Free Republic

It’s an indictment of Republican leadership that President Trump, who like most businessmen knows nearly nothing about education, still has better political instincts on this. When schools shut down this spring, Congress sent them $31 billion — nearly half its annual schools outlay — for sanitation and online learning, even though students weren’t in schools to theoretically contaminate them and online learning barely happened for millions of children. The vast majority of this money has not even reached schools yet.Nevertheless, the Wall Street Journal reports that education special interests are demanding, through their Democrat representatives, nearly half a trillion in...

It’s not a good sign when different departments at a school start suggesting cutting each other.

Two days. Two reports citing the same data. Two different conclusions.” That is how Rick Seltzer described the near-simultaneous release of two studies looking at state funding in Inside Higher Ed. The first study was written by myself for the Texas Public Policy Foundation and found that state disinvestment is a myth. The second study, by Michael Mitchell, Michael Leachman, and Matt Saenz for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, found that on average, the states have been disinvesting in higher education. Both studies relied on the same data set (SHEF), put out by the State Higher Education Executive...

A letter from the federal Department of Education has sparked yet another controversy on the campuses of Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This time, the issue is about how to honor the intentions of donors, with the donor being the federal government instead of a private individual or corporation. The U.S. Department of Education’s letter expressed concern about whether the Duke-UNC Consortium for Middle East Studies is fulfilling the requirements of a grant provided under Title VI of the Higher Education Act. The Consortium is the union of the Duke Middle East Center and...

New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham unveiled a plan Wednesday to make public college tuition free for all state residents. It’s a “an absolute game-changer” for the state, according to Grisham, a Democrat. Experts say it may well provide an example of good practice for state and local officials across the country who are crafting their own free college programs. If state lawmakers approve the proposal, the New Mexico Opportunity Scholarship program will pay for all state-college tuition and fees that aren’t already covered by federal grants and a state lottery. That’s an unpaid gap ranging from 25% to 40%...

ALBUQUERQUE — In one of the boldest state-led efforts to expand access to higher education, New Mexico is unveiling a plan on Wednesday to make tuition at its public colleges and universities free for all state residents, regardless of family income. The move comes as many American families grapple with the rising cost of higher education and as discussions about free public college gain momentum in state legislatures and on the presidential debate stage. Nearly half of the states, including New York, Oregon and Tennessee, have guaranteed free two- or four-year public college to some students. But the New Mexico...

Harvard University broke their silence and admitted that they've received money over a ten-year-period from Jeffrey Epstein. The disgraced financier who is convicted for crimes such as pedophilia and infamous sex-trafficking network still has his past under review despite the fact that he's already dead. He is known to have given donations and funding to foundations and companies as a philanthropist. Harvard's President Larry Bacow finally acknowledges the university's connection to Epstein. They have admitted to receiving a donation that sums up to $9 million from Epstein himself and his foundation. This comes from a letter to the community that...

The American public once again views “inadequate funding” as the top problem facing public schools, according to the annual PDK Poll. But the public will soon know exactly how much every public school actually spends, thanks to new federal reporting requirements. This leap forward in school finance transparency may forever change how Americans think about public education. The PDK poll has provided a barometer of public perceptions of public schooling since 1969. The latest survey confirms the public still believes schools have too little money. This view is shared across socioeconomic communities: “[A]among the best-off Americans, those in $100,000-plus households,...

In the lead-up to the 2020 elections, we’ve heard several proposals offering free college tuition for all, and loan forgiveness for those still carrying debt. While proponents call these proposals “investments in our future,” the reality is they would be a suffocating financial burden on every taxpayer, but especially on middle- and lower-income citizens. There’s an inherent unfairness to forcing many working-class Americans who couldn’t afford to go to college themselves to pay off the loans of those who could. Requiring a family making $50,000 a year to pay off the college debts of doctors, lawyers, engineers, and even some...

... According to the Department of Education, only 45 percent of student loans are used to attend public colleges and universities, presumably because tuition at those schools is already lower than in the private sector. The department also reports that 40 percent of loans are taken out to attend graduate or professional school — for example, master’s and Ph.D. programs, law school, business school and medical school. This number is large because graduate school is expensive and, in contrast with loans for undergraduates, there is no hard cap on how much money students can borrow from the federal government for...

University of Alabama Denny Chimes Denny Chimes at the University of Alabama Wikimedia Commons TUSCALOOSA, Ala. (AP) — The University of Alabama board of trustees voted Friday to give back a $26.5 million donation to a top donor who recently called on students to boycott the school over the state's new abortion ban. Hugh F. Culverhouse Jr., a 70-year-old real estate investor and lawyer, has already given $21.5 million to the university after his pledge last September with the rest still to come. But in a news release last week, he urged students to participate in a boycott of the...

