Clark Atlanta University
112.	16%	Wilmington University
111.	27%	Liberty University
110.	34%	National Louis University
109.	34%	Lindenwood University
108.	40%	Dallas Baptist University
107.	41%	Azusa Pacific University
106.	43%	Immaculata University
105.	44%	Maryville University of Saint Louis

Median Federal Debt of Pell Grantees »

Lowest

1.	$3,013	Princeton University
2.	$6,250	California Institute of Technology
3.	$6,856	Dartmouth College
4.	$7,903	Stanford University
5.	$8,100	Rice University
6.	$8,336	Duke University
7.	$8,750	Florida Institute of Technology
8.	$8,816	University of the Cumberlands
9.	$8,945	Vanderbilt University
10.	$9,982	Brigham Young University-Provo

Highest

115.	$30,500	Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
114.	$29,000	Syracuse University
113.	$28,901	Wake Forest University
112.	$28,543	Stevens Institute of Technology
111.	$28,500	Marquette University
110.	$28,250	Worcester Polytechnic Institute
109.	$28,000	Duquesne University
108.	$27,500	George Washington University
107.	$27,038	Brandeis University
103.	$27,000	Boston University

Source: U.S. Department of Education College Scorecard Data; NACUBO Endowment Study 2014; Pell graduation rate data from The Education Trust

tuition up 80? 2000, income flat

https://projects.propublica.org/graphics/publictuition

http://bigthink.com/videos/daniel-altman-sell-your-future-to-avoid-student-loans-2

Economist Daniel Altman acknowledges that the student loan industry in the United States is a disaster. The obvious solution of government intervention by way of forgiveness could make things even thornier. Rather, Altman imagines a scenario where students could sell shares of their future income to fund their education.

Show Transcript

DANIEL ALTMAN

Daniel Altman is Big Think's Chief Economist and an adjunct faculty member at New York University's Stern School of Business. Daniel wrote economic commentary for The Economist, The New York Times, and The International Herald Tribune before founding North Yard Economics, a non-profit consulting firm serving developing countries, in 2008. In between, he served as an economic advisor in the British government and wrote four books, most recently Outrageous Fortunes: The Twelve Surprising Trends That Will Reshape the Global Economy.

binders full of students/bundle

eclipses credit card loans

1.3 trillion? can be 100K; tuition up 500% since 80's kpfa 1/22/14 8 am strike debt, union; citibank, fannie?

===

https://www.propublica.org/article/new-jersey-senate-examines-controversial-student-loan-agency

This story was co-published with The New York Times.

Almost a dozen people with harrowing experiences with New Jersey’s controversial student loan program testified on Monday before state lawmakers, detailing its aggressive collection tactics and onerous terms that some said had ruined them financially.

“Hesaa destroyed my family,” Tracey Timony, referring to the state’s Higher Education Student Assistance Authority, said at a hearing before the Higher Education and Legislative Oversight Committees of the New Jersey State Senate.

Ms. Timony had co-signed on her daughter’s loans totaling $140,000. After her daughter defaulted, Ms. Timony was sued by one of the agency’s collection firms and has since declared bankruptcy to get more manageable monthly payments.

The hearing was prompted by an investigation published last month by ProPublica and The New York Times into the agency, which runs the largest state-based student loan program in the country, with nearly $2 billion in outstanding loans.

The agency charges higher interest rates than similar federal programs, the investigation found, and has strikingly broad collection powers. If borrowers fall behind on payments, the agency can garnish wages, seize tax refunds and revoke professional licenses, all without getting a court judgment.

State legislators, who on Monday pushed forward two measures that would give a break to borrowers in the program, said they were troubled by the agency’s tactics.

“We need to end this program, start over from scratch and find ways of providing assistance for students so that they can get an education without it bankrupting them,” said Sen. Robert M. Gordon, a Democrat from northern New Jersey and the chairman of the Legislative Oversight Committee.

The agency’s executive director, Gabrielle Charette, declined to testify at the hearing. Instead, she sent a letter to legislators, explaining that because the agency is currently conducting an internal review, it would be “premature” to testify on the concerns of borrowers and legislators. Ms. Charette added that the agency would brief the State Senate in the future.

“We’re disappointed that the agency didn’t show up,” Stephen M. Sweeney, a Democrat and president of the State Senate, said before the hearing.

An executive from the agency had previously dismissed reporting from ProPublica and The Times as “one-sided,” calling the investigation a “biased op-ed.”

New Jersey’s Student Loan Program is ‘State-Sanctioned Loan-Sharking’

The loans have extraordinarily stringent rules, aggressive collections and few reprieves, even for borrowers who’ve died. The head of the loan agency was appointed by Gov. Chris Christie.Read the story.

As ProPublica and The Times have detailed, repayment of the state loans cannot be adjusted based on income, and borrowers — alongside their co-signers — are given few breaks, even when facing disability or death...

https://www.propublica.org/article/new-jersey-student-loan-agency-to-staff-dont-tell-borrowers-about-help-unle

6/16

http://ww2.kqed.org/forum/2016/07/12/one-in-five-uc-students-struggles-to-pay-for-food-study-finds/

pro publ 4/16

Federal Government Finally Forgives Billions in Debt of Students Who've Become Disabled

by Cezary Podkul and Marcelo Rochabrun | @cezary and @mrochabrun

The move comes after a ProPublica investigation that documented how the government was making it hard for disabled borrowers to get their loans forgiven.

