Reply With Quote
TALKING ABOUT GOVERMENT
HERE IS A THOUGHT LOWER PRICE OF COLLEDGE AND NO STUDENET GO IN DEBT TO GET A STUPID DEGREE THAT IS WORTHLESS
SO MANYWORTHLESS DEGREES OUT THERE
TALKING ABOUT GOVERMENT
How are you going to do that Nixon?
The One Thing Obama Didn't Say About Student Loan Repayment
President Obama made big news today for student loan borrowers. He said he'll use his executive power to expand a program called Pay As You Earn, which limits borrowers' monthly debt payments to 10 percent of their discretionary income. Under the program, loans don't just get less expensive; they can actually disappear. The balance of a loan is forgiven after 20 years — 10 years if the borrower works in public service (for government or a nonprofit).
Pay As You Earn has been around since 2012. It's inspired by the higher ed finance systems in countries like Australia, where university students pay nothing upfront and a percentage of their income after graduation. With the announcement, Obama extends eligibility for the program to an older group of borrowers: those who borrowed before October 2007 and have not borrowed since October 2011.
This is the kind of announcement that makes for feel-good headlines, but, once the news cycle has passed, how much will have really changed? The fact is, there's been a serious flaw with the program up to this point: few people have actually signed up for it.
Thirty-seven million Americans are currently shouldering some kind of student loan debt. It's difficult to calculate exactly how many of them would be eligible for the Pay As You Earn expansion, but a White House fact sheet says "most" of today's borrowers would qualify. If you look at public service loan forgiveness alone, about a quarter of the workforce qualifies.
As we said, Pay As You Earn isn't exactly new, and last year, enrollment did grow almost 40 percent. But the total number of borrowers now signed up is still just 1.6 million. Remember — 37 million Americans are carrying some kind of student debt. That means quite likely the vast majority of those who could get help paying off their loans just aren't asking for it.
Why Not?
It seems people don't enroll in Pay As You Earn for two reasons. I hear from struggling borrowers all the time who are either
a) unaware of the program or
b) have had serious trouble signing up for it.
When it comes to awareness, the government simply hasn't promoted the program the way it did, say, the rollout of the Affordable Care Act.
And, anecdotally, borrowers who do hear about the program and try to sign up often run into obstacles and obfuscation from the companies that service their loans.
These loan servicers, led by Sallie Mae, are private-sector middlemen in the student loan business. They collect the borrowers' payments and fees. On the back end, they also repackage and securitize the loans. Many servicers used to originate federally subsidized student loans themselves, before President Obama cut them out of that side of the business in 2009.
But these lenders turned federal contractors still have a lot of control over borrowers. And it's not in their short-term business interests to lower monthly payments. Even if borrowers fall behind on those payments — or go into default — servicers still get paid handsomely.
An investigation by the Huffington Post last year found that Sallie Mae had a surprisingly low number of borrowers enrolled in income-based repayment. The loan giant handles 40 percent of all federal student loans (by loan volume) but represented just 18 percent of borrowers enrolled in Pay As You Earn.
The Obama administration acknowledges the problems in the fine print of its announcement today. One response: The government says it will partner with Intuit and H&R Block, telling borrowers about Pay As You Earn when they're doing their taxes.
The Department of Education also plans to "renegotiate its contracts with federal loan servicers to strengthen financial incentives to help borrowers repay their loans on time, lower payments for servicers when loans enter delinquency or default, and increase the value of borrowers' customer satisfaction when allocating new loan volume." Translation: The feds will penalize servicers who delay or deny help or otherwise incur complaints from borrowers, by steering new business away from them.
The expansion of Pay As You Earn won't achieve its stated goal unless this part of the work is taken seriously. Because, up to this point, borrowers haven't just had to be in debt to enroll ... they had to be savvy, resourceful and downright persistent.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/ed/2014/06/09/320351501/the-one-thing-obama-didn-t-say-about-student-loan-repayment?utm_source=npr_newsletter&utm_medium=ema il&utm_content=20140615&utm_campaign=mostemailed&u tm_term=nprnews
Of course, the Repugs would, if they could, block PAYE and any Exec branch attempts to promote and expand it.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-0...f-the-day.htmlThe cost of obtaining a university education in the U.S. has soared 12 fold over the past three decades, a sign the educational system is in need of reform, according to lawmakers in both parties.
