Free Republic

Jason Collier, a special education teacher in Virginia, often needs to wait until payday to fill up the gas tank of his car — and in the meantime hopes he doesn’t run out. “Money is tight when you’re a teacher,” Collier, 46, said. Now he’s afraid that the U.S. Department of Education will soon garnish up to 15% of his wages because he’s behind on his student debt payments. Collier said he hasn’t been able to meet his monthly bill for years, while juggling the expenses of raising two children and medical expenses from a cancer diagnosis. If his paycheck...

Millions of student loan borrowers are expected to see their credit scores drop by summertime, reversing progress made under pandemic-era protections that lifted credit scores but expired last year.New York Fed research released Wednesday found that over 9 million borrowers with past-due balances could see "significant" decreases in their credit scores. The warning comes after many student loan borrowers' credit scores increased during the period of federal student loan forbearance, which temporarily suspended payment requirements and interest during the COVID-19 crisis. The typical borrower's score jumped 11 points in 2020, rising from 662 to 673.Ads by Money. We may be...

Last week we shared some charts on the utter failure and folly of federal intervention in education for K-12.An even bigger failure has been the $1.5 trillion student loan boondoggle. As even more federal dollars have flowed into higher education in grants and (largely forgivable) loans. This is the result:We got a lot of praise and criticism from readers for our call to impose an excise tax on university tax-free endowments above $1 billion. But what is clear is that almost none of these treasure chests of wealth are being used to make college more affordable. Shameful.

Harvard undergraduate tuition will be free for students from families making $200,000 or less, starting next fall, the university announced Monday in its latest effort to provide an Ivy League education to those who might otherwise be priced out. Attending Harvard will be completely free for students from families making $100,000 or less, with the university committing to cover housing, health insurance and travel costs between campus and home. Undergraduate tuition at Harvard College was more than $56,000 this year, while total cost of attendance was almost $83,000, according to the institution’s financial aid website. (Harvard College is the undergraduate...

Columbia University is one of the most prestigious universities in the world, attracting students from over 120 countries. However, with its elite status comes a hefty price tag. In this article, we’ll break down the costs of attending Columbia University for a semester, covering tuition, fees, housing, and other expenses. Tuition and Fees The first and most significant expense is tuition and fees. For the 2022-2023 academic year, the cost of tuition for Columbia University is: Full-time students: $71,832 per year Part-time students: $4,844 per credit hour

You cannot make this stuff up? USAID, which blessedly is no more, paid for a radical Islamic terrorist’s college tuition. Past receipts show that the former agency footed the bill for Anwar Awlaki’s higher education. Awlaki lied about the country of his birth to obtain funds for college through the State Department. Awlaki later became the point of the lance for al-Qaeda’s digital jihad arm. Investigative Catherine Herridge has more: Looks like USAID supported college tuition for Anwar Aulaqi (Awlaki) who later became a high level al Qaeda terrorist. Aulaqi falsely claimed he was born in Yemen to secure the...

America’s youth are being pushed into a one-size-fits-all college track that saddles many with debt — without preparing them for careers.A few months ago, a handful of lucky Gen Xers virtually won the lottery when the White House directed the Department of Education to “adjust” their student loan accounts, in some cases down to zero. Joel Lambdin, a 49-year-old string musician from New York City, became a poster child for this one-time forgiveness measure, as Business Insider reported. During his studies and bohemian career, Lambdin had accumulated $250,000 in student debt that remained in forbearance for more than 25 years...

Like any Ivy League school, a degree from Yale University has the potential to help you go very far in life. The New Haven, Connecticut-based university has a long list of notable alumni, including actors Angela Bassett and Jodie Foster, Presidents George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush, and billionaire businessman Tom Steyer. Those are just some of the undergraduate alums — the list of notable alumni from Yale's graduate programs is even longer and includes several other U.S. presidents, Supreme Court justices, actors, founders and more. Plus, Yale students go on to command a median salary of $95,961...

A recent Tweet by Elizabeth Warren and a short rebuttal to her inspired this post. Let’s take a look at the Tweet and my 10 reasons.Deeply UnfairThere is something about this "cancel" student debt bill that just feels *deeply* unfair to me. Why have taxes from plumbers & electricians go towards paying the unpaid bills of college & masters grads?I wish we were building a safety net for ppl in poverty with the $167B. https://t.co/lSJE5Psde1 — Michelle Tandler (@michelletandler) May 28, 202410 Reasons Why Student Debt Cancellation is UnfairIt is unfair to those who sacrificed to pay off their student...

Student debt in the U.S. has ballooned to over $1.7 trillion, burdening millions of Americans with financial stress. Rising tuition costs and stagnating wages are considered to be the major drivers of this issue.To gain insight into how this is affecting students, Visual Capitalist's Marcus Lu visualized the results of WalletHub’s Student Money Survey.This survey was conducted in 2024 with a nationally representative sample of 210 students. Results were normalized by gender and income.Data and Key FindingsStudent wealth surveys can provide unique insights into the financial preparedness of younger Americans.Starting with post-grad fears, it appears that the majority of students...

