Thursday, October 11, 2007

Hillary's Higher-Ed Platform


She, too, has now come out in favor of abolishing FFEL loans (all of those made by banks, rather than Direct Loans). Other great notes:

*Radically simplify the aid-application process.
*Interesting: require a four-year tuition guarantee for state universities, so if you enter in 2008, your bill won't be 50% higher by the time you're a senior.
*$500 million for community colleges.
*$250 million for apprenticeship/ job training programs.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Not criticizing here, but should we provide a 4 year tuition guarantee (they had this where I went to school, but it cost more for freshman w/tuition guarantee) wouldn't we just have larger and larger increases in the cost of education for each freshman class that had to make up for the difference in tuition costs lost by the other three years of students whose tuition bills have remained static regardless of inflationary pressures?

Anonymous said...

Gov. subsidy leads to fraud, waste, and abuse. Student loans already drive up the price of education. Hillary is just sending pork to the education industry -- a very-profitable, for-profit industry at that.

Please, get a brain, before getting behind a politician's plan. Just b/c she's a woman does NOT mean she is necessarily good.

Anonymous said...

The proposal to scrap the guaranteed student loan program to generate savings is truly baffling.

The recently enacted $22 billion cut in lender payments makes the program comparable in cost to the Federal Direct Loan Program, if not cheaper, according to the President's FY 2008 Budget.

Even if direct loans retain a cost advantage, it will be ever so slight.

In other words, the savings from eliminating the guaranteed loan program wouldn't amount to a hill of beans - certainly not enough to make a dent in the proposal's $8 billion in new annual spending.

It may even cost taxpayers money to shift all federal student loans to the direct loan program.

In return for meager, if any, savings, the proposal would eliminate a program that serves 8 in 10 schools and students. It would eliminate the only federal student loan program that offers consumer choice.

Families are as entitled to choice in federal student loans as they are in health care and other areas. Indeed, consumer choice is central to the Clinton health reform proposal, as it is to Sen. John Edwards' and Sen. Obama's health reform proposals.