The CHART OF THE DAY shows college tuition and fees have surged 1,120 percent since records began in 1978, four times faster than the increase in the consumer price index. Medical expenses have climbed 601 percent, while the price of food has increased 244 percent over the same period.
“Soaring tuition and shrinking incomes are making college less and less affordable,” Senator Tom Harkin, an Iowa Democrat and chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, said in an e-mailed statement. “For millions of young people, rising college costs are putting the American dream on hold, or out of reach.”
The number full, tenured professors is being reduced (cost), replaced by adjunct professors, grad students on ty wages, often piecework (paid per course taught, aka "the gig economy"), while admin headcount and salaries have exploded, along with building 5-star dorms to attract a diminishing number of baby boomer kids.
Student aid also way down, replaced with foreign student paying 100% of their college costs, and "affirmative action" of admitting wealthy students demanding little or no financial aid.
The Banksters' Great Depression is still holding down state tax revenue meaning state financing of public colleges is down.
iow, colleges, even public colleges, have become an ATM for college presidents+full time admin staff, while the actual teaching is short-changed. Sort of a class warfare, college administrators self-enrichment vs college teachers/teaching.
just more data: America is ed and un able (money is the root of all ings)
College is the greatest scam in American history.
This is one of the rare posts by boutons that I actually agree with most of what he said.
In some ways, but I think saying that is too broad.
The problem with the system is that there are only so many jobs that need a college education. We probably have twice as many students going to college than we have jobs for. This just about means that unless you can pay for college, you will be lucky to do better than flipping burgers. This is how it becomes a scam. the excess of available money gives an overage of college students. Supply and demand means these jobs will just pay less. Then we have students never getting good enough jobs to pay back their debt. Then we have legislation like what was proposed in the OP, that does little more financially than paying bankers the money students defaulted on.
When well the demonrats stop scamming the American people?
I think I will change my mind.
It is a big scam.
This is not a completely accurate description. Whether or not an ITT type degree will be beneficial is entirely up to the individual. When I worked at AMD they hired their wafer techs almost exclusively from ITT. Some were good and moved up to maintenance or process techs, the best ones became techs for vendors like Speedfam making close to 6 figures (and that was 20 yrs ago). Two of my friends are engineers at an SA tech company and they hire their techs from ITT. They start them off cheap and if they are any good they pay them well to keep them. Another friend's son went to ITT and he's doing very well now working at Rackspace. The only problem with these for profit schools are that they will find away to pass anyone who shows up so they can keep getting those dollars so it's up to the employers to sort through them to find the good ones. I don't think they have any entrance requirements at these schools so yeah they are sucking money from people who are destined for the fast food industry but that doesn't mean those associate degrees are worthless, just that some of the people getting them are. I don't think that's much different than four year universities like UTSA. At USAA they had an intern program for CS majors from UTSA. These were supposed to be top GPA students and some were good and some of them probably couldn't write o World without help.
IIT tech school goes back a long way, well before the explosion pure- for-profit "colleges", so ITT is probably one of the more excludable from the current crop, although I bet they've jumped on that govt-guaranteed gravy train, too.
A College Major Matters Even More in a Recession
Graduating into a recession is unlucky. The bad luck haunts young people for years,studies have shown, affecting their salaries, employment prospects and even theirhealth and happiness.
But recessions don’t treat all college graduates equally. Those who major in subjects that command higher salaries, like engineering and finance, increase their earnings advantage when they graduate into a recession. And those who major in subjects that lead to lower-paying jobs, like philosophy and music, are even more disadvantaged than in normal economic times.
see the graph:
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/06/21...recession.html
on average, an college degree is still a huge positive diff in lifetime earnings (uneducated people are not blocked from and can do well, but ON AVERAGE, they don't)
My ideal would be that academic state/community college would be free, but with highly compe ive admissions.
