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Harvard and Yale Law Schools Back Out of US News Rankings

By dianeravitch
November 17, 2022 //
37

This is good news. In multiple ways, the US News & World Report rankings of schools, colleges, and graduate schools are misleading. Harvard Law School and Yale Law School certainly don’t need to have the blessing of US News. I’m hoping that other schools and universities refuse to be ranked by an invalid and useless measure.

CNN reports:

Yale and Harvard law schools, two of the premier law schools in the country, announced they are parting ways with U.S. News & World Report’s rankings of best law schools. The schools are bowing out after criticizing the publication’s methodology, arguing that the list actively perpetuates disparities in law schools. Given the elite status of Yale and Harvard, the move is significant and could signal a greater shift away from college rankings. For years, policymakers and those working in higher education have dismissed the rankings, though they are still referenced by potential students and their families. The decisions have been met with praise, but some questioned whether the move, if followed by other schools, would make it more difficult for the average person to choose to which colleges to apply.

The New York Times:

Colleges and universities have been critical of the U.S. News ranking system for decades, saying that it was unreliable and skewed educational priorities, but they had rarely taken action to thwart it, and every year almost always submitted their data for judgment on their various undergraduate and graduate programs.

Now both Yale and Harvard law schools have announced that they will no longer cooperate. In two separate letters posted on their websites, the law school deans excoriated U.S. News for using a methodology that they said devalued the efforts of schools like their own to recruit poor and working-class students, provide financial aid based on need and encourage students to go into low-paid public service law after graduation.

Categories Accountability, Competition, Data, Education Industry, Higher Education

Wisconsin: A Victory for Democracy and Decency

By dianeravitch
November 16, 2022 //
16

Tony Evers was the Wisconsin Superintendent of Public Instruction when he first ran for Governor and was elected. His first election was a triumph, because he succeeded the rightwing extremist Scott Walker, who hated unions, public schools, and public higher education, three of the jewels in Wisconsin’s crown. The celebrated “Wisconsin Idea” was centered on those policies, policies that advanced opportunity and equity.

Evers brought that rightwing extremism in the governor’s office to a halt, but he still had to deal with a Republican legislature, intent on frustrating everything he hoped to do.

Despite Republicans’ smear campaign, Evers was re-elected by a margin of 51-47, while his Lt. Governor Mandela Barnes lost to Republican Senator Ron Johnson, a reprehensible Trumper, by 1%.

Categories Democracy, Elections, Higher Education, Supporting public schools, Unions, Wisconsin

Nora de la Cour: Wisconsin Is a Battleground for the Future of Public Education

By dianeravitch
November 6, 2022 //
5

Journalist Nora de la Cour describes the dire situation in Wisconsin, where incumbent Governor Tony Evers is in a close race with an election denier/school privatizer, Tim Michels. There are many other states where education is on the ballot. Wisconsin was once known for its great public schools and public universities. Former Governor Scott Walker declared war on both. Twenty-five years ago, the far-right Bradley Foundation funded the voucher movement in Milwaukee, which has spread to other parts of the state and to other states. The Trumpist base of the Republican Party has declared war on public schools, based on lies and fantasies spun by rightwing think tanks.

She begins:

New research finds that market-style education reforms, like those pioneered in Wisconsin decades ago, have devastating consequences for students. This election, Wisconsin and the rest of the nation must choose whether to plow ahead or reverse course.

Wisconsin’s Democratic governor Tony Evers is neck and neck with his challenger, Trump-endorsed Tim Michels, whose campaign has lauded abortion bans, election denialism, and a beefed up carceral–policestate. Robert Asen, who studies political discourse at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, told Jacobin that because education has gotten relatively less airtime, it is “a bit of a stealth issue analogous to [labor law in] Scott Walker’s 2010 gubernatorial campaign,” which didn’t prepare voters for Walker’s vicious attacks on workers. But make no mistake: this election will determine the existential future of K-12 schooling in the state.

Following the now-familiar Chris Rufo playbook, Michels plans to sign a restrictive “parents’ rights” bill and move up the timeline on a universal school choice plan that would destroy what’s left of Wisconsin’s once-great public schools. Formerly the state’s superintendent of public instruction, Evers has pledged to increase school funding and prioritize the public system. In reality, though, even if Evers prevails he’ll at best continue to be “the man of a thousand vetoes,” given that Republican opposition will prevent him from pursuing his agenda. So as Marquette University senior fellow and veteran education reporter Alan Borsuk put it when speaking to Jacobin, this governor’s race amounts to a choice between treading water and veering hard right.

In many ways, Wisconsin blazed a trail for the rest of the country with market-style reforms that increase competition by weakening teachers’ unions and privatizing schools. Decades later, researchers have mapped the devastating impact of these reforms on Wisconsin students. So, as voters across the United States face grave education questions up and down the ballot, it makes sense to look back at what’s happened in the Badger State.