More coverage: Education Department Bureaucracy Keeps Disabled Borrowers in Debt

http://www.notey.com/blogs/student-loan-debt

The U.S. Department of Education has blessed a deal under which a non-profit student debt collection company, Minnesota-based Education Credit Management Corporation (ECMC), will pay $24 million to acquire 56 campuses, operating under the brands Everest and WyoTech, owned by collapsing Corinthian Colleges, one of the most abusive and deceptive for-profit college companies.The terms of this deal are extraordinarily unfavorable to students. The agreement creates a remarkable conflict of interest for the Department itself, and it sets terrible precedents for future failing colleges.

The deal is so bad that it seems that the Department is determined to prop up these Corinthian campuses at all costs. In other words, it has concluded that Corinthian Colleges is too big to fail. It is making a terrible mistake.

The Obama administration has done a great deal of hard work to try to stop the torrent of waste, fraud, and abuse engaged in by many companies in the for-profit college industry, which has been grabbing more than $30 billion a year in taxpayer money, mostly to offer career education programs in fields like medical assisting, criminal justice, and auto repair. The bad institutions in this sector offer poor to middling quality programs, charge sky-high prices, and use deceptive and high-pressure marketing to sign up as many students as possible, and deposit their federal aid checks, regardless of whether they will benefit from the program. Corinthian has been among the worst along those lines. The administration has been doing some good things to try to target federal aid away from such bad programs and toward those that actually help students build careers. But the ECMC-Corinthian decision puts that progress at risk.

It’s not too late, though, for the Department to change course.

Minutes ago, 46 civil rights, veterans, student, and consumer groups, part of a coalition in which I am a participant, sent a letter to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Attorney General Eric Holder, and CFPB director Richard Cordray sharply criticizing the ECMC-Corinthian deal and listing multiple specific problems with the proposed agreement. Our group, which includes the NAACP, League of United Latin American Citizens, Iraq Afghanistan Veterans of America, Student Veterans of America, AFL-CIO, Consumers Union, and many others, did so after extensive discussions between coalition representatives and Department of Education officials, as well as multiple conversations with ECMC executives, during which we expressed our strong concerns.

The deal had already been attacked by advocates for students on Capitol Hill. “I’m puzzled and upset by this outcome,” Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) told Buzzfeed. “I can’t see how students get a break in this scenario. They’re now stuck in this debt collection university.” In the wake of the proposed sale, Durbin, Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), and eleven more Democratic senators have written to Duncan asking that his Department exercise its authority to discharge federal student loans for students with legal claims against Corinthian. Representatives Steve Cohen (D-TN), Raul Grijalva (D-AZ), and Mark Takano (D-CA-41), issued a statement noting that “ECMC has no prior experience operating institutions of higher learning, but,” as the New York Times reported earlier this year, “it does have a checkered history that includes using ruthless collection tactics against student loan debtors who should have reasonably qualified for bankruptcy relief.”

There are indeed real questions about whether ECMC has the corporate character and capacity to undertake the enormously complicated task of suddenly running one of the nation’s largest school systems. But no less concerning are (1) the nature of assets being acquired and (2) the proposed terms of the deal.

There are good programs and instructors, and many fine students, in the Corinthian chain; I have spoken with scores of well-intentioned teachers and staff in the past few years. But they have complained about a company that has sacrificed student outcomes to the company’s bottom line. Corinthian’s deceptive practices and poor record of student success has given many of its programs a weak reputation and left many of its students — people of color, single parents, veterans, and others struggling to build a future — deep in debt. That tarnished image increases the challenges for graduates in finding jobs in their chosen field. It also increases the challenges for any acquirer to recruit new students without engaging in the kind of deceptive marketing that has delivered students to Corinthian programs. It’s not at all clear that anyone, including ECMC, can turn the quality of programs around fast enough to effectively help enough of the current students, who total about 39,000, 51 percent of them studying exclusively online.

It’s thus doubtful that it makes sense to have a plan that depends on new students enrolling at these Corinthian campuses, as opposed to seeking educational opportunities elsewhere. Why would the Department of Education force taxpayers to invest in a risky scheme to prop up these campuses for perhaps decades to come, mostly just to avoid having to redirect the current students to new educational opportunities, especially at a time when various sectors of higher education have excess capacity?

Closing Corinthian programs and campuses will likely occur in California, where Attorney General Kamala Harris refused to agree, as other regulators have now agreed, to shield ECMC from financial claims for past harm to Corinthian students. Thus ECMC declined to buy those campuses, which operate as Everest schools and also under the brand Heald College (a once higher-quality, independent institution that Corinthian bought and promptly ruined, as Heald’s former president recently charged). Shuttering of campuses would create hardships for those students who like their current Corinthian programs, however overpriced they are. It also, of course, would cost many Corinthian employees their jobs. But Attorney General Harris is right to stand up; current and future students, and the country’s long-term interest, is best served without the current anti-student Corinthian-ECMC deal.

Many of the current Corinthian students were defrauded, and they deserve the option of getting their money refunded, or attending another school.

If the Department is reluctant to spend federal dollars on forgiving the Corinthian students’ loans, and if Corinthian’s collapse was hastened when the Department froze federal aid and the company claimed it was almost out of cash, it’s fair to ask where all the federal tax dollars sent to Corinthian are now. Santa Ana, California-based Corinthian, at its peak, was hauling in more than $1 billion a year in federal student grants and loans.

Corinthian CEO Jack Massimino took home more than $3 million a year. He recently put on the market, listed at $11.5 million, his 10,000-square-foot, mountain-view second home in Park City, Utah; the listing says it is “Simply THE finest home in Kamas Valley and possibly the Intermountain West,” and it offers a heated horse barn, a “Children’s ‘Art Barn,’” and a pond on 61 acres.

The complaint against Corinthian filed by California AG Harris, one of many state and federal law enforcement actions taken against the company, alleges that Massimino and other “senior [Corinthian] executives” had “firsthand knowledge of the misconduct,” i.e., the deceptions at the center of Harris’s lawsuit.

