This is a must-see. Peter Greene here presents and discusses comedian John Oliver on student debt.
Most students will leave college with heavy debts; some will spend years trying to pay it off. The arrangement was created by the federal government and state governments, which have steadily decreased their responsibility for subsidizing the cost of higher education, transferring the burden to students. There once was a time when community colleges were tuition-free. No longer. For-profit institutions and online “universities” have moved in to fill their place. These institutions have terrible completion rates. Despite repeated calls to regulate the for-profits, Congress and the U.S. Department of Education have failed to do so. The for-profit industry hires top lobbyists from both parties to protect their interests. Who protects the students?
When one of the worst for-profit institutions (Corinthian) teetered near bankruptcy, the US DOE extended a bail-out instead of closing it down.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The bottom line is:
Teachers can scream all they like but NO ONE CARES and NO ONE is LISTENING. (NO ONE meaning the 1% who own America & their followers).
This blog is preaching to the choir. America has the highest CHILD ABUSE, PRISON, and CHILD MENTAL ILLNESS of any industrialized nation and its growing….and NO ONE CARES and NO ONE IS LISTENING! the 1% are not capable of empathy or guilt.
It’s time to stop preaching to the choir and put that effort into a movement that can wake people up. That means educating the masses who have been indoctrinated for too long.
De Mause studies are used in university classes and may be too advanced for mainstream non scientific thinking, but its time to educate the masses:
http://www.psychohistory.com
I agree and so do most of my co-workers. We have been asking (and I’m just talking about the education part of what you say) when are teachers going to stand up and say NO MORE. NO more CCSD, PARCC, Charlotte Danielson, VAM…… NO MORE blaming us for kids not being ready to go to college or get a job to pay off debt that shouldn’t be theirs in the first place. We need to stand together and say NO MORE!
We can’t keep burying out heads in the sand. When the shyest teacher in my building asks me when the Revolt is going to be and that she will be there when it happens, I know teachers are ready to stand up nation wide!
Send it to your young debtor friends and ask them to ask their lawmakers about how this happened and what they plan to do about it.
Also ask them why they’re gutting public community college funding. I hope they’re not creating a market for their friends and former colleagues in the for-profit college business!
Funny how for-profit colleges took off just as lawmakers decided to disinvest in public community colleges. That’s not “markets”. It’s people who are supposed to be serving the public creating a market for a new for-profit industry by decimating the existing public system. Ask young people to ask lawmakers why they did that. I went to a community college and I graduated with no debt. I could do that because 25 years ago lawmakers funded community colleges.
What an absolute betrayal of the young voters they’re all courting. They should be ashamed. Replacing a public system with a for-profit system simply shifts costs to young people and low income people. They ripped them off. They’re getting robbed.
Click to access 11434354.pdf
If you are a teacher then I assume you are warning your students–DON’T borrow money to go to college. The same advice goes to parents–DON’T cosign on a student loan for your kid. If there’s no money for college, then DON’T GO. BTW I hope you are aware of the news that Harvard’s endowment had some investments in payday lenders.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-09-04/secret-network-connects-harvard-money-to-payday-loans.html
Here’s a good piece on how much clout the for-profits have:
“But after a ferocious response that administration officials called one of the most intense they had seen, the Education Department produced a much-weakened final plan that almost certainly will have far less impact as it goes into effect next year.
The story of how the for-profit colleges survived the threat of a major federal crackdown offers a case study in Washington power brokering. Rattled by the administration’s tough talk, the colleges spent more than $16 million on an all-star list of prominent figures, particularly Democrats with close ties to the White House, to plot strategy, mend their battered image and plead their case.
Anita Dunn, a close friend of President Obama and his former White House communications director, worked with Kaplan University, one of the embattled school networks. Jamie Rubin, a major fund-raising bundler for the president’s re-election campaign, met with administration officials about ATI, a college network based in Dallas, in which Mr. Rubin’s private-equity firm has a stake.
A who’s who of Democratic lobbyists — including Richard A. Gephardt, the former House majority leader; John Breaux, the former Louisiana senator; and Tony Podesta, whose brother, John, ran Mr. Obama’s transition team — were hired to buttonhole officials.”
Who will be paying for that? How many millions of people?
