Obama eases student loan burden
President Obama will offer some relief to borrowers trying to pay back student loans. A measure passed by Congress to limit repayments to 10 percent of discretionary income — down from 15 percent — will go into effect in 2012 instead of 2014. The remainder of the loan will be forgiven after 20 years instead [...]
Report: Asian/Pacific students overlooked
Tagged as the “model minority,” the fast-growing Asian-American and Pacific Islander population is overlooked in the college completion agenda, complains a report by the Asian & Pacific Islander American Scholarship Fund and the National Commission on Asian American and Pacific Islander Research in Education. While some Asian-American subgroups have very high college enrollment and graduation rates, other [...]
Early college needs to be free
Early college programs will be cost-free for students as part of Pathways to College grants in the Harkin-Enzi bill, which reauthorizes the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Sen. Harkin’s HELP Committee approved an amendment ensuring that, but didn’t seem to understand the early college concept, writes Mary Nguyen on The Quick and the Ed. Early [...]
Surviving austerity with honor
As times get tougher on campus, political infighting gets meaner, writes Rob Jenkins, who teaches at Georgia Perimeter College, in The Two-Year Track. He calls for academics to rediscover a sense of honor to cope with austerity. If ever any group of individuals should pull together, it would be college faculty in today’s unsettled (and [...]
Summer bridge helps in Texas
Developmental summer bridge programs helped prepare low-skilled students for college in Texas, concludes the National Center for Postsecondary Research (NCPR) Teachers College. Compared to a control group, bridge participants at seven community colleges and one open-admissions university were more likely to take and pass college-level math and writing classes in the fall semester. Participants also [...]
Student Loan Countdown
Franchesca Leigh Ramsey’s Student Loan Countdown takes off on Beyoncé’s video for her hit song “Countdown.” A 27-year-old freelance graphic designer in New York City, Ramsey was graduated from Miami International University of Art and Design with a bachelor in fine arts and more than $100,000 in student loans, notes GOOD.
No more ‘overmathing’ in Virginia
Virginia community colleges are redesigning remedial education, writes Rose Asera in Innovation at Scale for Jobs for the Future. The goal is improve success rates — completion of a workforce credential, associate degree or transfer to a four-year institution — by 50 percent for all students, 75 percent for blacks and Hispanics. By 2013, developmental [...]
Paying for dropouts
Community college dropouts cost federal, state and local taxpayers nearly $4 billion over a five-year period, concludes an American Institutes for Research (AIR) study on The Hidden Costs of Community Colleges. The study looked at first-year, full-time, credential-seeking students, who are much more likely to graduate than part-timers or returning students, from 2004 to 2009. [...]
Postsecondary paths out of poverty
“Employment is the answer to poverty. Education is the answer to unemployment,” said Sharon Morrissey, senior vice president for the North Carolina Community College System (NCCCS), at the inaugural meeting of the Center for Analysis of Postsecondary Education and Employment (CAPSEE) at Teachers College, Columbia University. CAPSEE will research how well a variety of postsecondary [...]
$1 trillion in student loans
Student loan debt will exceed $1 trillion this year, reports USA Today. Students borrowed $100 billion for college in 2010. Students are borrowing twice what they did a decade ago after adjusting for inflation, the College Board reports. Total outstanding debt has doubled in the past five years — a sharp contrast to consumers reducing [...]