Then having gotten a broad-based ACADEMIC education, one would be faced with more compe ion to be accepted in a post-grad, also-free VOCATIONAL college.
It’s Official: The Boomerang Kids Won’t Leave
One in five people in their 20s and early 30s is currently living with his or her parents. And 60 percent of all young adults receive financial support from them. That’s a significant increase from a generation ago, when only one in 10 young adults moved back home and few received financial support. The common explanation for the shift is that people born in the late 1980s and early 1990s came of age amid several unfortunate and overlapping economic trends. Those who graduated college as the housing market and financial system were imploding faced the highest debt burden of any graduating class in history. Nearly 45 percent of 25-year-olds, for instance, have outstanding loans, with an average debt above $20,000. (Kasinecz still has about $60,000 to go.) And more than half of recent college graduates are unemployed or underemployed, meaning they make substandard wages in jobs that don’t require a college degree.
According to Lisa B. Kahn, an economist at Yale University, the negative impact of graduating into a recession never fully disappears. Even 20 years later, the people who graduated into the recession of the early ’80s were making substantially less money than people lucky enough to have graduated a few years afterward, when the economy was booming.
Some may hope that the boomerang generation represents an unfortunate but temporary blip — that the class of 2015 will be able to land great jobs out of college, and that they’ll reach financial independence soon after reaching the drinking age. But the latest recession was only part of the boomerang generation’s problem. In reality, it simply amplified a trend that had been growing stealthily for more than 30 years. Since 1980, the U.S. economy has been destabilized by a series of systemic changes — the growth of foreign trade, rapid advances in technology, changes to the tax code, among others — that have affected all workers but particularly those just embarking on their careers.
In 1968, for instance, a vast majority of 20-somethings were living independent lives; more than half were married. But over the past 30 years, the onset of sustainable economic independence has been steadily receding. By 2007, before the recession even began, fewer than one in four young adults were married, and 34 percent relied on their parents for rent.
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/06/22...ont-leave.html
Thanks, Banksters/VRWC. Your ING gifts keep on ING for decades.
Only if you go thinking that pursuing a degree to avoid any difficult study will do you any good.
which degrees are ?
how about magna laude in history or english lit or philosophy? all , right?
If you stop at a bachelors...yeah all .
Federal Crackdown On For-Profit Colleges Claims Its First Victory
A for-profit college company with a track record of dubious marketing practices is now set tonarrowly avoid closing its doors forever after agreeing to the government’s terms for continued financing. The agreement could bring changes in how Corinthian Colleges and other for-profit colleges that rely on taxpayer money do business.
After years of lawsuits and investigations into how the company marketed its schools to students, the Department of Education (DOE) restricted the Corinthian’s access to federal funds earlier this year, ins uting a three-week waiting period before federal payments could be distributed to Corinthian businesses. Corinthian, which gets $4 out of every $5 from federal education financing programs, appeared to be heading into a death spiral late last week when it announced that the restrictions had left it on the edge of insolvency.
Under Monday’s agreement, however, the company will reportedly get the bridge funding it needs long enough to act on several DOE requests, including closing some of its schools and bringing in an independent auditor for its remaining operations. The DOE is weighingwhether or not to reauthorize several Corinthian-owned schools for participation in the federal financial aid system, according to the Associated Press. The company will attempt to sell off significant parts of its 107-campus network.
The stricter DOE financing policy that forced Corinthian to bow to government demands was put in place after the company failed to cooperate fully with federal inquiries into its schools. Some of those inquiries involved Everest College, one of three separate for-profit higher education brands owned by Corinthian. Everest employees in six states told the Huffington Post that they were encouraged to falsify data on graduate job placement. The California attorney general has sued Everest for marketing fraud, arguing that the company mislead prospective students about how its graduates fared in the job market.