Our coalition letter, the text of which is below, lists many of the glaring problems with the ECMC-Corinthian deal, but I will highlight two particularly bad ones:

First, ECMC has insisted on — and the Department of Education has not rejected — requiring students when they enroll to waive any right to pursue disputes in court; instead they must resolve matters through private arbitration. Such mandatory arbitration agreements, which strongly favor companies over individuals, are common when it comes to anti-consumer business like the credit card industry and — of course — the for-profit college industry. The Department could, and should, demand that all recipients of federal student aid, including for-profit colleges, allow students who have been lied to, assaulted, or otherwise harmed by the institution, the option of a day in court. Instead, with this agreement, the Department appears to be moving in the opposite direction, acquiescing in ECMC forcing harmed students into arbitration, even though it plans to run its school system as a non-profit; few, if any, non-profit colleges currently use mandatory arbitration clauses. Denying students such basic legal rights shields a college from accountability for treating its students fairly. ECMC executives’ insistence on arbitration may be revealing of how they really would operate the schools, however well-intentioned and public-spirited they believe they are now. And the Department of Education’s apparent acceptance of that position is another sign of its desperation to have someone take over these campuses before they fold — regardless of the harms and dangerous precedents.

Second, the agreement builds in an extraordinary conflict of interest for the Department of Education. ECMC has insisted it won’t pay more than $24 million up front. So in order to recoup some of the taxpayer investment, the agreement includes an “Earn Out” provision providing that ECMC’s new college subsidiary, Zenith, will pay the Department “up to $17.25 million ... over a seven-year period” based on a still-unspecified “percentage of funds that exceed targets specified by the Department.” In other words, the agreement would essentially give the Department an equity position, dependent on ECMC making a good deal of money. What’s the problem with that? The Department is charged with overseeing ECMC’s conduct — that it is not engaged in predatory marketing, or leaving too many students defaulting on their loans, or lying to the Department itself. How can an oversight body have a financial stake in a company it is charged with regulating? It’s a blatant and unacceptable conflict. It could easily be avoided by ECMC, whose coffers are full of cash, ponying up a bit more money now. But the Department isn’t insisting on that, again suggesting its desperation to prevent these Corinthian campuses from failing.

Right now, at least two other huge for-profit college companies — ITT Tech and Education Management Corporation (EDMC, no relation to ECMC) — may be at serious risk of collapse, with declining enrollments, depleted share prices, and a pile of federal and state law enforcement investigations and lawsuits. Other big industry players are also in trouble. Treating Corinthian as too big to fail, and thus sacrificing students and common sense, simply to find a buyer, any buyer, is a terrible course and a terrible precedent. The time to stop this bad decision is right now.

Here’s the text of our coalition letter:

Each year, the collective student loan debt skyrockets as tuitions continue to rise and graduates compete for scarce jobs with stagnant wages. From 2011 to 2013, the amount of debt held by recent graduates increased a whopping 20%, reaching a total more than $1.2 trillion.

As students struggle to pay off their loans, big banks and financial institutions are spending millions to influence elections and prevent policy solutions that might hinder their profits.Every year, Wall Street companies rake in almost $45 billion in revenue from higher education, largely derived from student loans.

Last year, the student loan industry spent $4.5 million on lobbying efforts, followed by $1 million in political contributions. Sallie Mae, a publicly traded company and the nation’s biggest student loan lender, has spent about $3 million every year since 2007 to lobby against bills that would aid college graduates.

While young Americans and their families are desperate for a lifeline, Congress continues to push their own agenda and that of their donors ahead of voters.

We are calling on Sallie Mae to stop using its profits from student loans to fund politicians and policies that hurt young Americans and their families.

Lawmakers who side with Sallie Mae on key issues have collected more money on average than those who have not. With the right sized check, Sallie Mae is able to make and keep friends in Congress while securing policies that increase profits.

When it comes to Sallie Mae’s bottom line, there’s no politician or policy that costs too much. And sadly, American students and their families are paying the price.

http://www.propublica.org/article/colleges-flush-with-cash-saddle-poorest-students-with-debt

NYU

... ProPublica analysis based on new data from the U.S. Department of Education shows that students from low-income families graduate from NYU saddled with huge federal loans. The school’s Pell Grant recipients – students from families that make less than $30,000 a year – owe an average of $23,250 in federal loans after graduation.

That’s more federal loan debt than low-income students take on at for-profit giant University of Phoenix, though NYU graduates have higher earnings and default less on their debt.

NYU is not the only university with a billion-dollar endowment to leave its poorest students with heavy debt loads. More than a quarter of the nation’s 60 wealthiest universities leave their low-income students owing an average of more than $20,000 in federal loans.

This new data on student debt is drawn from numbers that the Obama administration assembled as part of a planned effort to create grades for every college. In the face offierce lobbying from universities, the administration backed away, but has made much of the data public on a new website called College Scorecard. ProPublica has used that material to create Debt By Degrees, an interactive database that allows you to search information for almost 7,000 schools. The data provides an unprecedented level of detail on the financial burden that the poorest college students face, showing for the first time how much federal debt poor students take on compared to their wealthier peers, and how well these students are able to repay their loans. The database also shows how much graduates earn on average after leaving school.

“Student debt is not the same to every borrower,” said Mark Huelsman, a senior analyst at Demos, a public policy nonprofit. “It can look a lot different to a first generation student from a very modest economic background than to someone going to graduate school getting a law degree.”

Indeed, undergraduates take a fraction of the loans of graduate students but default at much higher rates. Debt can put low-income young adults at a disadvantage for years to come, limiting a graduate’s ability to save, get a mortgage, or get the job they aspire to.

