Category: Debts: student, national, and otherwise

  • Thomas Frank has a nice analysis up on Salon.com on college tuition and debts.  In it, he points out that the crisis is of long duration, and people have been asking for more than a generation when the “college bubble” will burst.  Along the way, he shows that a number of standard explanations (overpaid professors,…

  • Back in March, I wrote a long piece about the effects of institutional debt on the current, destructive trends in U.S. Higher Education.  In the same vein, there's a new article by Michelle Chen up at The Nation discussing a new report by the Debt and Society group called Borrowing Against the Future: The Hidden Costs of…

  • As Protevi likes to keep reminding everyone on Facebook, it's been awhile now since I first started arguing that we haven't been paying sufficient attention to the role of institutional debt as a driver of the increasingly alarming developments in U.S. universities, especially those in the public sector.  I've gestured in this direction before on…

  • In comment #9 at this post, Susan makes a kind of canonical case I've heard from lots of assessment people. First, I should say that I agree with 95% of the intended answers to Susan's rhetorical questions. We should be much clearer about what we want our students to get out of their degrees, and…

  • There's a worrying piece over at Inside Higher Ed quoting the president of "a mildly selective private nonprofit institution that is tuition-dependent" saying that the institution has begun to reject some applicants that it would previously have admitted because of worries about meeting outcomes targets in the ratings system proposed by President Obama in his Higher…

  • There was a story in today's NYT about a number of colleges that are lowering tuition, sometimes drastically. The argument is that they can do this without loss of revenue, since so few pay full tuition anyway. Thus, they are lowering tuition and cutting financial aid and making a splash vis a vis the current concern…