Students who sued the University of Chicago for tuition refunds due to COVID-19 closures have reached a nearly $5 million settlement agreement with the school. The private Illinois university finalized the class-action lawsuit settlement with the students last week, agreeing to pay $4.95 million, according to the Chicago Sun Times. Students affected by the university’s 2020 decision to switch to online classes due to COVID-19 could receive $25 or more from the settlement, the report states.

Money-laundering is the art of taking money illicitly gained and cleaning it so that it cannot be traced back to its source and is therefore free and clear. In the television show Breaking Bad, Walter White and his co-conspirators purchase cash-based businesses such as the A1A Car Wash to launder their profits from cooking perfectly blue crystal meth.Crystal meth is illegal and the profits obviously in need of laundering. Sometimes, though, even legally gained money might need to be laundered. What if the government gave you a contract to do one thing, and you wanted to buy something else with...

Yesterday afternoon, Joe Biden visited Wisconsin and announced a new student loan bailout program, “a proposal that would cancel at least some debt” for more than 30 million borrowers.Then, last night, Alexandria Ocasion-Cortez joined Stephen Colbert on the Late Show to discuss the move, applauding Biden’s gift of “hope” for college graduates who will now have the opportunity to… “travel abroad” on trips they would have been otherwise unable to afford if they were held to the original stipulations of the loan.By passing the debt onto people who didn’t incur it—er, I mean, by implementing loan “forgiveness,” Biden is buying...

A bill making its way through the California legislature could, if approved, pave the way for free college tuition for black students and other perceived marginalized communities.ACA-7 passed the state Assembly in September and sits before the Democrat-controlled Senate. If approved there, it would be put before voters this November.The bill would effectively allow the governor to circumvent the state’s longstanding ban on racial preferences first passed by a majority of voters in 1996 with Proposition 209 and reaffirmed in a 2020 referendum.The measure would allow the governor to use the state’s coffers to fund research-based or culturally specific programs...

The Biden administration's latest plan to "cancel" student loan debt extends to those struggling to repay loans due to financial "hardship." The proposal was devised under the Education Department’s existing rulemaking powers after the Supreme Court struck down Biden’s original student loan bailout plan. A number of factors are set forth in the new proposal to determine hardship, “such as a borrower’s total student loan balance and required payments relative to household income, and whether a borrower has high-cost burdens for essential expenses like healthcare or childcare,” the press release states.The current regulatory process builds on the Biden-Harris Administration’s efforts...

For all his talk about wanting to get the border crisis under control, Joe Biden is still holding out fresh goody bags for the illegals. Sure, California is offering them free health care and New York is offering them free $1,000 debit cards handed out on the honor system that they'll only be used for food and baby supplies. But what better than for Joe Biden to top them by offering free college to illegals, too? That's what this looks like, with this measure preparing the groundwork for it: According to the New York Sun:The Department of Education could soon...

I graduated from college in the 1980s. I took my bachelor’s degree in 2.5 years by taking overloads—up to 22 credits--every semester, and full loads every summer and interim session, as well as a number of correspondence courses from another university when I had to have a class that wasn’t offered when I needed it. At that state college, my education cost a bit less than $10,000. I was an adult, paying my own freight, and needed to get back into the workforce as quickly as possible. I took out no student loans. Tuition then was a fraction of current...

The College Fix has done a series of articles recently estimating the number of administrators at various colleges compared to the number of students. The numbers are pretty surprising.The University of Virginia employs one full-time administrator for every three undergraduates at the school, according to an analysis conducted by The College Fix…During the 2013-14 school year, there were 291 full-time administrators and support staff employees per 1,000 undergrads, and in 2021-22, the most recent year for which data are available, there were 318 full-time administrators and support staff employees per 1,000 undergrads.Meanwhile, the number of full-time educators per 1,000 undergraduates...

For a long time now, the debate has raged as to whether it’s worth going to college anymore. The libertarian view on this question has typically been along the lines of… if people are foolish enough to waste money on worthless degrees, the world will soon enough teach them another lesson. While valid, that view ran aground on the Democrat vote-buying scheme to insulate those with useless degrees from the consequences of their poor choices and indebtedness, with our tax money. The cynical motives behind this ploy aside, I very much doubt many students enroll in college with the intention...

SACRAMENTO — Agustin Guzman spends hours in bumper-to-bumper traffic and crosses an international border just to get to his college classes. But it’s worth it. Though he’s a resident of Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, he pays the same tuition as a student four miles away from Laredo, Texas, thanks to a long-standing state law. “At some point, I stopped believing I could go to college,” said Agustin, 24, a senior at Texas A&M International University. “But now, I tell people that I cross every day — that I do three hours on the bridge just to get a college education.” Soon,...