Free Republic

"If the Federal Reserve can float trillions of dollars to large financial institutions at low interest rates to grow the economy, surely they can float the Department of Education the money to fund our students, keep us competitive, and grow our middle class.” That is the logic behind the first piece of legislation from Harvard Law School professor-cum-Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, introduced in the Senate two weeks ago. The Bank on Students Loan Fairness Act seeks to extend to students the same loan interest rates allegedly offered to the country’s chief financial institutions. Among the problems with the bill? Said...

<p>Former Education Secretary William Bennett sums up a big part of the problem in a new book titled “Is College Worth It?” In it, he and his co-author note that since 1990 the cost of attending a four-year college has risen at four times the rate of inflation. Over that same period, federally supported student loans have skyrocketed, to the point where student-loan debt now exceeds credit-card debt.</p>

Private colleges are offering record financial assistance to keep classrooms full, according to the Wall Street Journal's Ruth Simon. Some schools are seeing just 20% of the students they accepted enrolling, versus the usual rate of 33%. These schools have raised tuition discount rate — the price after grants and scholarships — to an all-time high of 45%. Meanwhile, the median sticker price increased just 3.9% last fall, the smallest gains in 12 years. And at public schools, the sticker price climbed just 4.8%, also a 12-year low. For the Washington Examiner's Michael Barone, this makes it official: the college...

The new Holy Grail in American life appears to be a four-year college degree. Almost all high school students and their parents aspire to go to college, and high school graduates are enrolling in much higher numbers than in the past. The problem is that too few of them are graduating. Dropout rates from four-year schools are over 40 percent and from community colleges they are closer to 70 percent. The need for remedial courses to compensate for what kids are not learning in high school is distressingly high and not all that effective. For those who actually graduate, a...

Is getting a bachelor's degree still worth the cost? Payscale, a salary data provider, answered this question by comparing the average cost of education to predicted income over 30 years for graduates at 1,060 schools in the United States. It turns out that most schools are good investments — though Payscale economist Katie Bardaro warns that students should consider individually whether college is worth it for their intended career. At around 3% of the schools, however, the return on investment over 30 years is negative, due to some combination of high tuition and low graduate pay. We've highlighted the worst...

As college tuition keeps rising, so does student debt. Asked about ways to make higher education more affordable, 59 percent of Americans “strongly agreed” that colleges and universities should reduce tuition and fees, and 46 percent said companies should provide more assistance to their employees. Forty percent said the federal government should provide more assistance, 38 percent said state governments should provide more, and 38 percent said community-based scholarship organizations should provide more assistance. …

Graduation season is upon us. It used to be that in the years after hopeful 20-somethings bid farewell to campus life, they'd start borrowing to buy many things typically associated with adulthood – namely, a car and a home. Many had college loans to repay, but that's partly what made brainy go-getters so attractive to banks and lenders. They typically earn more over a lifetime, so they seemed like a safe bet. They may still be, but times have changed. College debt may have once been the good kind of debt, but the scale has grown so big that in...

Having a choice is generally a good thing, and being able to choose among several college acceptances should be a wonderful thing indeed. But let’s face it: the cost of a college education these days ranges from expensive to obscenely expensive. So the decision is likely to be tougher and more emotional than most parents and children imagined as they weigh offers from colleges that have given real financial aid against others that are offering just loans. While some students will be able to go to college only if they receive financial aid and others have the resources to go...

When I applied to law school in 1975, the nation was recovering from a severe and prolonged recession. Even so, I always assumed that I’d be able to make a comfortable living with a legal degree, although I didn’t think that practicing law would make me rich. Three and a half years later, I became a new associate at one of the nation’s largest law firms, Kirkland & Ellis. It had about 150 attorneys in two offices, Chicago and Washington, D.C. My annual salary was $25,000, which is $80,000 in 2012 dollars. There were rumors that some partners in large...

America's student loan debt problem is nothing new: For years, the media has been offering up a flood of stories about people facing decades of debt repayment and crushing interest rates. But with tuitions still rising and employment options for college grads still stagnating, America's potential "student loan bubble" is making many experts increasingly jittery. President Obama's recent budget proposal includes a new plan to tackle the problem, but some critics worry that it could leave students in even worse shape. Pay As You Earn, President Obama's first stab at the student loan issue, came late last year. The...