Please open the link and read this important article.

Categories Education Industry, Elections, Extremism, Higher Education, Privatization, Walker, Scott, Wisconsin

Steve Nelson: The Legal Case Against Affirmative Action Is Poppycock!

By dianeravitch
November 5, 2022 //
49

Steve Nelson retired recently as headmaster of a private school in New York City. wrote this article on his blog..

The “arguments” this week centered primarily on the educational value of racial diversity. This focus was inevitable because all the other justifications for AA had been whittled away in prior decisions. Proponents of AA have been left with only educational value, which is really rich in that it essentially asks Black folks, once again, to teach white folks. If I were a Black man, I’d say, “No thanks. Teach your own damn selves.” Which is, I suppose, why I’m writing this piece.

With apologies for being quite blunt . . . the debate about affirmative action is almost entirely poppycock.

This week the Supremes heard arguments in a duo of cases challenging affirmative action (AA) in college admissions. Based on oral arguments, the end is near. Of course the oral arguments were unnecessary for a court with four privileged white men, one white handmaiden and a Black guy who, during these arguments, asked, “What’s diversity?”

Poppycock #1

Fairness requires that I do acknowledge the educational value of diversity, especially in the form of Black activists who specialize in upsetting the white privilege apple cart. But that’s really not what Harvard et al have in mind. They are more inclined toward Carlton Banks(check it out!) than to Malcom X. Each side trotted out their favorite research showing the rich benefits or total irrelevance of diversity.

The real importance of AA is as overdue justice – reparations, if you will. If one needs evidence of the ongoing, pernicious reality of racism, look no further than the 70% of Americans who are against AA, including Clarence Thomas, who is so resentful of AA that he married a White Nationalist.

And AA is not just giving preference to Black applicants. It is – or should be – recognition that the whole system, from birth to application, is built on a foundation of white bricks from social and cultural hegemony to; test bias; stereotype threat; K-12 funding disparity; racial gaps in wealth; early education disadvantages; health issues; and to white dominance in policy, administration and faculty at every level of schooling.

Poppycock #2

The Harvard case is based on the absurd idea that missing out on Harvard is severely traumatic. As is true of all the “top tier” schools, reputation is largely based on rankings from sources like US News and World Report. Top rankings derive from meaningless statistics like the number of hearts they can break. The more applications and rejections, the better.

It is just self-fulfilling nonsense. They take students with the highest SAT scores and grades and then they are “ranked” at the top because their incoming class had high SAT scores and grades. The ridiculous chase for the Ivies is toxic. It creates anxiety, high levels of stress and rampant depression. It depresses curiosity and creativity. The education may or may not be good. Many classes are taught by graduate assistants.

Many faculty members at highly selective colleges report that their high-flying students are not only stressed and depressed, but alarmingly incurious. After all, they’ve been conditioned to answer questions, not ask them. They sit with notebook in hand, diligently recording the professors’ points of view so as to accurately reiterate them on the next exam or writing assignment.

One lovely student, to whom I had expressed this reality in high school, grabbed the brass ring of Princeton admission despite maintaining her mental health and asking plenty of questions. At her first fall break, she stopped by my office.

(I paraphrase) “Steve! You were so right! At the start of the semester, in a small freshman class, the professor asked us to write an essay – no grade – to get an idea of our interests and writing ability. A student asked, ‘What should we write about?’ ‘Whatever you wish to write about,’ he replied. ‘But give us an idea of what you want,’ chirped another student. ‘I don’t care,’ he replied with mild irritation. ‘Write about whatever interests you.’ ‘But, but . . . what are we supposed to be interested in?’”

I headed a school for two decades and hoped for seniors to be accepted at Ivies (for their egos and parents’ cocktail boasts) and then decline the offer and go to, for example, Oberlin.

Poppycock #3

It is not as though a grassroots social justice movement arose and brought all these lawsuits through the system to the Supremes. It’s all the work of neoconservative activist Edward Blum. For decades he has fished for students willing to act as surrogates for his personal campaign. He has been supported by big conservatives bucks from like-minded “think” tanks who think racism is dead and it is white people who are getting the short end of the stick and the long end of the shaft.

There is lots of damage done in America, but it’s not done to the statistically insignificant number of Asian-American or white kids Blum claims are victims of injustice. They invariably go to another “elite” school.

A legal case requires proof that the plaintiff(s) have been harmed, not that their tender feelings were hurt. The only reason these cases rise to the Supreme Court is because the conservative justices are fishing for petitioners and Blum serves them up a few whoppers….

What a waste of time and resources, just because of one zealot and his wealthy conservative patrons.