Worse, Everest officials paid nearby companies to hire their graduates for just long enough to make the school’s statistics look better, then let them go. One Everest campus in Georgia paid companies $2,000 a head to keep Everest graduates on staff for 30 days. One alum named Eric Parms racked up about $17,000 in loan debt to earn a certification from its HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning) program, only to get placed into a temporary make-work job at a local contractor that was taking money from Everest to turn people like Parms into positive statistics on the school’s marketing materials.
The same money that Parms and peers now owe to student loan companies and the government went first to Corinthian as revenue. The company gets $1.4 billion a year in federal financial aid money, according to the Wall Street Journal.
While details of the ultimate resolution of Corinthian’s near demise remain in flux, the government’s stark actions against a company that was allegedly fleecing both students and the federal financial aid system should send a signal to the rest of the for-profit college industry. The graduate job attainment figures that allegedly drove Corinthian to take up fraudulent tactics are going to be a key measure of whether or not companies can continue to do business with the government going forward. For-profit schools generally fair worse on those metrics than traditional ins utions, and one market analysis late last year suggested that one in five for-profit schools will fail to meet new requirements.
http://thinkprogress.org/education/2...rofit-college/
Man, I see in Fight Club the strongest and smartest men who've ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see it squandered. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables – slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars, but we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off.
Senate Once Again Blocks Bill To Allow Borrowers To Refinance Federal And Private Student Loans
A bill that would have allowed millions of private and federal student loan borrowers to refinance their debts to the lower rate currently being issued on new federal and private student loans was once again blocked in the Senate.
The Bank on Students Emergency Loan Refinancing Act, which was first introduced by Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren in May, previously failed a Senate provisional hurdle in June.
The Hill reports that on Tuesday afternoon Warren asked for unanimous consent to vote on her bill. However, Sen. John Cornyn of Texas objected unless an open amendment process would be allowed, a move which Warren said she couldn’t agree to.
“Life is about choices. Each of us have made a choice on education, like where we’re going to go to school and what we’re going to study,” Sen. Durbin of Illinois said in a statement. “There was a choice made on the Senate Floor today…to ignore students across America who are struggling to make ends meet because of overwhelming amounts of student loan debt.”
The bill would have allowed federal and private student loan borrowers to refinance to rates set for first-time borrowers;
3.86% for Undergraduate Direct Loans,
5.41% for Graduate Loans, and
6.41% for PLUS Loans taken out by a student’s parents.
Borrowers looking to refinance their student loans would have to be current on their payments and meet debt-to-income ratios that would have been set by the Department of Education.
In addition to refinancing student loans, the bill set forth a number of tax reforms intended to enact what is called the “Buffett Rule,” a reference to billionaire Warren Buffett’s statement that he shouldn’t pay lower taxes than his secretary.
http://consumerist.com/2014/09/17/se...student-loans/
Warren asked for unanimous consent to vote on her bill, S. 2432, but Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) objected unless there would be an open amendment process. Warren said she couldn't agree to unlimited amendments.
you don't have to be as smart as EW
1. to know that the Repugs would attach totally irrelevant, extreme unpassable amendments to kill the bill.
2. to know that the Repugs don't GAF about the student debt crisis, keeping those interest payments flowing to bankers, and hounding indebted Americans to and beyond the grave.
Believe as you wish. Afterall, you have Common Dreams with other losers.
Occupy Wall Street takes executive action on student loans:
http://fortune.com/2014/09/17/occupy...ent-loan-debt/
that wonderful, great move, but less than a pinprick on the disaster of $1T+ outstanding.
btw, St Ronnie and his VRWC hitmen got the student load ball rolling
(VRWC useful idiot) Ronald Reagan stuck it to millennials: A college debt history lesson no one tells
The students Reagan loathed were the beneficiaries of a consensus that paired the GI Bill with the post-Sputnik explosion of higher education to offer no- to low-cost access to public ins utions, and aid to those who needed it to make private college possible. Students were not expected to shoulder the burden of their educations alone, and this freed them to explore who they wanted to be and the kind of America in which they wanted to live. There were many adults, of course, who despised them for just this freedom, and powerful forces terrified of the changes they saw coming.