It's a rough job market for anyone looking for work as we continue to just barely break stagnation levels in the Slowest Recovery Ever, but the picture is particularly bleak for the fresh-faced youths looking start careers. According to a new economic report, the situation is going to be “extremely difficult” for the crop of 2013 college graduates: Unemployment remains high for young college grads. For those who will find jobs, many will probably have to settle for low-level positions, the Economic Policy Institute said Wednesday.The unemployment rate for recent college grads between the ages of 21 to 24 has...

"NEW YORK (MainStreet) —It is a crisis looming on the horizon. Indeed, the possibility of massive defaults of student loans may be this decade’s financial crisis. Some say it would rival the housing bubble and the dot.com bubble in terms of its effect on the national economy. That's a major fear for..." http://www.mainstreet.com/article/moneyinvesting/education-planning/can-student-debt-crisis-outshine-housing-bubble

Print Reuters brings grim tidings from the world of America’s debt-encrusted college students: Banks wrote off $3 billion of student loan debt in the first two months of 2013, up more than 36 percent from the year-ago period, as many graduates remain jobless, underemployed or cash-strapped in a slow U.S. economic recovery, an Equifax study showed.The credit reporting agency also said Monday that student lending has grown from last year because more people are going back to school and the cost of higher education has risen.“Continued weakness in labor markets is limiting work options once people graduate or quit...

You didn't think it was possible, did you? This CNBC article details how the snowball keeps picking up steam as it rolls downhill, threatening to crush the entire student loan program: Student-loan defaults surged in the first three months of 2013, while efforts to collect bad loans are faltering, according to credit analysts and government audits. It is the latest twist in a college debt crisis that is hanging over recent graduates and dragging on the broader economy.Credit-rating firm Equifax said $3.5 billion in government and private student loans went bad in the first three months of 2013, the...

Of course! Democrats love to promise expensive things for free. Free healthcare, free cell phones, free money. Why not free college? Meet Bill Halter who’s running for governor of Arkansas. The emphasis below is mine. Bill’s letter to Arkansans Young adults who receive a college degree today on average can expect to earn $1 million more over the course of their working live than similarly situated Arkansans who do not. But Arkansas currently ranks 49th out of 50 states in the percentage of our workforce with college degrees – behind Mississippi and ahead of only West Virginia. And we’re not...

Senators are pushing to reinstate tuition assistance for members of the U.S. military, decrying a move by the administration to suspend the program citing the sequester. "The president wants Americans to feel the pain of the arbitrary across-the-board budget cuts from sequestration, but to cut off promised education assistance for our service members when there are other lower priority spending programs to draw from is an injustice," Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in a statement. He and Democratic Sen. Kay Hagan of North Carolina introduced an amendment Wednesday to a stopgap...

A student rides a bicycle past the bell tower on the campus of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. (Daniel Acker, Getty Images) For years, politicians and pundits have held forth about the high cost of higher education. Whether the issue du jour is rising tuition prices, falling returns on our educational investment, or the ballooning student debt bubble, the message has generally been the same: College is only getting harder to afford, even as it becomes more necessary. Recently, CourseSmart, an e-textbook provider, created an infographic that lays out in simple terms the details of the college tuition explosion...

SIERRA VISTA— The U.S. Army suspended its tuition assistance program on Friday, which will impact many local soldiers who use those funds to take courses at Cochise College, though those already enrolled are not affected. In response to the suspension, the Cochise College Foundation has re-opened its scholarship application system, extending the deadline to March 20, according to a release from the college. Generally, students need to be enrolled in at least six credits to be eligible for one of the 100-plus scholarships available starting in the fall semester. Cochise College could see an impact from this suspension before the...

How 10 universities in the Lone Star state do it. Recently, Alex Stenner, a sophomore at the University of Wisconsin — Green Bay, saved hundreds of dollars on tuition and hours spent in class. He signed up for a free online introduction to psychology course offered by Education Portal, of Mountain View, Calif.; crammed his studying into two weeks over the Christmas holidays; and then took the College Board's College Level Examination Program (CLEP). After he passed that exam, his university awarded him academic credit for the psychology course. That meant he'd obtained the course credits for only $90 —...

Pity the college graduate, burdened with shocking levels of student-loan debt and looking for a job in the worst employment market in two decades. But save a little pity for the rest of us. The staggering amount of outstanding student debt — nearly $1 trillion owed – is beginning to impede the U.S. economy as a whole, a new report from the New York Federal Reserve suggests, chiefly by robbing the housing market of its richest crop of new buyers: young college graduates. The statistics in the report are dismaying in themselves. With the number of borrowers approaching 40 million...