“At the end of the day, you’re talking about households that don’t have nearly as much wealth to fall back on,” said Huelsman.

Rebecca Arthur wanted nothing more than to study photography at Tisch, NYU’s arts school. Her mother, however, made less than $25,000 a year working at a nursing home, so Arthur knew the school’s four-year price tag of over $250,000 would be a stretch. When Arthur was accepted, she was shocked – not only because she had gotten into her dream school, but also because the school only offered modest financial aid.

“The first bill was $32,000 and it was more than my mom made in a year,” she said. “Why would they accept me if they knew I couldn’t afford it?”

Arthur tried to crowdfund the remaining amount of her tuition, but it was only when her mother died a month before school started that NYU agreed to take a second look at her financial aid package. Although they increased her aid, she works four jobs and expects to graduate with over $24,000 in loans.

“The one downside to NYU is that money is always a big problem,” said Arthur, who is now a sophomore at the university. “People that really want [to go to NYU] and deserve it shouldn’t have to fight for it.”....

http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2015/07/07/3677543/marco-rubios-economic-plan-calls-students-sell-private-investors/

Florida Senator and Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio described his economic platform in a speech Tuesday in Chicago, touching on well-worn GOP priorities including slashing corporate taxes from 35 to 25 percent, further deregulating the private sector, restricting family immigration, and resisting calls to raise the minimum wage. Taking several specific shots at Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton, Rubio said his plan would avoid “pumping more of today’s money into yesterday’s programs,” and bring the U.S. into the future.

In the speech, Rubio also called for a “revolutionized” higher education system. If elected president, he promised to “bust…the cartel of existing colleges and universities” by loosening the rules for accreditation so that “innovative, low-cost competitors” can court students.But critics say the government accreditation process is already far too loose, allowing predatory for-profit chains like Corinthian Colleges to win federal approval and funding even as they mislead students into paying for essentially worthless degrees.

He also touted the “Student Right to Know Before You Go Act” he co-sponsored with Oregon Democrat Ron Wyden — a plan extremely similar to one President Obama pushed for last year that ranks colleges by how much their tuition costs and how much money their graduates make.

Lamenting the “shadow of debt hovering over millions of graduates,” Rubio then proposed a model already suggested by his rival Governor Chris Christie (R-NJ): allowing rich individuals or hedge funds to pay a students tuition and collect their investment back post-graduation.

“It may result in a profit for the investor or it may not – but unlike with loans, none of the risk lies with the student,” Rubio said.

He expanded on this idea in a speech last year:

Let’s say you are a student who needs $10,000 to pay for your last year of school. Instead of taking this money out in the form of a loan, you could apply for a “Student Investment Plan” from an approved and certified private investment group. In short, theseinvestors would pay your $10,000 tuition in return for a percentage of your income for a set period of time after graduation – let’s say, for example, 4% a year for 10 years.

This group would look at factors such as your major, the institution you’re attending, your record in school – and use this to make a determination about the likelihood of you finding a good job and paying them back.

Unlike with loans, you would be under no legal obligation to pay back that entire $10,000. Your only obligation would be to pay that 4% of your income per year for 10 years, regardless of whether that ends up amounting to more or less than $10,000.

But these “Student Investment Plans,” which also have the Orwellian name “human capital contracts,” raise many serious concerns. For one, investors may refuse to cover entire fields of students not likely to bring in the big bucks after graduation, or would charge them a staggeringly high percentage of their income. For those backing this plan, such as the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute (AEI), this poses no problem.

“Isn’t this ‘unfair’ to those wanting to be librarians, teachers, social workers, etc., since they would have to forego more of their incomes to satisfy the human capital contract? Not really,” writes AEI Adjunct Scholar Richard Vedder. “Society puts a relatively low value on those jobs.”

Additionally, following Rubio’s math of 4 percent over 10 years, a graduate would have to earn an extremely low salary for the investor not to make a profit. Vedder and other advocates of the plan are less cautious, and have voiced support for plans that take as high as 25 percent of a graduates salary for multiple decades after they enter the workforce.

The National College Access Network and other groups have warned that such a plan could cost students even more than high-interest federal loan programs, diverting away money those graduates could have used to save for retirement or buy a house.

Rubio’s proposal is similar to the “Pay It Forward, Pay It Back” model currently being explored by the state of Oregon — with one crucial difference. In Oregon’s plan, the investor is the democratically-elected state government, so when graduates repay their loans that money can go back into public education. Under Rubio’s version, the money would go into the pockets of investors.

Tags

A ‘free market’ solution to college debt?

In order to address the problem of many students graduating from college with huge debts, Bernie Sanders has proposed that all state universities provide free education as an investment in the nation’s future by enabling the creation of a more educated work force. The idea is that freed from such debt, graduates will be able to choose worthwhile careers rather than ones that pay a lot so that they can retire their debt. Sanders points out that many developed countries provide free higher education to their students. Even some developing countries do so. For example, my own university education in Sri Lanka was completely free.

Of course the idea of providing anything free, however worthwhile it may be (such as health care), is anathema to our ruling oligarchs, and free-market devotees have come up with their own capitalist solution to college debt, one that has been seized on by New Jersey governor Chris Christie as his presidential campaign flounders.

The idea is that students incorporate themselves somehow into a kind of company and sell stock in themselves to investors in return for giving them a portion of their future earnings. While on the surface this has disturbing similarities to the practice of sharecropping, with education replacing land, with all the problems that can happen in such a system, its supporters say that it is not that different from the student loan systems we currently have.

