Free Republic

It is hard to know exactly how to interpret the plight of the modern college student. The term "lost generation" isn't exactly original, having been used to describe grads during the three "jobless" recoveries of the interest rate targeting age, but the current predicament is much more dire and unrelenting. At least the graduate population after the dot-com recession had a housing bubble to look forward to, as the current iteration of asset inflation holds little such "hope." The labor force participation rate for those people 25 years and older with a Bachelor's degree peaked around 1995 at 81%. After...

Elizabeth Warren wants paying for college to be like paying for a car. No, she doesn’t want mandatory airbags in colleges or Presidents’ Day sales on tuition. Instead, the senator from Massachusetts wants students to be able to refinance federal student loans. Unlike a loan to pay for a house, a vehicle, or just about anything else your heart desires, you can’t refinance a student loan. The result is that student loans have become a rare way for the federal government to generate revenue, making $66 billion in profits off them between 2007-2012. Warren told The Daily Beast that she...

Florida, Indiana, Massachusetts, Missouri, Mississippi, New Hampshire and Virginia have bills under consideration that would extend the in-state benefit, said Tanya Broder, a senior attorney with the National Immigration Law Center.

igher education reminds many of gruelling hours in the library, re-heating Pot Noodles and grubby student pubs. Additional culinary adventures are determined by what can be found in the supermarket’s reduced section rather than by what you fancy for dinner. However, the students at High Point University are having a rather different experience. The campus, located in High Point, North Carolina, has more resemblance to a theme park than a traditional university, and boasts amenities you are more likely to find at a high-end hotel than at a school. Aside from the jaw-dropping buildings, a result of more than $700million...

When newspaper editors are in the mood to run a good old-fashioned screed about the collapsing value of college, they inevitably turn to Richard Vedder, an Ohio University economist who runs the Center for College Affordability and Productivity. Vedder likes to argue that the financial return on a B.A. is falling, graduates are chronically underemployed, and that our profligate universities are in for a reckoning once everyone wises up and stops throwing their money away. (For what it's worth, I tend to disagree). Today Vedder and one of his students, Christopher Denhart, have upped the ante a bit for The...

After years of cuts in state subsidies and growing resistance to rising tuition, U.S. colleges and universities are starting to unwind decades of administrative bloat and back-office waste that helped push up costs and tuition. The State University of New York system shaved $48 million in the past two years by cutting unused software licenses and consolidating senior administrators. The University of California, Berkeley, cut $70 million since 2011 by centralizing purchasing and laying off a layer of middle managers, among other things. And the University of Kansas revamped its back-office operations to save about $5 million in 2013. One...

DECATUR — A judge said Thursday that he needs more information and time to decide the case of a group of young people who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children and want the Georgia university system to grant them in-state tuition. The roughly three dozen young immigrants have been granted temporary permission to stay in the U.S. under an Obama administration policy introduced last year. They filed a lawsuit in August asking a judge to instruct the university system’s Board of Regents to allow them to qualify for in-state tuition. At a hearing Thursday, DeKalb County Superior Court...

Academics tend to circle the wagons when you suggest that Pell grant increases lead to tuition hikes. “There has been research on this that shows that Pell grants have not led to higher tuition,” Judith Scott-Clayton, of Columbia alleged in a forum at the National Press Club Monday. Scott-Clayton is an assistant professor of economics and education at Teacher’s College at Columbia. She spoke at a forum sponsored by the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution. On the same panel, Gail Mellow, president of LaGuardia Community College, claimed that, “One of the reasons tuition keeps going up has been a...

It's common knowledge that college costs are on the rise. But you may be surprised to know that some schools currently charge over $60,000 to educate a student for just one year. A list recently released by the Department of Education charts the highest tuition in the country. Unfortunately, the tuition numbers used in the rankings are two years old, and fail to show the contemporary college landscape. The list also ignores the total cost of an education. Most four-year residential colleges will tack on an extra ten grand or more for room, board, and a wide range of other...

Every time I write or speak about college, I tend to upset many parents and other decent, educated people. They are righteously offended at the mere suggestion that college isn’t necessarily the only way to go. Angry mothers email to tell me that my “anti-college” message is polluting the minds of their children. They don’t want their kids to skip college and become hobos and drug addicts. This is understandable. I should know — I’m one of those malcontents who decided not to get a four year degree. And what a tragedy my life has been ever since I made...

