Obama at Hudson Community College

"These are the building blocks of innovation: Education, infrastructure, research."
"Job training as a silver bullet. College as a cure-all. It's not, I don't want to pretend that it is."

but...
I've set this ambitious goal: By 2020, America will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world. (Applause.) We used to be number one. We should be number one again. (Applause.)

"A former senator from New York, Robert Kennedy, once told us, "The future is not a gift. It is an achievement." It was not an accident, not a gift, that America led the 20th century. It was the result of hard work and discipline and sacrifice, and ambition that served a common purpose. "

SEE YA LATER SALLIE MAE

The House voted to eliminate the Federal Family Education Loan Program, saving an estimated $87 billion in subsidies to banks over the next decade.

Some -- not all-- of the money will go to improve higher education access, notably:

• $40 billion over 10 years to increase the maximum Pell Grant to $5,550 and ensure that it would increase annually by the rise in the Consumer Price Index plus 1 percent.
• $10 billion to community colleges in support of President Obama's American Graduation Initiative, designed to produce 5 million more two-year college graduates by 2020.

Once the second most profitable company in the entire Fortune 500, Sallie Mae has now been relegated to junk bond status and potential irrelevance. This should be a day of celebration for student advocates everywhere....

but, it must also be disappointing for those currently burdened by student loans, as the bill does nothing to make those burdens more manageable. Student borrowing jumped by 25% last year, defaults and delinquencies are up, tuition is up. 100% Direct lending is a great first step, but it's only the first step.

Student Loan Borrowing Up 25%

Says Inside Higher Ed.

"Students took out 25 percent more in federal student loans in 2008-9 than they did the year before, according to Education Department data reported by The Wall Street Journal. The federal data showed borrowing rising to $75.1 billion, higher than the 17 percent [increase] most recently projected by the Obama administration. Robert Shireman, deputy under secretary for education, called the rise "definitely above expectations" and attributed it to the poor economy and increases in federal limits on how much students can borrow."

Health Care = A Tricky Generational Issue

President Obama mentioned last night that young healthy people who choose not to buy into the insurance system are being irresponsible, and everyone pays for them when they go into the emergency room for expensive visits.

True.

However, a mandate to buy insurance that doesn't provide for the creation of truly low-cost plans that cover the services young people can realistically expect to use, and that that doesn't subsidize coverage for low-income young people, is just driving a fatted cash cow into the arms of the lucky insurance companies.
1 doctor visit a year + (1 OB-GYN checkup for the ladies)+ 1 dentist visit+ catastrophic coverage if you have a car accident or something. $100 a month. Something reasonable like that.

"On Those "Entitled" Twentysomethings"

An entertaining and justifiable rant.

3 Great Reads on the Future of Higher Ed

College for $99/Mo by Kevin Carey

Myth-Busting: The Value of College by David Leonhardt

A Call for Change, From Within by Doug Lederman

I Need Your Stories!

I need a few more stories for my upcoming book, with the working title "Hacking Education."
I want to hear from you if you have a nontraditional educational story--anything besides graduating high school at 18 and going straight to/through a 4 year college.

Online programs, vocational training, travel, volunteering, etc. . .

Thank you!

From My Inbox #2

Dear Ms. Kamenetz,

I am working in a grassroots effort to help students avoid massive college and student loan debts. I would appreciate very much if you could provide me with source information for the following statements from your article on higher education in the Sept 09 issue.

"College tuition has gone up more than any other good or service since 1990, and our nation's students and graduates hold a staggering $714 billion in outstanding student-loan debt. Once the world's most educated country, the United States today ranks 10th globally in the percentage of young people with postsecondary degrees."

Thank you very much. I have been concerned with escalating costs, as well as the need for recreation or reform in the higher ed industry, for years. I purchased the domain name collegedebtsucks.com three years ago and have always put off the project for tomorrow. Well, tomorrow has arrived!
Facts such as those you have stated above deserve to be repeatedly shouted from millions of students (and parents!). Please feel free to visit my website or contact me at any time. I would like to use this information, promote your article, and give the issue more attention on my blog.
Sincerely,
Julie Hendrix
www.collegedebtsucks.com"


Hi Julie,
For the 1990 figure, see the post below.
For the total amount of outstanding student loan debt, this is based on $590 billion of outstanding federal student loan debt and the rest private student loan debt. Mark Kantrowitz of Finaid and FastWeb, in this recent article, gives a slightly different figure of $730 billion--$598 billion in federal student loans and $132 billion of private student loans.
For America's relative world standing, this is a recent study (pdf) .

