Black Students
Graduate With More Debt Than Whites, Study Finds
Black college graduates take on significantly more student debt than do
their white counterparts, according to a new study by
Gallup. The study, conducted with Purdue University and the Lumina
Foundation, found that half of black students who graduated from 2000 to
2014 reported graduating with more than $25,000 in debt, compared with 34
percent of white graduates who reported that level of debt. According
to the study, the gap has remained roughly the same during the past four
decades.
The Chronicle of Higher Education, September 18, 2014
High Impact,
Low Participation
Community colleges now have solid data on which strategies work best to
help students get to graduation. While more colleges are using those
techniques, far too few students are benefiting from them.
Inside Higher Ed, September 18, 2014
These People
Can Make Student Loans Disappear
Since November 2012, Rolling Jubilee has purchased and eradicated
about $15 million worth of debt arising from unpaid medical bills. Today,
the group announced that it has erased $3.9 million in private student
loans, including Courtney Brown's and those of almost 3,000 other students
of the for-profit Everest College. Rolling Jubilee is a project of a
group of economic activists called Strike Debt, which formed out
of the Occupy Wall Street movement. The group timed today's announcement
for the third anniversary of that protest. The word "jubilee"
refers to a time decreed in the Bible, every 49th year, when all debts were
ritually forgiven, and slaves and prisoners freed.
NPR, September 17, 2014
A Passion to
Highlight Which Colleges Do Well by Low-Income Students
Mr. [Stephen] Burd has continued to track the issue at the New America
Foundation, where he is a senior policy analyst in the
education-policy program. On Wednesday the think tank will release
the second installment of "Undermining Pell," Mr.
Burd’s look at colleges’ shares of low-income students and the prices those
students pay.
The Chronicle of Higher Education, September 17, 2014
What a Consumer
Watchdog's Suit Against Corinthian Could Mean for Other Colleges
It’s a pretty safe bet that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau won’t
see much of the half-billion-plus dollars it demanded from Corinthian
Colleges Inc., in a lawsuit the bureau filed on
Tuesday that accused the company of predatory lending and illegal
collection tactics. Since June the for-profit college company has been selling
off or closingits 100-plus campuses, after a crackdown by the
U.S. Department of Education.
The Chronicle of Higher Education, September 17, 2014
The Power of
the Personal
Under fierce pressure to do more with less, colleges today need improvement
strategies that are simultaneously reliable, powerful, available, and
cheap. Such methods should consistently work well, clearly repay the effort
they require, be usable by almost anyone on campus, and require little time
and no additional money (since there probably isn’t much lying around).
These are strict criteria, but they are achievable. In particular, there is
one step colleges can take right now to engage students, without spending a
cent or creating a new program: They can encourage more face-to-face human
contact. Such human contact, with its power to grab students’ attention and
motivate them, may be the key to workable improvement strategies.
The Chronicle of Higher Education, September 15, 2014
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