Categories Bigotry, Higher Education

How Elite Colleges Restricted the Number of Jewish Students

By dianeravitch
November 5, 2022 //
31

Journalist Mark Oppenheimer wrote an opinion article in the New York Times, describing the long history of antiSemitism at elite colleges. Stanford University apologized for its limited enrollment of Jews in the 1950. The apology came at a time when anti-Semitism is surging on college campuses and in society.

But restricting the number of Jews admitted to Ivy League campuses is nothing new. The top Ivy League colleges introduced strict quotas in the 1920s, fearful of being overwhelmed by Jewish students.

To anyone who understands the history of Jewish exclusion on elite campuses, the central findings of a recently released, long-awaited report from Stanford University were no shock. The report confirmed that Stanford admissions officers purposefully limited the enrollment of Jewish students in the 1950s, in part by greatly reducing the number of applicants admitted from heavily Jewish public high schools.

What’s surprising is that these discriminatory measures were, comparatively, so mild and so late to come about. Elite Northeastern schools perfected Jewish exclusion decades before Stanford got in on the act.

In the 1920s, Columbia and Harvard began seeking students from the South and West as a means of limiting the number of students from more Jewish school systems in the Northeast — the very idea of “geographical diversity” was invented to keep out Jews. From 1928 through 1938, Columbia operated Seth Low Junior College, a two-year school in Brooklyn to which Jews were relegated to keep the student body of its Manhattan campus more Protestant. And Yale decided, in 1922, to restrict Jewish enrollment, which it did until the 1960s.

Given that history, and the increase in antisemitism today in the United States, the most noteworthy aspect of the Stanford report is its long list of proposed steps for atonement, or teshuvah, to use the Hebrew word invoked by its authors. The recommendations show noble intentions, but they also reveal the limitations of official university action in fighting what may be the world’s most enduring prejudice.

How universities balance the ethnic compositions of their student bodies is an urgent question right now, as the Supreme Court on Monday heard arguments on two cases challenging affirmative action, at Harvard and the University of North Carolina. In several months, when it rules on the legality of their admissions practices, the court may forbid the use of race or ethnicity as considerations. If so, partisans on both sides will argue about what such a change means for “diversity,” especially the imperative to admit historically underrepresented people of color, like Black and Hispanic Americans.

These fights are nothing new. As the plaintiffs note in their brief on the Harvard case, in 1922 Harvard began to suss out which applicants were Jewish, in part by asking questions like, “What change, if any, has been made since birth in your own name or that of your father? (Explain fully.)” Indeed, as scholars like Jerome Karabel and Robert McCaughey haveshown, the modern college application process, from the form to the interview, were developed to weed out Jews.

Stanford adopted some of this playbook midway through the last century, so its reckoning is welcome. Some of its report’s recommended steps for atonement are symbolic, like issuing an official apology (which Stanford just did). Other steps are more concrete, like better accommodating students who need kosher food or don’t use technology on the Sabbath, and thus can’t use electronic key cards on Saturday. The report recommends paying better attention to the Jewish calendar, so the start of school does not conflict with Jewish holidays — as it did this year, when first-quarter classes started on Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year….

Jewish students today are faced with a growing antisemitism that is rooted in widespread ignorance. In September, the Wellesley student newspaper published an editorial that relied on the blatantly antisemitic Mapping Project, a crude website that implies that institutions in Massachusetts including Emerson, Tufts and Harvard, a Boston-area Jewish high school, and even a public school system (Newton) are part of a web of conspiratorial Zionism. (The newspaper later said it did not “endorse” the Mapping Project.) Other institutions, like Northwestern, near Chicago, have seen incidents of swastika graffiti on their campuses.

And this year, students at a Jewish fraternity at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo told me that fellow students regularly shouted anti-Jewish slurs at them when they walked by the fraternity house. The Cal Poly students told me the hate speech is so common that they don’t even bother to report it.

College campuses are merely reflections of the national mood. The Anti-Defamation Leaguesays there was a 167 percent increase in antisemitic assaults from 2020 to 2021. But given that context, what might address the problem at schools?

Leadership, for one thing — like the kind modeled by Wellesley’s president, Paula Johnson, who condemned the Mapping Project as promoting antisemitism. A renewed focus on the humanities is another part of the solution. As students rush to major in subjects deemed useful — fields like economics and computer science — they are leaving history and philosophy in the dust.

As a college lecturer, most recently for 15 years at Yale, I have been surprised by the gaps in students’ historical knowledge. I’ve had students who thought that President John F. Kennedy had email and that American slavery ended in the 20th century. Some students didn’t realize Holocaust survivors still walk the earth, and many knew nothing of other genocides, from Rwanda to Cambodia.