Economist Richard Vedder explains how the system would work:

Students currently do the equivalent of selling bonds – they borrow money with the promise to repay the funds. Why not issue stock (equity) in themselves – give investors partial, temporary ownership of a college graduate’s “human capital,” in return for a share of his or her earnings. Call these contracts between investors and future students “income share agreements” or “human capital contracts.”

…

There are lots of advantages to having voluntary arrangements made between individual students and financial service companies financing human capital construction. A contract might go like this: “if you pay one-half of my tuition to go four years to XYZ University, I will give you 15 percent of my earnings beyond $15,000 a year for the next 18 years.” Sometimes the investor will hit a jackpot: the college student becomes highly successful, making a big six digit income. In other instances, the student either flounders in college or secures a low paying job after graduation and, on net, the investor loses. The trick is to have a pool of contracts that collectively provide a good return. The risk, however, passes from a young student with no experience in financial markets to a savvy investor.

One problem with this system can be seen immediately. Investors are more likely to back students who go into areas that promise high earnings (like investment banking, medicine, engineering) and avoid careers that serve the needs of people (like teaching and social work and other forms of public service oriented jobs). But Vedder see no problem with this. In his eyes, the reason some jobs pay poorly is because those jobs have no value in the eyes of society.

Isn’t this “unfair” to those wanting to be librarians, teachers, social workers, etc., since they would have to forego more of their incomes to satisfy the human capital contract? Not really. Society puts a relatively low value on those jobs.If a market-based financing system is in place and, say, fewer kids want to be teachers, in time salaries of teachers would rise to eliminate potential shortages. If lots of kids flee to high paying STEM [Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics] disciplines to lower the proportion of equity that has to be paid to human capital investors, in time this will lead to some flattening of salaries in those disciplines – supply will rise to meet high demand.

But this misses the point that there already exists a scarcity of teachers as can be seen in the increasingly large class sizes they are called upon to teach and yet their salaries and benefits are being cut, not raised. This is because schools (and libraries and social service agencies) are funded by taxpayers, and states are cutting those budgets in order to give tax cuts for the wealthy.Furthermore, the number of teachers the nation requires is vastly greater than the number of investment bankers and engineers. There is no way that the salaries of all or nearly all of these teachers will ever approach that of the currently high-paying occupations.

The logical end point of this free-market model for teachers (and one that is ardently sought by conservatives) is for publicly funded schools to disappear and be replaced by entirely private schools that would then compete for teachers and students. But that does not mean that the salaries of all teachers would rise. What would be the more likely result is a further separation of rich and poor, with a few schools catering to the elite and paying higher salaries to their teachers and attracting the children of the wealthy who will then go to elite universities and jobs in high-paying fields, while the majority of people will have to send their students to schools that pay their teachers much less because they cannot afford more. Teachers will take low-paying jobs in such schools simply because they need to earn a living.

This system already partially exists in the US where schools are largely funded by local property taxes. People who can afford to, live in school districts that have high property values that generate higher taxes that can support schools that provide excellent resources. But these are relatively few. In Vedder’s proposed system, the current inequality will likely accelerate.

http://www.globalpossibilities.org/liberate-41-million-americans-from-student-loan-debt/

I know a high school senior who’s so worried about whether she’ll be accepted at the college of her choice she can’t sleep.

The parent of another senior tells me he stands at the mailbox for an hour every day waiting for a hoped-for acceptance letter to arrive.

Parents are also uptight. I’ve heard of some who have stopped socializing with other parents of children competing for admission to the same university.

Competition for places in top-brand colleges is absurdly intense. With inequality at record levels and almost all the economic gains going to the top, there’s more pressure than ever to get the golden ring.

A degree from a prestigious university can open doors to elite business schools and law schools – and to jobs paying hundreds of thousands, if not millions, a year.

So parents who can afford it are paying grotesque sums [2] to give their kids an edge.

They “enhance [3]” their kids' resumes with such things as bassoon lessons, trips to wildlife preserves in Botswana, internships at the Atlantic Monthly. They hire test-prep coaches. They arrange for consultants to help their children write compelling essays on college applications.

They make generous contributions to the elite colleges they once attended, to which their kids are applying – colleges that give extra points to “legacies” and even more to those from wealthy families that donate tons of money.

You might call this affirmative action for the rich.

The same intensifying competition is affecting mid-range colleges and universities that are doing everything they can to burnish their own brands – competing with other mid-range institutions to enlarge their applicant pools, attract good students, and inch upward on the U.S. News college rankings.

Every college president wants to increase the ratio of applications to admissions, thereby becoming more elite.

Excuse me, but this is nuts.

The biggest absurdity is that a four-year college degree has become the only gateway into the American middle class.

But not every young person is suited to four years of college. They may be bright and ambitious but they won’t get much out of it. They’d rather be doing something else, like making money or painting murals.

They feel compelled to go to college because they’ve been told over and over that a college degree is necessary. Yet if they start college and then drop out, they feel like total failures. Even if they get the degree, they’re stuck with a huge bill — and may be paying down their student debt for years. And all too often the jobs they land after graduating don’t pay enough to make the degree worthwhile.

Last year, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York [4], 46 percent [5] of recent college graduates were in jobs that don’t even require a college degree.

The biggest frauds are for-profit colleges [6] that are raking in money even as their students drop out in droves, and whose diplomas are barely worth the ink-jets they’re printed on.

America clings to the conceit that four years of college are necessary for everyone, and looks down its nose at people who don’t have college degrees.

This has to stop. Young people need an alternative. That alternative should be a world-class system of vocational-technical education.

A four-year college degree isn’t necessary for many of tomorrow’s good jobs.

For example, the emerging economy will need platoons of technicians able to install, service, and repair all the high-tech machinery filling up hospitals, offices, and factories.