The S&P Case-Shiller repeat sales house price index for 20 metro areas rose 0.89% in June, and rose 12.07% YoY. Now THAT is a big increase in house prices! cshp082713 House prices are back to October 2008 levels. cschart082713 But Case-Shiller was no surprise if you follow CoreLogic’s Loan Performance HPI that came out earlier. Atlanta was the leader on major metro areas in June. csloanhp082713 And Washington DC is the worst performing major metro (but still up 1% in June). csmetro082713 csmetro2082713 House prices continue to rise despite flat-lined mortgage purchase applications. cs20mbap082713 Inflation in college tuition is rivaling...

Another school year beckons, which means it's time for President Obama to go on another college retreat. "He loves college tours," says Ohio University's Richard Vedder, who directs the Center for College Affordability and Productivity. "Colleges are an escape from reality. Believe me, I've lived in one for half a century. It's like living in Disneyland. They're these little isolated enclaves of nonreality." Mr. Vedder, age 72, has taught college economics since 1965 and published papers on the likes of Scandinavian migration, racial disparities in unemployment and tax reform. Over the last decade he's made himself America's foremost expert on...

SYRACUSE, N.Y. — While making the pitch on his new college affordability plan for a second time, President Obama was interrupted by pro-Bradley Manning hecklers at Henninger High School in Syracuse, N.Y., Thursday evening. Two women holding a giant “Free Bradley Manning” sign yelled at the president in the middle of his speech. It was unclear what the women were saying, but they were escorted out of the gymnasium to applause from the crowd. When the women started shouting, the president said, “I hear you,” and tried to calm down the crowd. After the two women left, Obama called the...

NEW YORK (MainStreet)—The government is providing assistance for student debtors in creating default avoidance plans for them. But what about the parents who borrowed money through the PLUS program? What options have they? Not many it seems.

On Martin Bashir’s Thursday MSNBC program, New York Democratic Rep. Charles Rangel said that no students should have to pay for college. Rangel was reacting to President Barack Obama’s higher education proposal rollout that would put in place requirements for students and institutions to receive federal financial aid assistance. Rangel explained to fill-in host Joy Reid that he support Obama’s plan, particularly the accountability components. “I think it’s exciting, and certainly it’s going to bring in accountability,” he said. “You know, we have universities scattered all over the world. Sometimes you think that tuition means nothing to a large group...

President Obama unveiled a new plan Thursday designed to shame colleges and universities over rapidly escalating tuition costs, warning the nation is facing "a crisis in terms of college affordability and student debt." At a series of events across New York state, the president touted his order to the Department of Education to create a new ranking system that grades universities on their value to students, providing applicants with a clearer idea of which schools give students the best bang for their buck. He also proposed tying federal aid to the rating system, arguing that the federal government should not...

President Barack Obama on Thursday will unveil a broad plan to lower the cost of college, the highlight of which involves a new ratings system that ties the federal government's allocation of financial aid to the ratings system. Obama's plan would instruct the Department of Education to rank colleges with their peers, according to new measures that evaluates their success and affordability. Some of these measures, according to the White House, include the following: * Access, such as percentage of students receiving Pell grants; * Affordability, such as average tuition, scholarships, and loan debt; and * Outcomes, such as graduation...

For years we've heard the propaganda line that everyone needs to go to college -- that a degree will improve your status and standard of living. It has become politically incorrect to even suggest that a higher education degree might not be right for every young American. So it's not surprising that those without a college degree often feel inferior and marginalized. Has a college degree become the litmus test for whether a person is well educated and successful? These highly successfully individuals would likely disagree with that premise. Michael Dell, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs, Richard...

Last year I wrote about some of the myths surrounding higher education in the U.S. You also have to beware of colleges acting to redistribute wealth. Following is an anecdote with which I am intimately acquainted: In the mid-‘90s, there was a family (a white family which you will see is a significant detail) whose daughter had a sterling high school record that guaranteed her acceptance at all but the very top colleges in the country. This girl had everything—a nearly perfect grade point average and strong SAT scores, leadership and citizenship awards, three MVP awards in two different sports,...

NEW YORK (MainStreet) — As we said in Part 1, the terms for lending money to college students for their tuition are such that they would make loan sharks green with envy. One aspect of these loansthat make them very attractive to private lenders is the near impossibility of them being discharged in bankruptcy. "They are almost guaranteed to be collected, so it is easy to sell the notes," said Barmak Nassirian, formerly an official with the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers. [Read: Avoid Popular Stocks like the Devil] More bluntly, Clare Law, a certified educational planner,...