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Any sanguine prognosticators who may have predicted a decline in the average cost of attending college may need to rethink how they arrived at such an off-the mark conclusion. college grad hire me At least 50 American colleges and universities are now charging students more than $60,000 per year. This marks a significant increase from last year when only nine schools exceeded the 60K mark. What’s shocking about this year’s figures is that the data presented in the story from Business Insider does “not reveal the true financial burden of higher education.” Other fees not included in the story include...

As the average cost of higher education in America continues to rise, at least 50 American colleges and universities are now charging students more than $60,000 per year. We found these numbers by examining the average cost of tuition, fees, room, and board that an incoming student would face over the 2014-15 academic year. Check out a more in-depth breakdown of the 20 most expensive colleges here >>While these direct costs are a significant portion of the total cost of college, they alone do not reveal the true financial burden of higher education — students are also responsible for paying...

Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach has fired back at his critics. Kobach announced that his Republican primary opponent, Scott Morgan of Lawrence, had one last day to switch party affiliations from Republican to Democrat before the Aug. 5 primary election, according to a news release.

Congratulations, graduates, on your diploma. Now what about that $29,000 student loan debt? More than 70 percent of graduates will carry student debt into the real world, according to the Institute for College Access and Success. And the average debt is just shy of $30,000. But the news will get worse next week when interest rates on student loans are set to rise again. Though federal student loan rates are fixed for the life of the loan, these rates reset for new borrowers every July 1, thanks to legislation that ties the rates to the performance of the financial markets....

Hillary Clinton will continue to “work hard” recovering from being “near broke” to stay not “truly well-off” by collecting $225,000 for a speech in Las Vegas at the public university campus there. The University of Nevada, Las Vegas coincidentally has just announced a tuition increase of 4% a year for the next 4 years. David Martosko of the UK Daily Mail reports: Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will collect a $225,000 speaking fee from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas in October, it emerged on Tuesday. The massive expense was confirmed just weeks after the university formalized a 4...

[SNIP] We allow people to declare bankruptcy in acknowledgment that letting people escape from debt they cannot repay is a beneficial policy for both society and the economy. To exempt a particular type of debt—for an activity society should very much like to encourage—belies the very reason for a bankruptcy law in the first place. Lending a student $60,000 to attend a private school he may have little chance of graduating from is not terribly different than the mortgage lenders who gave imprudent loans to people buying homes they could not really afford. [SNIP] If we are concerned that allowing...

With high school graduation season out of the way, countless families are facing the hefty price tag of sending their children to college. Over the past five years, tuition rates for private four-year colleges have risen 14 percent, while rates for public colleges have risen 27 percent. If you look back thirty years, tuition has risen a shocking 1200 percent. There is plenty of speculation about the reasons for these rising costs, which have outpaced inflation for decades. But far more important to millions of parents is how to minimize and manage them. According to the National Center for Education...

There are plenty of problems with American higher education: Its price keeps rising rapidly, some qualified students still don’t have access to it, and others end up at institutions for which they are ill suited. President Obama proposed a plan this week to enable existing student-loan borrowers to lower their payments, which addresses none of these concerns. Student debt is a real problem, but the cost of college is a much bigger one, and this is a temporary salve, applied unevenly. A number of federal programs already limit annual payments on recently issued student loans to a certain percentage of...

Tuition is up 1,200 percent in 30 years. Here's why you're unemployed, crushed by debt -- and no one is helping The price of a year at college has increased by more than 1,200 percent over the last 30 years, far outpacing any other price the government tracks: food, housing, cars, gasoline, TVs, you name it. Tuition has increased at a rate double that of medical care, usually considered the most expensive of human necessities. It has outstripped any reasonable expectation people might have had for investments over the period. And, as we all know, it has crushed a generation...

It's no secret that college tuition and textbook inflation is just out of control.Expensive as it seems now though, the picture is only expected to get scarier, according to a new report from Michael Conrath and his team at JP Morgan Funds.This chart shows that future college costs are expected to inflate 5% per year, taking annual private college costs (for tuition, fees, room and board for a year) from $39,518 today to $90,576 in 2030 (in 2012 dollars). JP Morgan FundsFor you parents, the younger your child is, the more expensive college is likely going to be going forward....