And people who can upgrade the software embedded in almost every gadget you buy.

Today it’s even hard to find a skilled plumber or electrician.

Yet the vocational and technical education now available to young Americans is typically underfunded and inadequate. And too often denigrated as being for “losers.”

These programs should be creating winners.

Germany – whose median wage (after taxes and transfers) is higher than ours – gives many of its young people world-class technical skills [7] that have made Germany a world leader in fields such as precision manufacturing.

A world-class technical education doesn’t have to mean young people’s fates are determined when they’re fourteen.

Instead, rising high-school seniors could be given the option of entering a program that extends a year or two beyond high school and ends with a diploma acknowledging their technical expertise.

Community colleges – the under-appreciated crown jewels of America’s feeble attempts at equal opportunity – could be developing these curricula. Businesses could be advising on the technical skills they’ll need, and promising jobs to young people who complete their degrees with good grades.

Government could be investing enough money to make these programs thrive. (And raising taxes on top incomes enough to temper the wild competition for admission to elite colleges that grease the way to those top incomes.)

Instead, we continue to push most of our young people through a single funnel called a four-year college education — a funnel so narrow it’s causing applicants and their parents excessive stress and worry about “getting in;” that’s too often ill suited and unnecessary, and far too expensive; and that can cause college dropouts to feel like failures for the rest of their lives.

It’s time to give up the idea that every young person has to go to college, and start offering high-school seniors an alternative route into the middle class.

Robert B. Reich has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. He also served on President Obama's transition advisory board. His latest book is "Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future." His homepage is www.robertreich.org [8].

http://www.alternet.org/culture/get-out-while-you-can-why-young-americans-should-consider-moving-abroad

http://www.tickld.com/x/wtf-is-wrong-is-wrong-with-americans-this-guy-nails-it

According to The Costs of War project at Brown University, the total costs for the second Iraq War and the ongoing one in Afghanistan is $4.4 trillion. Cost-wise, these two conflicts should be considered as one because it has long been established that the war in Iraq prolonged the one in Afghanistan by drawing away resources from it and causing it to drag on. Everyone in the country could go to college for nearly a decade free of charge with $4.4 trillion.

http://www.alternet.org/print/education/these-are-worst-colleges-america

9/14

Late Tuesday, Mitch McConnell and the Senate Republicans blocked a game-changing bill brought to the floor by Elizabeth Warren -- a GOP favor to the big banks that gave a cold shoulder to 40 million middle and working class students.

Sen. Warren’s "Bank on Students Act" would have allowed borrowers to refinance their student loans just like homeowners can with their mortgage, lowering their interest rate and saving money.

7/14

WASHINGTON-- Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have flocked to for-profit colleges, including a troubled chain that is closing or selling its campuses amid a series of federal and state investigations.

A report to be released Wednesday from the office of Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, a critic of the for-profit education industry who chairs the Senate Education Committee, finds that for-profit colleges received $1.7 billion in Post-9/11 GI Bill benefits in the 2012-2013 school term. About a quarter of benefits paid under the program went to the for-profit sector.

Among the top 10 recipient schools in terms of GI Bill funds, eight were from the for-profit sector. One of them was Corinthian Colleges, a chain based in Santa Ana, California, that recently reached an agreement with the Education Department to sell or close its more than 90 U.S. campuses. The Education Department has said it has concerns about the chain's operations that included allegations of falsifying job placement data used in marketing claims to prospective students, and allegations of altered grades and attendance.

Since the new GI Bill rolled out in 2009, Corinthian has received $186 million in the new GI Bill funds, the report said. Last week, the advocacy group Student Veterans of America placed the schools under the Corinthian umbrella - Everest College, Heald College and WyoTech schools - on its "not recommended" list.

Including Corinthian, the report finds that seven of the eight companies face investigations by states attorneys general or federal agencies for "deceptive and misleading recruiting" or other possible federal violations. Even as overall enrollment decreased at the eight schools since 2009, it says the number of veterans enrolled at these schools increased.

For-profit colleges have been popular among veterans, in part, because of offerings in skilled trades and flexibility such as online classes.The new GI Bill program provides the most generous school benefits paid to warfighters since the original bill was enacted in 1944. It can be used by a veteran or a member of the immediate family - and more than a million people have used it so far.

Michael Dakduk, the vice president for military and veterans affairs with the Association of Private Sector Colleges, said in a statement: "It is no surprise that members of the military choose our institutions because we provide them with career-focused programs, important support services and flexibility they need to complete their education."

But, the for-profit sector has among the highest student loan default rates and lowest graduation rates in higher education and has been a target of Democrats. The Obama administration has pushed "gainful employment" regulations that would penalize career-oriented programs that produce graduates without the training needed to find a job with a salary that will allow them to pay off their debt.

Harkin's report finds that the average cost for a veteran to attend a for-profit college is $7,972, compared to $3,914 for a public college - about twice the price.

The two top recipients of GI Bill money not in the for-profit sector were the public University of Maryland system and the non-profit Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, according to the report.

Earlier this year, the Student Veterans of America issued a report that said a little more than half of the veterans who got college money under the GI Bill since 2009 eventually graduated. The rate was lower than the graduation rate for traditional students, who generally enroll out of high school, but higher than for veterans' non-traditional peers - those students who also tend to be older and have families and jobs.

It found that about three-quarters of the student veterans who graduated did so from public institutions. Another 15.5 percent attended private universities, while about 13 percent attended for-profit schools.

Another group, the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, has lobbied against what is known as the "90/10" rule that requires colleges to receive at least 10 percent of their revenue from sources other than the federal government. Students using the new GI Bill don't count toward the limit, so the veterans said they are aggressively targeted by the for-profit industry.