From My Inbox

(thanks Gaping Void)
On Sat, Aug 22, 2009 at 12:51 PM, W. wrote:
Hi Anya,

I haven't even finished your piece, but I think it's great, interesting topic, good info, and well written. I have a question, I feel is important so I hope you know; Why did "the college tuition rise more than any other good or service since 1990"?
What are the main factors that led to this huge cost in such a short time?
Please let me know or where you found that statistic. Thanks
Sincerely,
W.


Thank you for writing.
I am working on a book with the working title "Hacking Education" and I will address this question in an entire chapter. There are many different explanations; the combination of government subsidies, the secondary loan market, and cost shifting from states to the federal government are the top three. Imagine if people could take out a low-interest mortgage from the federal government to pay for their routine health care costs and you'd have pretty much the same situation, with hospitals charging even more than they do now to take advantage of that federal loan money, which was in turn sliced and diced and resold as derivatives.

The source for that fact is the American Institute of Economic Research. I realize people may find it amazing.

All the best,
Anya

BlogTalkRadio tonight at 7pm

Anya Kamenetz: Hacking Education (Higher Education in the Digital Age)

You can catch me live at 7pm tonight talking to the wonderful Dr. Hope May, director of the Ethics Center at Central Michigan University in Mt. Pleasant, Michigan, and her delightful students. I met these folks on a speaking engagement last year. This is a wonderfully meta moment as I will be talking about the incorporation of technology into higher education, on a college-student-produced podcast.

Future of Higher Ed: Edupunks + Open Ed

My new article is out in Fast Company's September issue: "How Web-Savvy* Edupunks* Are Transforming* American* Higher Education*."

To annotate, if I may:
"Web-savvy" is of course, a distasteful term. Pls read something like "Internetty."
"Edupunks", and entrepreneurs, and investors, and open-education advocates, and educational technologists employed by universities large and small...with varying agendas.
"Transforming" Some seek to supplant it. Some to tinker with it. Some to destroy it.
"American" global, even more so.
"Higher Education." Learning, workforce preparation and accreditation.

In the Future, The Cost of Education Will Be Zero

Article on Mashable, a social media website, gives a good overview of many of the same innovations in higher education I cover in my new book...Open CourseWare, Flat World Knowledge, University of the People

One of the commenters raises a question I've been mulling over. "I would like to see innovations that problem-solve around issues of FULL access to higher education (and quality k-12 education for that matter) for low-income communities in the US and around the world. This includes opportunities for learning that necessitate physical learning communities that dominant groups will surely continue to build for themselves... I fear that those with the resources to take these innovations to scale will focus their energies around notions of campus-free learning to the detriment of those whose only economical option might be such incomplete learning opportunities, thus dangerously perpetuating a tiered system anyway."

I think in any society you can imagine, there is going to be some inequality and the school system is going to reflect that. What distinguishes the current round of innovations in open education, from what I've seen, is an unusual amount of cross-institutional collaboration from Ivy League colleges to community colleges, and internationally, too.

Also, campus-free learning doesn't have to be seen as incomplete, but complementary to a course of lifelong learning, seeking out learning communities for oneself and incorporating one's life experience as well.

No File, No Future

This story will make your blood boil: In several cases, corrupt Chinese officials have stolen the manila folders of exemplary young, often poor students, which contain their permanent records of test scores and other official documents, and sold them for thousands of dollars. Without the documents, the students, who have slaved and sacrificed everything to achieve a greater place in society, are doomed to low-wage work. Questions raised by the story:

1) What are the consequences of basing people's life chances on a series of tests?
2)Is this an extreme version of the flawed American meritocracy, or does the rigidity of the no-second-chances system make it something else altogether?
3) Why the hell don't they have electronic records, or at least copies of these documents?

Today's Scary Debt Chart

Via Henry Blodget:

The world's governments are borrowing $5 TRillion this year. $3 TRillion will be borrowed by the US.
Where will the money come from? And how will we pay it back?

Where the money comes from gets into a weird existential question about the nature of money. Basically sovereign governments print more money. This causes the value of the money to go down = inflation.
Inflation is one basic way we will "pay" the debt back. A second way is for future taxpayers to pay more taxes to service the debt and the interest. In this sense we are borrowing from ourselves and future generations. If households and companies buy more Treasury bonds, this is a way for these private entities to lend more money to the government, but it also means that these entities are spending and investing less in other things, which keeps a lid on economic growth.