Paradoxically, ignorance is flourishing at a time when many students seem more interested than ever in history. They are dismayed that their dormitories and classroom buildings are named after slaveholders, and they know that there is something problematic about Christopher Columbus, even if they can’t always say what. These students are ill served by curriculums that have downgraded the study of history, literature and philosophy.

Narrow-mindedness hurts us all, not only Jews. But encouraging and empowering students to discuss the history of Jews — to know anything about Jews — is the one indispensable way for schools to atone for their antisemitic past. I suspect that more Stanford students have learned about antisemitism from their school’s mea culpa than from classes they’ve taken there.

I am a graduate of Wellesley College, and I was very proud when the College’s President Paula Johnson called out the student newspaper for supporting The Mapping Project, an attempt to name and shame Jews who did not follow the newspaper’s politically correct views. Dr. Johnson did not interfere with the publication, but she said forcefully that there’s no room on campus for bigotry.

Categories Accountability, Bias, Bigotry, Education Reform, Higher Education, History

Iris Rotberg: The Real Scandal of Affirmative Action

By dianeravitch
November 5, 2022 //
22

The U.S. Supreme Court is pondering the fate of affirmative action, the policy in higher education that aims to increase the representation of African American and Hispanic students. Students of color have long been underrepresented in the nation’s top colleges. Affirmative action is a good faith effort to increase their numbers. Critics who oppose affirmative action want admissions to be based solely on objective measures, like SAT-ACT scores. The critics claim that white and Asian-American students are discriminated against by affirmative action and that the number of places available for them are diminished by affirmative action.

Iris Rotberg, professor of education policy at the graduate school of education and human development at George Washington University, contends in the Hechinger Report that the real scandal in admission to elite colleges is the large number of places set aside for white students.

She writes:

The main barrier is affirmative action for affluent white students, which uses up a significant number of admissions slots at many highly selective institutions. This preferential treatment constitutes a major obstacle for everyone else — including white students who are not in privileged categories.

Consider how affirmative action played out for Harvard’s class of 2023. More than 43 percent of admitted white students were in one of four categories that received preferential treatment: legacies, recruited athletes, applicants on the dean’s interest list and children of faculty and staff.

An analysis of this class shows that three-quarters of these students would not have been admitted if their applications had not received preferential treatment.

More important, that preferential treatment resulted in far fewer slots for other applicants.

In addition, Harvard gives preferential treatment to white students who attended elite private schools.

About one-third of Harvard’s students attended private high schools, compared with the national average of less than 10 percent….

While the Students for Fair Admissions case has prompted a unique analysis of Harvard’s admissions practices, the practices themselves are not unique and are consistent with practices at many other highly selective institutions, where a substantial number of white applicants receive preferential treatment.

At the same time, Black and Hispanic students continue to be substantially underrepresented at highly selective institutions. A 2017 New York Times analysis of elite colleges and universities, for example, found that Black students, who account for 15 percent of the college-age population, averaged only 9 percent of freshman enrollment at the eight Ivy League institutions; Hispanic students accounted for 22 percent of the student-age population, but averaged 15 percent of freshman enrollment.

In addition, Black and Hispanic enrollment rates are even lower when the list of institutions is expanded to include the top 100 elite colleges and universities. Black students comprised 6 percent of student enrollment and Hispanic students 13 percent at those schools.

As many studies have shown, the underrepresentation of Black and Hispanic students does not reflect a lack of high-achieving students, but the barriers these students face in applying to highly selective institutions — costs, insufficient counseling and the recruitment policies of the institutions themselves, for starters.

Categories Accountability, Bias, Higher Education, Race

Florida: Faculty Senate Vote Overwhelmingly to Reject Ben Sasse as New President

By dianeravitch
October 27, 2022 //
14

The faculty senate of the University of Florida voted to reject Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse as the new president. Sasse was the sole finalist. The decision will be made by the university’s board of trusteees.

The University of Florida’s Faculty Senate on Thursday voted to support a no-confidence resolution against Nebraska GOP Sen. Ben Sasse, who was the sole finalist to be the next UF president.

“The Senate held an emergency meeting on the resolution, which questioned Sasse’s qualifications and a search committee’s decision to name him as the only finalist for the job. Senators voted 67-15 to pass the measure, after some criticized the search process and past statements made by Sasse on issues such as LGBTQ rights,” The Gainsville Sun reported.

Students have also protested the highly controversial search process which resulted in Sasse being the only finalist.

“The UF board of trustees is scheduled to consider Sasse for the position Tuesday,” the newspaper reported. “The Nebraska Republican is currently serving his second term in the Senate and was previously president of Midland University, a 1,400-student Lutheran school in Nebraska.”

The University of Florida has over 50,000 students.