By the time Reagan was elected to the nation’s highest office a decade and a half later, these powers had devised perfect tools to make sure the spirit of 1960s protest would never again erupt on campus.
During Reagan’s two terms as president,
dedicated funding for outright grants-in-aid decreased,
federal guidelines pushed individual loans,
and private bill collectors were brought in to ensure that the hardest kind of debt to escape waswhatever you took on for your education.
Even more important was the shift in tone and expectation. Public goods became private services, and by the end of the 1980s, the anti-tax, infra-structure-starving, neoliberal Weltanschauung meant that as states cut their budgets, support for higher education was thrown into a cage match with every other necessary public good.
http://www.salon.com/2014/07/05/rona..._no_one_tells/
================
My students pay too much for college. Blame Reagan.
Today’s student aid crisis has its roots in the 1980s. In 1981, the Reagan administration, with a coalition of congressional Republicans and conservative Democrats, pushed through Congress a combination of tax- and budget-cutting measures.
No federal program suffered deeper cuts than student aid. Spending on higher education was slashed by some 25 percent between 1980 and 1985.
In raw dollar figures, cuts totaled $594 million in student assistance and $338 million in Pell grants. Students eligible for grant assistance freshmen year had to take out student loans to cover their second year. For middle-class families, eligibility was changed as well.
Low-cost, low-interest, subsidized federal loans were limited to families with household incomes of less than $32,000, regardless of family size.
Effectively, these changes shifted the federal government’s focus from providing students higher education grants to providing loans.
How did college students and their families find themselves in the budgetary crosshairs of the Reagan administration?
Some in the White House and the Office of Management and Budget argued cutting aid would reduce the deficit, while others averred that less money meant less federal intrusion in individuals’ lives. Still others insisted government support of students upset the natural order of the nuclear family, supplanting parents and their obligation to provide.
These various perspectives coalesced around a shared view: students were “tax eaters … [and] a drain and drag on the American economy.” Student aid “isn’t a proper obligation of the taxpayer,” Reagan’s OMB Director David Stockman told Congress.
Reagan administration Education Secretary Terrel Bell would later write in his memoir that
students needing aid were part of the problem,
not very different from other “undeserving” Americans,
no different than the “welfare queen,”
the out-of-work father drawing unemployment insurance,
the poor families on Medicaid,
the elderly in need of Medicare or even farmers relying on subsidies.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/09/02/my-students-pay-too-much-for-college-blame-reagan/
Thanks, Repugs, and all y'all Repug voters!
and voodoo-economics/trickle-down/supply-sider St Ronnie TRIPLED THE NATIONAL DEBT TO $3T
Last edited by boutons_deux; 09-18-2014 at 10:24 AM.
Feds Sue Corinthian Colleges For Pushing More Than $560M In Predatory Loans On Students
Tens of thousands of students were duped by Corinthian Colleges Inc. into taking out costly predatory, and often financially devastating, private student loans to finance their post-secondary education, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau alleges in a recently filed lawsuit against the large for-profit education company.
An investigation by the CFPB found that since July 2011 Corinthian has lured tens of thousands of students at Heald College, Everest University, and WyoTech to take out private student loans to cover expensive tuition costs by advertising bogus job prospects and career services.
The CFPB alleges in a lawsuit [PDF] that Corinthian then used illegal debt collection tactics to harass students into paying back those loans while still in school.
To protect current and past students of the Corinthian schools, the Bureau is seeking to halt these practices and is requesting the court to grant relief to the students who collectively have taken out more than $569 million in school issued private student loans known as Genesis Loans.
The CFPB seeks full redress of all private student loans made since July 21, 2011, including those that have been paid off.
http://consumerist.com/2014/09/16/fe...y-loan-scheme/
CFPB? just another govt regulatory/enforcement agency the Repugs keep trying to defund and kill.
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