Last month, the nation marked the 70th anniversary of the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, more commonly known as the GI Bill.

The bill has been credited with providing millions of military veterans with college educations and creating the American middle class.

Exclusive: Chilean Robin Hood? Artist Known as "Papas Fritas" on Burning $500M Worth of Student Debt

Salon.com / By Thomas Frank [1]

Congratulations, Class of 2014: You’re Totally Screwed

May 18, 2014 |

Welcome to the wide world, Class of 2014. You have by now noticed the tremendous consignment of debt that the authorities at your college have spent the last four years loading on your shoulders. It may interest you to know that the average student-loan borrower among you is now $33,000 in debt [2], the largest of any graduating class ever. According to a new study by the Pew Research Center [3], carrying that kind of debt will have certain predictable effects. It will impede your ability to accumulate wealth, for example. You will also borrow more for other things than people without debt, and naturally you will find your debt level growing, not shrinking, as the years pass.

As you probably know, neither your parents nor your grandparents were required to take on this kind of burden in order to go to college. Neither are the people of your own generation in France and Germany and Argentina and Mexico.

But in our country, as your commencement speaker will no doubt tell you, the universities are “excellent.” They are “world-class.” Indeed, they are all that stands between us and economic defeat by the savagely competitive peoples of Europe and Asia. So a word of thanks is in order, Class of 2014: By borrowing those colossal amounts and turning the proceeds over to the people who run our higher ed system, you have done your part to maintain American exceptionalism, to keep our competitive advantage alive.

Here’s a question I bet you won’t hear broached on the commencement stage: Why must college be so expensive? The obvious answer, which I’m sure has been suggested to you a thousand times, is because college is so good. A 2014 Cadillac costs more than did a 1980 Cadillac, adjusting for inflation, because it is a better car. And because you paid attention in economics class, you know the same thing must be true of education. When tuition goes up and up every year, far outpacing inflation, this indicates that the quality of education in this country is also, constantly, going up and up. You know that the only way education can cost more is if it is worth more.

In sum, you paid nearly sixty grand a year to attend some place with a classy WASP name and ivy growing on its fake medieval walls. You paid for the best, and now you are the best, an honorary classy WASP entitled to all the privileges of the club. That education your parents got, even if it was at the same school as yours, cost them far less and was thus not as good as yours. That’s the way progress works, right?

Actually, the opposite is closer to the truth: college costs more and more even as it gets objectively worse and worse. Yes, I know, universities today offer luxuries unimaginable in the 1960s: fine gymnasiums, gourmet dining halls, disturbing architecture. But when it comes to generating and communicating knowledge—the essential business of higher ed—they are, almost all of them, in a frantic race to the bottom.

According to the Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty [4], only about 30 percent of the teachers at American colleges these days are tenured or tenure-track, which means that fewer than a third of your profs actually enjoy the security and benefits and intellectual freedom that we associate with the academic lifestyle. In 1969, traditional professors like these made up almost 80 percent of the American faculty. Today, however, it is part-time workers without any kind of job security who are the majority of the instructors on campus, and in general these adjuncts are paid poorly and receive few benefits. That is who does the work of knowledge-transmission at the ever-so costly, ever-so excellent American university: Freelancers. Contract laborers.

The awful lives of these workers is the subject of a vast and popular literature. Read around and you will discover that these adjuncts sometimes collect food stamps and live out of cars [5], that they race from job to job [6], that they inflate grades [7] and endure whining rich kids [8] and come todespise the academics [9] they once sought to join. The most shocking tale [10]of all (so far) concerned an 83-year-old adjunct at a university in Pittsburgh who was reduced almost to the level of a homeless person before dying last year from an illness that she endured without benefit of health insurance from her employer.

What makes all these stories so irresistible, of course, is their overwhelming sense of irony. These adjuncts are people who once believed they were signing up for a life of teaching, writing and highbrow contemplation. And just look at the world of shit they got instead. Many of them have PhDs and many work hard at teaching. But it seems that all the learning in the world, all the good grades and high test scores—which they had too, remember, just like you—don’t mean a goddamned thing when people have no bargaining power.

Yes, you are a screwed generation, Class of 2014, with a helping of debt that will take you many years to digest. But consider this other generation that has also been screwed, and screwed by the very same people who secured that millstone to your neck. You borrowed and forked over enormous sums in exchange for the privilege of hearing lectures . . . lectures that were then delivered by people who earned barely enough to stay alive. It is a double disaster of the kind that only we Americans are capable of pulling off.

Actually, it’s worse than that. This is a disaster not only for individual adjuncts but for the production of knowledge itself. What do we really expect college classes to be like when they are taught by people in such dire situations? Is our new precarious professoriate able to research or write at the same pace as its predecessor? How many of them feel secure enough in their position to defy the prevailing conventions of their disciplines?

“No major new works of social theory have emerged in the United States in the last thirty years,” wrote the anthropologist David Graeber in an important 2012 essay [11]about this age of diminishing innovation. “We have been reduced to the equivalent of medieval scholastics, writing endless annotations of French theory from the seventies. . . .” I emailed Graeber and asked him to elaborate. Here’s what he said:

“If you look at the lives and personalities of almost any of the Great Thinkers currently lionized in the American academy, certainly anyone like Deleuze, or Foucault, Wittgenstein, Freud, Einstein, or even Max Weber, none of them would have lasted ten minutes in our current system. These were some seriously odd people. They probably would never have finished grad school, and if they somehow did discipline themselves to appear sufficiently “professional,” “collegial,” conformist and compliant to make it through adjunct hell or pre-tenure, it would be at the expense of leaving them incapable of producing any of the works for which they have become famous.”