“Sasse was announced Oct. 6 as the sole finalist for the UF presidency, after a search process that was conducted largely in secret,” the newspaper reported. “UF stated that its search committee reached out to more than 700 people and focused on a dozen candidates, including nine sitting presidents at major research universities.”

Categories Accountability, Florida, Higher Education

Why Did the Ford Foundation Kill Off Its Highly Successful Diversity Program?

By dianeravitch
September 19, 2022 //
13

The Ford Foundation decided to eliminate one of its best programs. This program has encouraged some of our most outstanding scholars of color. Who made this decision and why?

A millionaire foundation president constantly surrounded by controversy and verbal missteps (Google Darren Walker), a former University president who resigned, and the “cold” wealthy Apple tech heir just killed the most successful philanthropic diversity effort ever. Darren Walker, Francisco G. Cigarroa, and Laurene Powell Jobs are sunsetting the Ford Fellowship. For decades, this program has been addressing educator diversity in higher education and enhancing the contributions of faculty of color. Despite its unrivaled accomplishments— in an instant— one of the most successful diversity programs of all time— 6,102 fellows since the inception of the program in 1967— is now in the dustbin of history.

 

Educator diversity is one of the biggest challenges facing education today. It is an acute issue as students of color rarely encounter teachers of color in K-12 and then have the same experience in higher education. The last decade of research has shown that higher education hasn’t moved the needle and improved diversity in an appreciable way— but the Ford Fellowships clearly have. Mary Beth Gasman, a Professor at Rutgers University, said in the Washington Post that higher education has not solved this problem because colleges and universities “don’t want” faculty of color and now neither does the Ford Foundation.

 

In an email message to Ford Fellows, Darren Walker, Francisco G. Cigarroa, and Laurene Powell Jobs and the Ford Foundation board offered a couple of flawed reasons for killing the prestigious and impactful program. They argued that “winding down” the Ford Fellowships is acceptable because the Gates and Lumina foundations participate in higher education philanthropy. Leaving to the side the failures that the Gates Foundation has wrought on K-12 and Higher Education, it’s a straw man argument because unfortunately neither of these— nor any other foundation— are funding educator diversity in higher education in “meaningful and inspiring ways” as the Ford Foundation fellowships have done.

 

Walker, Cigarroa, and Jobs and the Ford Foundation board also engage a sleight of hand by mentioning that they will refocus on “social and racial justice.” What they neglect to mention is that the Ford Fellowship have supported the intellectual foundation of grassroots social and racial justice activism and movements. For example, while the program has encompassed many intellectual disciplines, this award has identified and supported some of the leading educational scholars and movement influencers such as Travis Bristol (Educator Diversity), Keffrelyn Brown (Culturally Relevant Pedagogy), Julian Vasquez Heilig (Community-Based Education Reform), Delores Delgado Bernal (Latinx students and schools), Daniel Solorzano (Critical Race Theory), Angela Valenzuela (Ethnic Studies), Chezare Walker (Black Youth and schools), Bryan Brayboy (Indigenous students and schools) and many more. I can only imagine how slighted the scholars of color supported by this fellowship may feel by this gross oversight of their widespread impact on social and racial justice. What Walker, Cigarroa, and Jobs and the Ford Foundation board don’t realize is that the fellowships are funding social and racial justice intellectual capital across the nation and globe. If they would have asked the Ford Fellows, they may have realized this. Furthermore, to set up a competitive and false dichotomy between funding Ford Fellowships and racial justice and movement building is insulting and demeaning for Ford Fellows and communities of color.

 

Killing the Ford Fellowships is not actually a “judgement call” as they say in their closing statement, but rather severe ignorance of the incredibly rich history of the Ford Fellowship. The closing of the Ford Fellowships just compounds Darren Walker’s ongoing errors, controversies, and missteps as a leader. Maybe for Darren Walker this “judgement call” is payback as the Ford Fellows created a movement and publicly protested his extensive support of prisons.

 

So, what is to be done? How do we hold the board members of the Ford Foundation representing Xerox, Ford, Davidson Kempner, Aluko & Oyebode, Cisco Systems, Sigma Impact, Mastercard and others accountable? Do you know how to reach out to them? Should Ford Fellows boycott the proposed 2023 conference? If Walker, Cigarroa, and Jobs and the Ford Foundation board were truly interested in movement building, the fellowship could have been reworked to encourage scholars to apply who are leaders and were identified as future leaders in social and racial justice. This new approach would add to the heritage of the Ford Fellowships and honor the legacy of leadership whose shoulders Walker, Cigarroa and Jobs and the Ford Foundation board stood on— but have now fallen off. By simply killing the Ford Fellowships, Darren Walker, Francisco G. Cigarroa, and Laurene Powell Jobs and the Ford Foundation board are destroying the intellectual foundation of social and racial justice movements and killing philanthropy’s most successful diversity program of all time. Shame on them.

