Free Republic

Presented with no snark or ironic comment whatsoever...

Should legislators approve in-state tuition rates for students who entered the country illegally with their parents? Yes No

It's a point we've made a million times. We're making it again. What's the most expensive college in America? Ask Google, Princeton Review, or the Chronicle of Higher Education, and you'll get the same answer: Sarah Lawrence University at $61,236. It's kind of crazy. No, not (just) the price. It's crazy that when we talk about price, we often only talk about tuition, a sticker shock that only 35 percent of Sarah Lawrence graduates pay in full. The Sarah Lawrence story is typical. Only a third of full-time students at four-year public and private schools pay the published price at...

[1]Back in 1962, Robert Gover published a novel called the One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding [2] whose premise Amazon describes this way: “A college sophomore spends a weekend with a pretty 14-year-old black prostitute under the manly misapprehension that she has invited him because she finds him irresistible.”I remember reading it as an undergraduate and finding it mildly amusing. Of course, inflation being what it is, it’s hard to write a book about a piddling hundred dollar misunderstanding anymore. But somehow the novel came to mind today when reading one of my favorite websites — The College Fix [3]. The...

In its recent ruling that athletes at Northwestern University have the right to unionize, the National Labor Relations Board cited the case of senior quarterback Kain Colter, who naively thought that he could pursue a pre-med degree while also playing on the school’s football team. When he attempted to enroll in a required chemistry class during his sophomore year, “Colter testified that his coaches and advisors discouraged him from taking the class because it conflicted with morning football practices. Colter consequently had to take this class in the summer session, which caused him to fall behind his classmates who were...

My friend and fellow retired Army officer, Dr. Rich Swier, has posted some  interesting factoids about enabling the dreams of illegals over the aspirations  and dreams of Americans. Swier writes, “In a report released by  Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) the impact of providing  College Tuition Subsidy for Illegal Aliens (HB851/SB1400, a.k.a. in-state  tuition) will be that approximately 5,000 legal students will be displaced in  Florida higher level institutions by illegal alien students.  These legislators  are unwilling to raise taxes for the additional illegal alien students by  expanding capacity so legal students will consequently be displaced.” This means  a lot...

If you’ve seen the occasional stories on “sex weeks” at Yale and Harvard, you might be surprised to know that many colleges and universities officially devote more than seven days to the subject. “In reality, I suspect many parents have little sense of the extent to which their son’s or daughter’s university promotes this sexual ideology—it’s not the kind of information included in university admissions packets or fact sheets,” Mary Rice Hasson wrote in an article which appeared in the winter edition of The Family in America, published by the Howard Center for Family, Religion and Society. Hasson has done...

A lot of Internet ink has been spilled over how lazy and entitled Millennials are, but when it comes to paying for a college education, work ethic isn't the limiting factor. The economic cards are stacked such that today’s average college student, without support from financial aid and family resources, would need to complete 48 hours of minimum-wage work a week to pay for his courses—a feat that would require superhuman endurance, or maybe a time machine. To take a close look at the tuition history of almost any institution of higher education in America is to confront an unfair...

Here's a typical college scenario: Your daughter's dream job is to be an elementary school teacher and reading specialist. Yet she'll need to dive deep into debt to pursue her undergraduate degree, and borrow more if continuing to grad school. She's worried -- rightfully -- about her financial future, and she's looking for answers. How much debt might she be saddled with? How much will her college degree translate into salary once she lands a job? And what budget-squeezing sacrifices might be necessary to repay the swath of loans? Those types of questions are on the minds of countless college...

MORRIS PLAINS, N.J. - A New Jersey couple does not have to pay for their 18-year-old daughter's college education, a judge ruled Tuesday, CBS New York reports. Judge Peter Bogaard denied Rachel Canning's request $600 a month in support, high school tuition back pay, college tuition and legal fees. But he said he would revisit the issue of college tuition at the end of April, about a month after her financial aid forms are due. Earlier her lawyer said the parents of the high school honor student should have sought help for their daughter rather than cutting her off financially...

An 18-year-old New Jersey honor student and cheerleader has been tossed from her parents’ Lincoln Park home, but demands that her mother and father continue to pay her private high school and impending college costs — as well as her mounting lawyer fees, according to her lawsuit. Rachel Canning claims she’s been out of her parents’ home since her 18th birthday, Nov. 1, after her parents vowed to cut her off “from all support both financially and emotionally.” But Sean and Elizabeth Canning say their “spoiled” college-bound daughter doesn’t live by their house rules and left the home because she...

Chris Rong did everything right. A 23-year-old dentistry student in New York, Chris excelled at one of the country’s top high schools, breezed through college, and is now studying dentistry at one of the best dental schools in the nation. But it may be a long time before he sees any rewards. He’s moved back home with his parents in Bayside, Queens—an hour-and-a-half commute each way to class at the New York University’s College of Dentistry—and by the time he graduates in 2016, he’ll face $400,000 in student loans. “If the money weren’t a problem I would live on my...

It hasn't been a good week for the housing market. Sales of previously owned homes fell 5.1% in January -- the fifth drop in the past six months -- to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.62 million, the lowest level in a year and a half. New home construction fell 16% in January compared to December -- the biggest percentage drop in almost three years -- and permits slipped by more than 5%. Homebuilders reported a 10-point decline in their confidence index for February to 46 -- below the key 50-point level which separates a growing market from a...

In America, total student loan debt tops $1 trillion and a four-year college degree can cost as much as a house — leaving many families wondering if college is really worth the cost.Yes, a new study of young people finds. The study, released Tuesday by the Pew Research Center, looks at income and unemployment among young adults. Paul Taylor, executive vice president of special projects at Pew, says it's pretty much case closed when it comes to the benefits of going to college."In a modern, knowledge-based economy, the only thing more expensive than going to college is not going to...

A look at the latest education news seems to show that academia’s left hand doesn’t know what its far left hand is doing. From the Chronicle of Higher Education we learn that “As students confront rising college costs and a labyrinthine financial-aid process, some are turning to crowdfunding websites like Go-FundMe to cover their expenses.” “While the approach is still novel and hardly widespread, financial-aid officials say, enthusiasm for online campaigns is very much a reflection of the times,” Libby Sander wrote in the Chronicle. “Students are frustrated with the aid process, eager to avoid student-loan debt, and worried over...

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...