It is not easy to discover how heavily any one school uses adjuncts, because the data depends on voluntary disclosures by the institutions themselves and because the number of adjuncts reported doesn’t tell us how many classes those adjuncts teach or how much time they spend on campus. Still, numbers do exist for some institutions, thanks to a survey [12]done by the Department of Education. What you’ll find: some of the most expensive universities in America are also big employers of part-time, non-tenure-track labor. Remarking on this situation, a spunky website for the college-bound asks [13], “There’s No Other Way to Put It: They Like Adjuncts. What’re You Gonna Do?”

It’s a good question. What are you gonna do? The obvious answer, for adjuncts themselves, is to organize, and they are doing it [14] all over the country. The rest of us need to ponder how to stop this insane situation from getting any worse. We might begin by understanding college less as a mystical place of romance and achievement and more as a cartel or a predator, only a couple of removes from a company like Enron or a pharmaceutical firm that charges sick people $1,000 per pill. We might ask why the numbers of university administrators have grown by some 369 percent since 1976 [15], why college presidents are sometimes paid over a million dollars a year, and why state legislatures keep cutting education budgets and passing the burden along to students and their parents.

The word we always hear in connection to university price increases is “unsustainable.” The price tag of college can’t keep going up forever. But of course it can, and the party that will “sustain” it, just as soon as you get those loans paid off, will be you.

See more stories tagged with:

millennials [17],

college [18],

CLASS OF 2014 [19],

college debt [20],

adjunct [21],

Rank	Lender	Origination Volume
1.	Sallie Mae	$20.990 billion
2.	Citi Student Loans	$5.870 billion
3.	Wachovia Education Finance Inc.	$5.540 billion
4.	Wells Fargo Education Financial Services	$5.147 billion
5.	Bank of America	$4.921 billion
6.	JP Morgan Chase Bank	$3.548 billion
7.	Pittsburgh National Corp	$2.656 billion
8.	U.S. Bank	$2.262 billion
9.	Discover Bank	$1.726 billion
10.	EdAmerica	$1.563 billion
11.	National Education Loan Network (NELNET)	$1.557 billion
12.	Citizens Bank Education Finance	$1.251 billion
13.	Regions Bank	$1.147 billion
14.	Fifth Third Bank	$1.128 billion
15.	Access Group	$1.012 billion
16.	College Foundation Inc.	$967.4 million
17.	Suntrust Bank	$932.2 million
18.	South Carolina Student Loan Corp	$754.4 million
19.	Key Corp	$619.4 million
20.	Kentucky Higher Education Student Loan Corp	$577.4 million
21.	Commerce Bank	$478.0 million
22.	Vermont Student Assistance Corporation (VSAC)	$342.4 million
23.	Rhode Island Student Loan Authority (RISLA)	$303.0 million
24.	All Student Loan Corp	$279.6 million
25.	Arvest	$270.0 million
26.	Union Bank \& Trust Company	$241.7 million
27.	Dollar Bank	$228.7 million
28.	Utah State Board of Regents	$228.1 million
29.	CollegeInvest (Colorado)	$225.8 million
30.	New Mexico Education Assistance Foundation (NMEAF)	$215.0 million
31.	Missouri Higher Education Loan Authority (MOHELA)	$177.2 million
32.	Associated Bank	$176.2 million
33.	Banc First	$160.1 million
34.	Bank of North Dakota	$159.3 million
35.	New Hampshire Higher Education Loan Corp	$158.9 million
36.	First Tennessee Bank	$137.1 million
37.	Georgia Student Finance Authority	$135.4 million
38.	USC Credit Union	$133.9 million
39.	University of Wisconsin CU	$127.0 million
40.	University Federal Credit Union	$126.9 million
41.	Louisiana Public Facilities Authority	$122.1 million
42.	Navy Federal Credit Union	$122.0 million
43.	Marshall & Isley Bank	$115.2 million
44.	Midwestern University	$113.5 million
45.	First National Bank of Texas	$106.4 million
46.	America First Credit Union	$99.6 million
47.	Simmons First National Bank	$92.6 million
48.	Compass Bank	$89.8 million
49.	National Ed Financing II, LLC	$89.6 million
50.	Education Services Foundation	$89.2 million
51.	Stillwater National Bank	$77.3 million
52.	Pennsylvania State Employees Credit Union	$75.6 million
53.	Illinois Student Assistance Commission/IDAPP	$63.7 million
54.	Alaska SLC (ACPE)	$62.1 million
55.	Anchorbank	$59.8 million
56.	Arkansas Student Loan Authority	$54.7 million
57.	Mountain America Credit Union	$54.3 million
58.	Wells Fargo ELT Student Funding Group	$50.9 million
59.	Herring Bank	$50.7 million
60.	Aggieland Credit Union	$47.2 million
61.	American Savings Bank FSB	$46.1 million
62.	Campus Federal Credit Union	$44.1 million
63.	Wyoming Student Loan Corp	$43.4 million
64.	Touro College	$40.5 million
65.	First Hawaiian Bank	$39.6 million
66.	First Interstate Bank of Montana	$39.1 million
67.	Student Lending Works, Inc.	$38.2 million
68.	Northstar Education Finance	$37.3 million
69.	Independence FSB	$37.2 million
70.	Montana Higher Education Student Assistance Corp (MHESAC)	$37.1 million
71.	First Security Bank	$36.1 million
72.	Educators Credit Union	$35.2 million
73.	Utah Community Credit Union	$35.1 million
74.	Emory University	$32.8 million
75.	SMART Financial Credit Union	$31.6 million
76.	Graduate Leverage	$30.5 million