Categories Billionaires, Higher Education, Race, Shame

American Prospect: Why Obama-Era Economists Hate Biden’s Student Debt Relief

By dianeravitch
September 10, 2022 //
88

Lindsay Owens and David Dayen note that some of the most outspoken critics of Biden’s decision to forgive up to $20,000 in student debt are Obama-era economists. Republicans have called it “socialism” and worse, but some Democratic economists are also upset. Owens and Dayen attribute their anger to the failure of Obama’s policy to solve the home foreclosure crisis.

They write:

President Biden’s long-awaited decision to wipe out up to $20,000 in student debt was met with joy and relief by millions of borrowers, and a temper tantrum from centrist economists.null

Moments after the announcement, former Council of Economic Advisers Chair Jason Furman took to Twitter with a dozen tweets skewering the proposal as “reckless,” “pouring … gasoline on the inflationary fire,” and an example of executive branch overreach (“Even if technically legal I don’t like this amount of unilateral Presidential power.”). Brookings economist Melissa Kearny called the proposal “astonishingly bad policy” and puzzled over whether economists inside the administration were “all hanging their heads in defeat.” Ben Ritz, the head of a centrist think tank, went so far as to call for the staff who worked on the proposal to be fired after the midterms.

Histrionics are nothing new on Twitter, but it’s worth examining why this proposal has evoked such strong reactions. Elizabeth Popp Berman has argued in the Prospect that student loan forgiveness is a threat to the economic style of reasoning that dominates Washington policy circles. That’s correct. But President Biden’s elegant and forceful approach to tackling the student loan crisis also may feel like a personal rebuke to those who once worked alongside President Obama as he utterly failed to solve the debt crisis he inherited.

Let’s be very clear: The Obama administration’s bungled policy to help underwater borrowers and to stem the tide of devastating foreclosures, carried out by many of the same people carping about Biden’s student loan cancellation, led directly to nearly ten million families losing their homes. This failure of debt relief was immoral and catastrophic, both for the lives of those involved and for the principle of taking bold government action to protect the public. It set the Democratic Party back years. And those throwing a fit about Biden’s debt relief plan now are doing so because it exposes the disaster they precipitated on the American people.

One reason the Obama administration failed to swiftly help homeowners was their obsession with ensuring their policies didn’t help the “wrong” type of debtor.

President Obama campaigned on an aggressive platform to prevent foreclosures. Larry Summers, one of the critics of Biden’s student debt relief, promised during the Obama transition in a letter to Congress that the administration “will commit substantial resources of $50-100B to a sweeping effort to address the foreclosure crisis.” The plan had two parts: “helping to reduce mortgage payments for economically stressed but responsible homeowners,” and “reforming our bankruptcy laws” by allowing judges in bankruptcy proceedings to write down mortgage principal and interest, a policy known as “cramdown.”

The administration accomplished neither. On cramdown, the administration didn’t fight to get the House-passed proposal over the finish line in the Senate. Credible accounts point to the Treasury Department and even Summers himself (who just last week said his preferred method of dealing with student debt was to allow it to be discharged in bankruptcy) lobbying to undermine its passage. Summers “was really dismissive as to the utility of it,” Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) said at the time. “He was not supportive of this.”

Summers and Treasury economists expressed more concern for financially fragile banks than homeowners facing foreclosure, while also openly worrying that some borrowers would “take advantage” of cramdown to get undeserved relief. This is also a preoccupation of economist anger at student debt relief: that it’s inefficient and untargeted and will go to the “wrong” people who don’t need it. (It won’t.)

For mortgage modification, President Obama’s Federal Housing Finance Agency repeatedly refused to use its administrative authority to write down the principal of loans in its portfolio at mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—the simplest and fastest tool at its disposal. Despite a 2013 Congressional Budget Office study that showed how modest principal reduction could help 1.2 million homeowners, prevent tens of thousands of defaults, and save Fannie and Freddie billions, FHFA repeatedly refused to move forward with principal reduction, citing their own efforts to study whether the policy would incentivize strategic default (the idea that financially solvent homeowners would default on their loans to try and access cheaper ones).

Virtually everyone involved with the housing system was stunned that the options of cramdown and principal reduction weren’t taken. Banks literally held meetings in expectation of Obama’s team requiring writedowns, until they didn’t.

Instead, the Obama administration rolled out the industry-backed Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP), relying on the voluntary cooperation of servicers to modify mortgages. The program was, even by the administration’s own modest objectives, a failure, ultimately reaching less than a quarter of the three to four million homeowners it hoped to target. In the critical first two years, the administration did not even spend 3 percent of what they were allotted to save homeowners.