For about fifteen years, from 1995 to 2010, enrollments grew rapidly in the for-profit higher education sector, but since then have fallen substantially. The reason for the decline is mainly the overt hostility to for-profits during the Obama administration. The Department of Education killed off two of the largest for-profit competitors (Corinthian and ITT), and rhetoric from top officials created the impression that the for-profits were in general an educational scam. That impression is challenged a newly published book Unprofitable Schooling, edited by Todd Zywicki and Neal McCluskey. It consists of eleven interesting and varied chapters; the one I will...

President Trump on Saturday announced he plans to sign an executive order soon requiring colleges and universities that accept federal research money to support free speech rights. Mr. Trump made the announcement at the 2019 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) after he called up onstage Hayden Williams, a conservative activist who was allegedly assaulted while on a recent recruiting trip to the University of California, Berkeley.

In 2015, a high-quality pre-k program was created and funded $118 million by the legislature, with the support of Governor Greg Abbott. In 2017, lawmakers voted not the fund it again, although schools still had to meet the program requirements, even without the money. On the eve of the 2019 legislature, the SBOE recommendation would not only restore the funding, but expand pre-k from half-days to full days.

Whether the nation’s $1.5 trillion student-debt problem represents a crisis is a matter of debate among policy makers and experts. But ask regular voters what they think and the answer seems pretty clear. More than half of Republicans, 67% of Independents and 71% of Democrats agree that student debt is a crisis, according to a recent poll of 1,000 voters conducted by Lake Research Partners and Chesapeake Beach Consulting on behalf of Americans for Financial Reform and the Center for Responsible Lending, two consumer advocacy organizations. “It’s pretty clear that regardless of political orientation, people see it not just as...

When 39 university associations send an open letter to Congress expressing “grave reservations” about proposed legislation, you can be sure that money is involved. No matter how they describe their concern about students, our colleges and universities have spent money at a pace well above inflation for decades, and they have raised tuition and fees in tandem. The federal student loan program has been their “enabler,” so they want to keep the money flowing.New buildings, new stadiums, fitness centers, luxury apartments, a “lazy river” at Louisiana State University, climbing walls at Notre Dame and Rutgers, and a $120 million refurbishing...

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (D) signed a bill Wednesday that allows New Jersey college students who are in the country illegally to obtain financial aid for their education, several news outlets reported. Murphy called the United States the "world's melting pot" where people come "in the hope of a new life," when he signed the legislation at Rutgers-Newark, according to NJ.com. The bill's sponsor, State Senator Teresa Ruiz (D-Newark), praised Murphy's move, saying that the Garden State prides itself in investing in "all of our students throughout their K-12 academic careers." She said it is not right to limit...

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- Metro DACA students from the Kansas/Missouri Dream Alliance headed to Missouri’s capital Wednesday to lobby against a budget bill that would terminate in-state tuition rates for undocumented youth with DACA. “It was horrible. I ended up going to the dean’s office. It got to the point where I really wanted to continue school. I didn’t want to drop out or go to another college, but I wasn’t able to afford it,” said Zaid Consuegra, a dreamer from Mexico City. He came to Kansas City in 1999. He did not get in-state tuition for his schooling and...

Subsidies reduce motivation, distort the education market, and often end up reducing students’ motivation. The “free college” movement, fueled to a large degree by Bernie Sanders during his 2016 presidential bid, is a response to concerns about increasing college-tuition rates, concomitant stagnation in state and federal grants, and a corresponding student-loan debt load that has ballooned to roughly $1.4 trillion. Indeed, inflation-adjusted data provided by the College Board shows that the average sticker price of higher-education tuition (excluding room and board) over the past ten years has increased 32 percent for two-year public colleges, 37 percent for four-year public colleges,...

Jeff Bezos just donated $33 million to 'dreamers' Jeff Bezos just donated $33 million to 'dreamers' 41 Mins Ago | 00:41 Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos donated $33 million in college scholarships for "dreamers" — childhood undocumented immigrants granted stay in the country under the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. TheDream.Us, a nonprofit working toward college access for undocumented immigrants, said the donation from Bezos and his wife MacKenzie is the largest in the organization's history and will fund 1,000 scholarships. "My dad came to the U.S. when he was 16 as part of Operation Pedro Pan," Bezos said...