Free Republic

The average college graduate holds at least $35,200 of debt and has spent four years out of the workforce, where he or she would be otherwise gaining experience. All this for a piece of paper that by no means guarantees a job. The question that potential and current college students need to ask is: Do the financial costs, opportunity costs, and other factors justify the cost of college? For a select few, the answer may be yes. For a surprising number of people, it will be no. Does the financial cost justify going to college? It depends on what you...

As a regular reader of this column, you are acutely aware of the crisis in college education and particularly the soaring costs. As costs have climbed very little effort has been made to control them or limit the genesis of those costs. Our President has floated a plan which is destined for the scrap heap to have the federal government step in and rate colleges and then control federal funds to those colleges. A new way of funding college educations has emerged from the legislature in Oregon, and we took a look here. We first became aware of this new...

We spend about twice as much as other developed countries as a fraction of national output. Yet our results are mediocre. Public and private spending is growing much faster than our income ? putting us on a course that is clearly unsustainable. It appears we are buying quantity instead of value. Outcomes vary wildly from state to state. And programs that target the poor seem to be backfiring instead. I could easily be talking about health care. Instead, I'm speaking about higher education ? making some of the same points that President Obama made the other day. Unfortunately, both fields...

What ever happened to the medium once known as Little Magazines? This country once had a select group of literary and political journals that represented the vanguard of American thought and art. Some were both literary and political. High Culture, it was called when there was still such a thing. For example, the old and much-missed Partisan Review. Its first issue as an independent journal in 1937 included Delmore Schwartz's short story, "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities," a poem by Wallace Stevens, and pieces by Lionel Trilling, Sidney Hook and Edmund Wilson -- once names to conjure with. Begun as the...

Half of recent college graduates can’t find employment. Those who find a job often settle for something less than a “college level job.” So what good is a college education, anyway, in our very unstable economy? As 2013 launches with more federal government debt and American businesses guessing when the next punitive regulatory show will drop, most Americans are ignoring an area of societal upheaval that is poised to get more intense. Increasingly, Americans are wondering how essential it is for one to possess a college degree. The upheaval transcends what you’ll read in the occasional “top paying” and...

Sorry, college students. President Obama has cut your access to Pell Grants by 33%; he just forgot to mention it before Election Day. During the recent campaign, President Obama claimed credit for increasing funding to the Pell Grant program, which provides college funds, free from repayment, to millions of students. However, an email sent out Tuesday to some Dallas college students is revealing a detail the President forgot to mention: the time a student can receive a Pell Grant has been cut, by as much as three years. With Pell Grants for the fall semester now dispersed, colleges are informing...

America’s accumulated college-loan debt will surpass $1 trillion this year; what is our leadership doing about it? The Obama Administration took over the student loan market and expanded Pell Grants, but hasn’t accomplished anything to address the root cause of the crisis: exploding college fees and related costs. The only thing they’ve done is criticize innovators and entrepreneurs. The Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP), chaired by Senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), issued a new report calling into question the costs and performance of For-Profit universities. There are actually hundreds of these schools, perhaps the most well-known being...

Full title: We petition the obama administration to: provide University graduates ability to trade their diplomas back for 100% tuition refunds. We petition the obama administration to: provide University graduates ability to trade their diplomas back for 100% tuition refunds. Because of the inability of recent college graduates to find gainful employment in order to repay their college debt, and since this college debt cannot be eliminated in bankruptcy, and most of the recent additions to the job market have been in service related industries, the Obama administration should take up the cause of reducing college debt and hold those...

AUSTIN — Tea party conservatives will push next year to rescind a state law that allows illegal immigrants to pay state-resident tuition rates, and when they do, a little-known fact could be at the center of the debate: Students who aren’t citizens are also eligible for state financial aid. Nearly 2,500 students who are in the country illegally received more than $9.5 million in state higher education grants in fiscal year 2010, the most recent figures available from the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. There were 16,476 illegal-immigrant students paying resident tuition rates, meaning more than 1 in 7 get...

Ancient Sparta turned its conquered neighbors into indentured serfs -- half free, half slave. The resulting Helot underclass produced the food of the Spartan state, freeing Sparta's elite males to train for war and the duties of citizenship. Over the last few decades, we've created our modern version of these Helots -- millions of indebted young Americans with little prospect of finding permanent well-paying work, servicing their enormous college debts or reaping commensurate financial returns on their costly educations. Student-loan debts now average about $25,000 per graduating senior. But the percentage of youths 16 to 24 who are working (about...