Just as with cramdown, one reason the Obama administration failed to swiftly help homeowners was their obsession with ensuring their policies didn’t help the “wrong” type of debtor. When Obama first announced HAMP in 2009, he said the program would “not reward folks who bought homes they knew from the beginning they would never afford.” The resulting “Goldilocks” proposal, with its focus on weeding out undeserving borrowers, would not be available to homeowners with incomes too high or too low and would be backstopped with voluminous income and financial verifications (in many cases, more than what was required to take out the loan in the first place). Treasury also tweaked the program numerous times as they went along, confusing servicers and borrowers. The barrage of paperwork ground the program to a halt at many servicers, and ultimately nearly a quarter of modifications were rejected on the grounds that incomplete paperwork was provided.

But it was much worse than that. The mortgage servicers used HAMP like a predatory lending program, squeezing homeowners for as many payments as possible before canceling their modifications and kicking them out of their homes. These companies had financial incentives to foreclose rather than modify loans. In one particularly excruciating example, the servicer arm of Bank of America offered its employees Target gift cards as a bonus for placing borrowers into foreclosure.

This was also by design, or at least benign neglect. Then–Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner candidly told officials that the program was intended to help banks, not borrowers. The purpose was to “foam the runway” for the banks, Geithner said, with homeowners and their families being the foam crushed by a jumbo jet in that scenario. If the goal was just to let the banks use HAMP for their own benefit, it’s not surprising that would come at homeowners’ expense.

And those banks executed their plan fraudulently, using millions of forged and fabricated documents to illegally foreclose on people. Even with this new leverage against the banks, the administration failed to provide equitable relief. A new program, the National Mortgage Settlement, promised one million principal reductions but delivered only 83,000. Meanwhile, millions more unlawful foreclosures ensued, and no high-level executive was convicted in association with any of these crimes.

In short, the policy apparatus ultimately failed to assist the majority of people who sought help, a suboptimal policy outcome by any metric. Student debt relief skeptics like Furman spent the Obama years advocating for privatizing Fannie and Freddie, rather than apologizing for falling so short on dealing with the massive debt overhang, which stunted the economic recovery.

President Biden’s approach has been markedly different and, if well implemented, is poised to be extremely effective. The simplicity of the program design, with its straightforward cancellation thresholds ($10,000/$20,000) and eligibility criteria (Pell status and household income), means the policy should deliver nearly 90 percent of its relief dollars to those making less than $75,000 a year. Will some small amount of relief dollars land in the bank accounts of borrowers who will make higher incomes in the future? Absolutely. Is preventing that outcome more important than delivering relief to 43 million borrowers? Of course not.

It’s not just the policy design that is a rebuke to the old guard’s theory of debt relief; it’s also the rhetoric. Notably, in his 20-minute speech announcing the rollout of the student loan relief program, President Biden didn’t mention “bad debtors” once. He didn’t spend a single breath on the individual failings of borrowers, make any reference to their poor decision-making, or nod to a handful of unscrupulous debtors trying to game the system.

Instead, he talked about the failings of our higher-education system, in which “an entire generation is now saddled with unsustainable debt.” Instead of blaming borrowers, he showed them empathy. Instead of talking about borrowers taking advantage of the system, he vowed to hold “colleges accountable for jacking up costs without delivering value to students” and crack down on “schools luring students with the promise of big paychecks when they graduate only to watch these students be ripped off and left with mountains of debt.” And he headed concerns about moral hazard off at the pass, vowing to “never apologize for helping the working and middle class.”

Moreover, Biden wasn’t afraid to use all of the tools available to him to get results for indebted borrowers. The Obama administration was given funding from Congress, an explicit mandate for foreclosure prevention, and at the end, a settlement with the banks that authorized even more money. They still failed, because they were more interested in deluded notions of “personal responsibility” than acting to avert disaster.

Biden has flipped the Beltway consensus on policy design around debt forgiveness and modeled a path for viewing student debt as a national crisis, rather than an individual failing. It’s a stunning reversal of the Obama-era consensus and one that casts that failed legacy of mortgage debt relief in an even darker light. Biden has shown us there was an easier, softer way all along.

Categories Accountability, Biden, Economics, Education Industry, Equity, Higher Education, Student Financial Aid and Student Debt

Slate: The Long History of Forgiving Debt

By dianeravitch
August 27, 2022 //
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Republicans are outraged that Biden is forgiving the student loan debt of millions of borrowers by $10,000-20,000. They have denounced loan forgiveness as “socialism,” a “big government giveaway,” and worse.

They are on the wrong side of history and politics.

I can tell you from the two years I worked in the U.S. Department of Education that there is a student loan industry that has a powerful lobby. They want student debt to be as high as possible and they want the rates to be as high as possible. Biden’s decision is very disappointing to their lobbyists.