My daughter’s law school loans were set at a high above 8%; have paid off the highest but still stuck at 7+% which CANNOT BE NEGOTIATED DOWN TO CURRENT COMMERCIAL RATES.
We eventually took a HELOC to pay for our daughter’s college and a car to get her back and forth. I’m still about $65,000 in college expense debt. Since we don’t have government student loans, even if there is hope for some to assist with their debt, there is none for us. Eventually, I see us all living under a bridge.
Since they obviously failed miserably at regulating for-profit colleges, is there some rational “evidence-based” reason to believe they’ll do a better job at regulating privatized K-12 schools?
Or are we once again relying on the inherent goodness and high ethical standards of people who know other powerful people?
Can anyone explain to me why they would take this disaster of an “idea!” and spread it to K-12? If it isn’t working in one” sector”, why would it work in another still more fragmented sector?
We have the Greatest Minds in Business and Government working on privatizing K-12. None of this occurs to them? They failed in higher ed. Any reason they won’t fail in K-12?
Who’s “they”? What do for-profits like ITT Tech have to do with charter schools? Many people like myself don’t believe in a Bill Gates plot to privatize public schools, just like most teachers don’t believe that the $4.5 trillion in unfunded public pension liabilities is anything to worry about.
Exactly what I was thinking.
Here’s one I’ll let you-all figure out. We shouldn’t worry about privatizing K-12 schools because they probably won’t be profitable. Also, we should privatize K-12 schools because for-profit colleges are a rip-off, so therefore charter schools are different than for-profit colleges, which are horrible, but that will never happen with K-12 schools, which are probably not going to be as profitable as those horrible for-profit colleges.
For-profit colleges don’t give one pause when privatizing K-12. Instead, they are a REASON to privatize K-12, although they suck.
“Circular” isn’t the word. That implies some organization, even if one ends up at the same place one started. This is more like an abstract painting.
http://www.njspotlight.com/stories/14/09/09/opinion-time-to-cash-in-on-charter-schools-i-don-t-think-so/
Going in debt to get a college degree = being an INDENTURED SERVANT for a LONG, LONG time, esp. when parents co-sign the loan. Think of the sugar cane and pineapple plantations in Hawai’i. Read: Honolulu and Unfamiliar Fishes.
“Predator Loans”
Mortgages and student loans
Target folks with killer drones
Dropping bombs of heavy debt
Killing dreams for profit net
Will the President or Congress do something to fix this problem. Watch tonight’s televised presidential address for the answer which I am sure is No. We will be told tonight, yet again, that we are at war and the demands of war come easy to the political class in this country which is owned by the corporations who profit from war and who find it easy to garner votes from a dumbed-down electorate which is infatuated with militarism, especially since there is no draft. Money for community colleges, for public vocational training – No. Tax breaks for off-shore corporations and private technical colleges – always. Will this next war Obama announces tonight be paid for by the wealthy and the corporations who benefit (or the next one in Ukraine) – No. It will be paid for by the taxes on the poor and middle class, whose human treasure will be slaughtered in it. Education? Student loan debt? Who cares. Let’s go fight terrorism and defend the homeland. Let’s have a parade!
Sorry for my rant but I’m home from school today on sick leave and only have Diane’s blog and MSNBC to keep me company. Eugene Debs was right. And so was Gibbon in that book he wrote about Rome. Back to school tomorrow definitely.
Peace.
Sorry if you think education is unfairly targeted for budget cuts when states run into cash problems. Read the NY Times series “Degrees of Debt”. One lawmaker (who works as a waitress part-time to pay off her student loan) says it’s her job to balance budgets. The one place where you can cut is education. It’s harder to cut pensions for cops and firemen. You should look at the website of your teachers’ pension fund and see what they are invested in. CalSTRS lists stocks, bonds, real estate, hedge funds, private equity, etc. Lots of risky stuff, some of which carry big investment fees for people like Steve Cohen, whose associate Matthew Martoma was just sentenced to 9 years for insider trading. You better hope those investments generate Madoff returns because if they don’t more budget cuts are coming. DB pensions expose schools and students to unlimited stock market risk, as they are finding out in Philly.
The interest earned on student loans goes to Arne and the DOE. They use some of it to render the IDEA act and FERPA protections useless, and to support TFA, RttT, charters, etc.