Save Our Jobs, Plead Student Loan Companies

Sallie Mae and 31 other student lenders and allied groups have come up with a counterproposal to the switch to direct lending. Surprisingly, they are agreeing to the elimination of all subsidies for making the loans--this means they are agreeing that the business of actually lending money to students themselves is too risky or otherwise undesirable for private sector lenders. Instead, they want to collect fees to service the loans for which the federal government will provide the capital. Not so incidentally, their plan "...would preserve 35,000 jobs that are supported by the current system."

As student-aid expert Sandy Baum told me today, "At this point in time it seems pretty clear that private sources are not actually funding these loans, so it doesn't make sense to pay them to fund the loans.
We should do whatever is most efficient, saves money, and works for students." Whether that means a single, government-administered and serviced program or a complicated nationwide network of public and private entities using additional taxpayer money to produce the image of "competition"...well, you can ask the health care reformers.

Local NYC Debt Help!

Heard about this from a new acquaintance on the 4th of July. She writes:

"The CLARO clinic. Every Thursday from 2:30-4:30 and 6-8 PM (Kings County Civil Ct, 141 Livingston St rm 403), volunteer attorneys assist those in need of consumer debt legal assistance by filling out the proper court documents etc. It's run by Sidney Cherubin, the supervising attorney of the Brooklyn Bar Association's Volunteer Lawyer's Project"

Is the Bachelor's Degree Obsolete?

Wick Sloane is a business guy who got obsessed with fixing our education system. He actually volunteered for the front lines, taking a job teaching at Bunker Hill Community College. If you go here you can read his entertaining column and download his enlightening and provocative pamphlet on the future of higher education, modeled after Tom Paine's Common Sense.

In other news, some private student loan borrowers who got ripped off by a flight school are suing. Alan Collinge has collected a million stories like these. Vocational schools (beauty school, truck driving school, culinary school) + private student loans = trouble.

"You'll Never Be A Lawyer," Says Sallie Mae (Mwah ah ah)

This guy has absolutely no luck, and his case is sure to cause a deserved outcry.

Robert Bowman grew up in foster care, worked his way through community college, college and law school, and survived two accidents, on an ATV and a Jet Ski, the former of which nearly cost him a leg. Along the way he took out 32 separate student loans, both federal and private, which because of the medical deferments (and because of his private loans going into collection) ballooned from $270,000 to $435,000 over a period of four years.

Now the NYC bar is refusing to admit him because his loans are so crazy huge! But of course unless he can practice law he has little hope of ever paying them back.

Anyone who thinks that a crushing burden of debt is a sane way to offer opportunities to the disadvantaged, speak up.

College Doesn't Pay?

Not so sure about the NYPost's math here, but it's interesting that the conventional wisdom may be shifting...

"College degrees bring higher income, but at today's cost they can't make up the savings they consume and the debt they add early in the life of a typical student. While Ernie was busy earning, Bill got stuck under his bill."

What Counts

Yesterday I attended the funeral of my mother's oldest sister, Anna Lisa Crone. My aunt was a blonde beauty and a warm wit who spoke eight or nine languages fluently, and left behind her upbringing in rural North Carolina to marry and live among Russian intellectuals. She got her PhD from Harvard and taught in the Slavic department at the University of Chicago for nearly 30 years. At her memorial service, held in an ivy-shrouded Gothic chapel on the campus of the Divinity School, distraught colleagues and students stood up one after the other and bore witness to her achievements as a friend, scholar, mentor and teacher. My mother, who gave the eulogy, repeated that my aunt's essential engagement with life was as an educator even when she was a little girl, drilling her baby sister in Latin conjugations for fun.
Although she contended with sexism at the beginning of her career, my aunt survived to be lauded nationally and internationally for her contributions to the study of Russian letters and even more so, to the community of scholars who loved these 18th, 19th and 20th century writers--Derzhavin, Tsvetayeva, Turgenev--as much as she did.

My aunt was a specialist. She was an expert in a concentrated area of the humanities with no immediate economic payoff, the type of department that is most likely to be targeted for cuts in an era of scarcity like today's. Her life's work was not interdisciplinary or innovative when it came to technology or a million other buzzwords. She imparted her wisdom as a teacher the old-fashioned way, through time and intense attention, face to face.

I'm working on a book about the future of higher education: cost, access, productivity, specific learning outcomes, and many other values that can be measured. In honor of my aunt's memory, and of my parents, who are both lifelong academics as well, I will be working hard to keep in mind the values of education that cannot be measured.