Zachary D. Carter writes in Slate that there is a long history of forgiving debt. This is a terrific article. I urge you to read it.

He begins:

In 1920, the world’s most famous economist, John Maynard Keynes, was digging through old books on the economy of the ancient world, when he discovered something startling. All his life he had been taught that civilization depended on ironclad financial certainty. Without a stable currency and dependable debt contracts, commerce could not exist. Governments that meddled in such matters were thought to be asking for social chaos.

But the documents he perused on Ancient Greece, Rome, Babylon, Assyria, and Persia showed him something else entirely. Throughout history, political leaders had abolished debts and managed the value of their currencies—another way to revise debts—as routine matters of government policy. Keynes was electrified. A year earlier, he had staked his reputation on a call to cancel the largest debts the world had ever seen—those accrued by the governments of Europe during World War I. If these debts were not cleared, Keynes had argued, the international trading system would break down, leading to misery and another war. Predictably, the financial establishments on two continents responded to this apparent heresy with alarm. Now Keynes had discovered precedent for his ideas — thousands of years’ worth, from Hammurabi in ancient Babylon to Solon of Athens.

[As a side note, the Treaty of Versailles imposed massive debt on Germany. Had that debt been forgiven, there might have been no World War II.]

Indeed, debt relief has always been the handmaiden of debt itself. In the United States we have a formal legal process for eliminating nearly all forms of debt: bankruptcy. When debts become unbearable, people file for bankruptcy to have them discharged in court. In the 15 years preceding the pandemic, more than 14.3 million people filed for bankruptcy, and in the decade prior to the pandemic, more than 20,000 businesses filed for bankruptcy every year, with a high water mark of 60,837 in 2009. Debts are discharged every day in the United States, and have been for decades.

Indeed, debt relief has always been the handmaiden of debt itself. In the United States we have a formal legal process for eliminating nearly all forms of debt: bankruptcy. When debts become unbearable, people file for bankruptcy to have them discharged in court. In the 15 years preceding the pandemic, more than 14.3 million people filed for bankruptcy, and in the decade prior to the pandemic, more than 20,000 businesses filed for bankruptcy every year, with a high water mark of 60,837 in 2009. Debts are discharged every day in the United States, and have been for decades.

Not that you would know from the apocalyptic conservative outrage emanating from social media and cable television this week. When President Joe Biden announced his new student loan relief program on Wednesday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell decried it as “socialism” and Utah Sen. Mitt Romney called it a naked attempt to “bribe the voters.” Reason magazine’s Robby Soave declared it a “fuck you to every financially responsible person in the country.” These reactions belie centuries if not millennia of economic history.

Capitalism would collapse without debt relief systems. Businesses get in trouble all the time—both good businesses that would work fine without a few onerous debt deals, and bad businesses that need to be liquidated or restructured. Sometimes bad things just happen. People get divorced. They get injured and are overwhelmed by medical bills. They get laid off. They have to pay for a parent’s funeral or care for children with special needs. And yeah, some people just don’t know how to manage their money and buy things they can’t afford. But we do not consign such people to never-ending financial servitude as a result of unforeseen circumstances, or even totally reckless spending habits. We have a formal process to eliminate debts and start over, with a reasonable chance of living a healthy financial life.

But not for students who borrow money to attend college. In 2005, Congress passed a law that made it next to impossible to discharge almost any form of student debt. Even the most creative consumer lawyers estimate that only about $50 billion—less than 3 percent of the $1.75 trillion in outstanding student debt—had the potential to be wiped away, but only if students could persuade a court that they had been egregiously wronged, by say, non-accredited programs or institutions that didn’t actually offer degrees.

Biden’s new student debt relief program exists because student debt is currently ineligible for the ordinary process that Americans use for extinguishing excessive debts….

Nor are the recipients of Biden’s aid particularly wealthy. The plan flatly excludes anyone who makes more than $125,000 a year from participation. According to an analysis by the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Wharton Budget Model, about half of the money will go to borrowers in the bottom half of the income spectrum, with only 2.5 percent of folks breaking into the top 10 percent receiving relief. The median personal income in the United States—the 50 percent line—is $35,800. This makes sense once we consider the actual demographics of the typical American college student, who is not an Ivy Leaguer bound for the 1 percent. About 40 percent of all undergraduate students attend community colleges, about one-third of whom take out student loans to help pay for their education. The average community college borrowergraduating with more than $13,000 in debt. There are also racial disparities in student debt: According to a Brookings Institute analysis, Black borrowers shoulder roughly double the amount of debt to attend college that white borrowers do.



Categories Biden, Education Industry, Higher Education, Student Financial Aid and Student Debt
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