Had the DOE shut down Corinthian, the students would have had their loans, and interest, nullified. Because Corinthian is allowed to “wind down”, the students remain on the hook for the loans for their worthless education, and the intere$t goes to Arne.
You have to be a bit careful with the quoted figures that you see in the press. In this article (http://blogs.wsj.com/numbers/congatulations-to-class-of-2014-the-most-indebted-ever-1368/), or example, the figures quoted are for ” The average Class of 2014 graduate WITH STUDENT-LOAN DEBT has to pay back some $33,000″ (emphasis is mine). At my institution, most of the graduates do not have any student loan debt at all, so are not included in the $33,000 figure. Of course this may not be true at other institutions.
I don’t agree with Ms. Ravitch about anything, except when she says that kids should not be pressured to go to college. It’s ridiculous to blame states for not funding higher education, because they do. HALF of the Calif, budget goes to education. If that’s not enough then I don’t know what is. Much has been reported and written about why college is so expensive. One quarter at UCLA costs $4500. One semester at USC costs $24,000. The only thing certain is that those costs will continue to rise as CalPERS/CalSTRS unfunded pensions use up more of the state budget. Teachers who assert that they have a right to their pensions shouldn’t complain about their kids’ tuition at UC–UC has a very big pension bill, too. In a few years UC will spend more on pensions than on classroom instruction. BTW your candidate Zephyr Teachout lost her election in NY. It’s not a good idea to support unions when you’re running for office.
Lehman Bros, I thought you went bankrupt back in 2008. No?
Zephyr Teachout had no TV advertising, spent weeks fighting in court for her right to run (she prevailed), and was up against the machine-Wall Street candidate with $35 million (did you contribute to Cuomo’s campaign?). Most of the unions supported Cuomo, not Zephyr. They should have supported her. I am not ashamed to support the best candidate.
As for higher education, the states have been cutting their contribution and shifting the cost to students. I think that public higher education—certainly at the community college level–should be free. The cost should be borne by the state. You don’t agree? Sorry.
It would be very helpful if folks in the academy would turn down the higher salaries and lower teaching loads offered by the privates and teach in the public universities of the land. NYU charges about a quarter million for four years. What does CUNY charge?
Lehman…… Didn’t Gov. Kasich work for you? The problem isn’t pension promises or supporting education. You could have every retiree eat canned dog food and enslave every college grad and you still would not solve the real issue – growing wealth inequality. It is a fact 100% of the gains of the recovery since 2010 have gone solely to the top 10%. That is a serious problem. But your comments may find sympathetic responses on Politico. Especially if you start off your post with “Evil socialist teachers…”
It all went down to bogus bank lending, housing loans, and the series of financial corruption that struck everything down in the Wall Street. It’s all about bad, poor, awlful business decisions. And some people like ‘you’ –yes, your name is well remembered as Lehman Shock in Japan– shift the blame on those who are not in control of managing corporate investor’s portfolio to pigeonhole their screwjobs. That’s pity.
Various reports have indicated that California expenditures on prisons exceeds the amount spent on education.
If that is true, that casts doubt on the assertion above
” HALF of the Calif, budget goes to education.”
I have no knowledge of the State of California budget, but it appears that some need to review the facts before making claims in public.
Here are the figures for California: http://www.sco.ca.gov/state_finances_101_state_spending.html
About 43% of general revenue funds are spent on K-12, another 10% on higher education.
It is quite likely that the report that I saw a few years ago referred to prison expenditures exceeding HIGHER EDUCATION expenditures in California. Since then, California has implemented public policy procedures to reduce its incarcerated population in part by reducing its oppressive parole administrative practices, which returned to prison those with the most insignificant infractions after being released from prison.
Separately, with the very high incidence of illiteracy among prison inmates. it would be interesting to see if there are any scientifically valid studies that have been conducted to determine the impact upon incarceration rates from improvements in pre-K learn to read initiatives.
I submit that it would be far cheaper to fund teaching our youngest to read and write than it would be to pay for their 24 by 7 incarceration later in life when they find virtually every economic door closed to those lacking literacy skills.
I do acknowledge that we would still have prison expenses for those on Wall Street who could not keep their hands off of client funds.