IF INSANITY is doing the same thing again and again but expecting a different outcome, then the federal government's strategy for keeping higher education affordable is crazier than Norman Bates. For decades, American politicians have waxed passionate on the need to put college within every family's reach. To ensure that anyone who wants to go to college will be able to foot the bill, Washington has showered hundreds of billions of dollars into student aid of all kinds -- grants and loans, subsidized work-study jobs, tax credits and deductions. Today, that shower has become a monsoon. As Neal McCluskey points...

Today Rush Limbaugh aired a brilliant clip of a clueless Occupy Wall Street protester who wants people to pay for his college tuition because “that’s what he wants.” Check out the video:

Like many wealthy universities, Harvard offers only "need-based" financial aid, which means that rich parents need to pay much more than poor ones. Using the calculator at the site listed above, you can estimate the marginal income tax rate Harvard imposes. Assuming zero student assets, Harvard expects parents to contribute 10% of income up to $150K, which is $15K for parents earning $150K. Above that level, the marginal income tax is much higher. Parents earning $235K are expected to pay $52K. The marginal tax rate for income rising to $150K to $235K is (52-15)/(235-150) = 43.5% . This is of...

Public universities across the U.S. are arguing for freedom to reap more revenue and create more efficiencies to offset dwindling state dollars. One way, they say, is to raise tuition. At California University of Pennsylvania, a 158-year-old state school serving 9,400 students, enrollment is rising for all but the poorest students, which, in part, has led to a novel idea: replace the "low tuition for all" policy with a market-rate policy. University officials say students from wealthier families could afford to pay more than the average $5,804 annual tuition at the state's 14 universities. Fresh revenue from the higher tuition,...

As their state financing dwindled, four-year public universities increased their published tuition and fees almost 8 percent this year, to an average of $7,605, according to the College Board’s annual reports. When room and board are included, the average in-state student at a public university now pays $16,140 a year. At private nonprofit colleges and universities, tuition rose 4.5 percent to an average of $27,293, or $36,993 with room and board. The good news in the 2010 “Trends in College Pricing” and “Trends in Student Aid” reports is that fast-rising tuition costs have been accompanied by a huge increase in...

Colorado lawmakers this week unveiled a major overhaul of the state's college tuition program that seeks to raise an additional $300 million by requiring parents and students to pay more. Lawmakers announced the move as a way to help the state cover a projected $1.7 billion budget shortfall next fall. If approved, the measure would go into effect this November. In exchange, colleges would have to meet strict goals for graduation and employment of students or they would have to roll back tuition increases. it's not unreasonable to ask students to work 10 hours a week during the semester and...

... Across the nation, college prepaid plans are operating in the red, putting their promises to investors like Ms. Lambert in jeopardy. For now, the states still are paying tuition as they agreed. But the fine print in some state contracts gives them some wiggle room to pay out less than the promised amounts. "There's an aura of guarantee around many of these programs," said Tim Ranzetta of Student Lending Analytics. "But when you dig into it, it's often a lot less than you'd expect." Prepaid plans—a type of 529 plan where qualified educational distributions are tax free—allow families to...

I have received a number of e-mails over the years from disgruntled parents griping about the left-wing indoctrination their kids are forced to undergo at colleges and universities all over America. One minute, it seems the kids are sane, or at least as sane as one can expect of 18-year-olds, and the next thing you know they’re parroting the likes of Ward Churchill, William Ayers and Noam Chomsky, bad-mouthing America and yodeling the praises of such left-wing troglodytes as Hugo Chavez, the Castro brothers and Barack Obama. I feel their frustration. Even if the little nincompoops can’t do long division...

The admissions team at Reed College, known for its free-spirited students, learned in March that the prospective freshman class it had so carefully composed after weeks of reviewing essays, scores and recommendations was unworkable. Money was the problem. Too many of the students needed financial aid, and the college did not have enough. So the director of financial aid gave the team another task: drop more than 100 needy students before sending out acceptances, and substitute those who could pay full freight. The whole idea of excluding a student simply because of money clashed with the college’s ideals, Leslie Limper,...

CAPITAL REGION — Private liberal arts colleges, including Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs and Union College in Schenectady, are seeing a decline in admission applications and increased requests for financial aid. “It’s no surprise, looking at the economic climate,” said Robert Shorb, associate dean and director of student aid and family finance at Skidmore. Some students’ parents have lost their jobs, he said. Some families’ college investments have declined dramatically with the stock market. At the same time, the small liberal arts colleges have also lost money on their endowment investments. Skidmore’s $223 million endowment, for example, is down 23...