Maggie is a straight-laced, straight-A student studying to become an international affairs lawyer, who will graduate debt-free all thanks to the unusual way she pays her tuition. Maggie, 23, a double-major in Spanish and political science, is a student by day and a stripper by night. Every other weekend, Maggie, who asked that her last name not be used, takes the three-hour ride from her college in Maryland to Manhattan, where she performs at a dance club called Scores. “I have a class that ends at 5:30, hop on a bus at 6:00, and be at work by 8:30,” Maggie...

Yesterday we provided a detailed breakdown of the cost aspects of a college education, particularly for young people who have no choice but to fund their education with student debt, a key part of the equation that the San Fran Fed in its particular cost-benefit "analysis" of college education avoided.There is much information in the post, but one particular aspect of the Pew analysis that the article was based on, bears repeating and highlighting for all those less than "1%" young Americans debating whether a college education is worth the tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in...

Point Lookout, Mo. Looking for the biggest bargain in higher education? I think I found it in this rural Missouri town, 40 miles south of Springfield, nestled in the foothills of the Ozark Mountains. The school is College of the Ozarks, and it operates on an education model that could overturn the perverse method of financing college education that is turning this generation of young adults into a permanent debtor class. At this college the tuition is nowhere near the $150,000 to $200,000 for a four-year degree that the elite top-tier universities are charging. At College of the Ozarks, tuition...

There’s a debate among economists about why a college degree is worth so much. That the credential is valuable is not in doubt. According to the Pew Research Center, college graduates earn about $17,500 more annually than high school grads. Why? The “human capital” school believes that students learn valuable skills in college that employers are willing to pay for. The “signaling” school doubts that the content of a college education is really that marketable. They argue instead that employers are interested in the traits — diligence, intelligence, self-control — that a degree reflects. For decades, politicians have bought votes...

by Brian Hayes | Top Right NewsThe New Hampshire Senate spiked a bill making students who entered the country illegally eligible for in-state tuition rates at University System of New Hampshire schoolsThe Senate's action rejected the N.H. House that had passed the same bill earlier this year.The move surprised some observers and showed how little influence pro-amnesty U.S. Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) has over the upper house in her state. Ayotte had supported the bill.

Another month, another confirmation that when it comes to the US consumer, it is all about student debt (and to a lesser extent, car loans). Moments ago the Fed reported that consumer credit number for March: at $17.5 billion, it not only blew out the expectation of a $15.5 billion increase (although when one adds last month's $3.5 billion downward revision to $13.0 billion the two month total actually missed), but was the highest monthly increase since February 2013. That's the good news.  The bad news was once again in the composition: of this $17.5 billion $16.4 billion was...

ALEXANDRIA, VA. (AP) – Attorney General Mark Herring on Tuesday instructed Virginia colleges to grant in-state tuition to potentially thousands of students who were previously considered ineligible because of their immigration status. The policy change, announced in front of hundreds of cheering immigration advocates at Northern Virginia Community College's Alexandria campus, is a change from the Democrat's Republican predecessors. In the past, the attorney general's office had advised that students who entered the country illegally were barred from receiving in-state tuition, even if they were children when they immigrated.

The federal student loan program is becoming so costly to taxpayers that even President Obama is pretending to fix it. Readers will recall Mr. Obama as the man who has spent much of his Presidency expanding this program, creating new ways for borrowers to avoid repayment, and then campaigning about these dubious achievements on campuses nationwide. Now Team Obama is acknowledging that his policies are turning out to be more expensive than he claimed. Participation in federal debt-forgiveness programs is surging. In a mere six months the number of borrowers who've signed up for such plans has increased to more...

American education is in trouble—that much seems to be a given. Our public schools and colleges are getting poor results, our young people are drowning in debt, new graduates can't find jobs, and our overall rankings in the world are pretty dismal. We are greatly in need of a transformation, but we need to think big, because the problem is huge. In 2012, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development tested 15-year-olds in 64 countries in math, science, and reading. Out of 64 countries, the U.S. Scored 23rd in science, 20th in reading, and 29th in math. Not only is...

"It's impossible to work your way through college nowadays"...is the hard-to-swallow (but not entirely surprising) conclusion of Randal Olson's research into just how extreme national tuition costs have become in the US. As The Atlantic notes, the economic cards are stacked such that today’s average college student, without support from financial aid and family resources, would need to complete at least 48 hours of minimum-wage work a week to pay for his courses. To better measure the cost of tuition, Olson links to a Reddit discussion of cost per "credit hours" - MSU calculates tuition by the "credit hour," the...