While the increasingly popular quip that “colleges are just real-estate hedge funds with classes attached” may inspire eye rolls, recent moves are making the joke cut deeper… Rather than help ease student’s cost burdens, the growing hedge-fund-like nature of endowments has actually made affordability worse. According to a 2018 case study on the financialization of higher education from the Roosevelt Institute, a progressive think tank, complex financial investments called interest-rate swaps had cost a sample of 19 schools $2.7 billion — enough to cover the total cost of college for 108,000 students.

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by Catherine Liu, Business Insider.

Posted: March 8th, 2023, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

Just weeks after the University of California and academic workers heralded historic wage gains in new labor contracts, the question of how to pay for them is roiling campuses, which are scrambling to identify money, considering cutbacks in graduate student admissions and fearing deficits… The UC Office of the President estimates that the increased costs for salary, benefits and tuition across all 10 campuses will be between $500 million and $570 million over the life of the contracts… Options are limited, with no new state influx of money in the coming academic year dedicated to covering the raises when they kick in — and the state is facing a projected $22.5-billion budget deficit. Fixed federal contracts that pay for 60% of the academic workers can’t be abruptly renegotiated. Many campuses have raised questions as to why UC negotiated the contracts without identifying a clear funding source.

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by Teresa Watanabe, The Los Angeles Times.

Posted: January 27th, 2023, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

A majority of the general public (55%) supports forgiving up to $10,000 of a person’s federal student loan debt. But the more generous the relief, the more that support narrows… when asked about income limits, poll respondents’ views about debt relief didn’t budge… In one of the poll’s most unexpected findings… a whopping 82% said the government’s priority should be making college more affordable for current and future students. Just 16% believed forgiving student debts should take priority.

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by Cory Turner and Sequoia Carrillo, NPR.

Posted: June 17th, 2022, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

Graduation season is usually accompanied by receiving congratulatory gifts and the big question of what’s next. Well, nearly 500 women at North Carolina’s Bennett College got an answer for the future in the form of a gift. Debt Collective, a union of debtors rallying against consumer debt, contacted the president of the HBCU and offered to clear the debt for the current graduating class… they chose Bennet College because data indicated that Black women have higher student loan balances than any other group of student loan borrowers.

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by Josh Rodgers, Yahoo!News.

Posted: May 23rd, 2022, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

It was reported that the Biden administration is considering competing plans for how much student debt to cancel and who will get it. Among the plans are versions that exclude anyone who made over $125,000 or $150,000 as individuals (or $250,000 or $300,000 as a couple) in 2021. In theory, nearly everyone should qualify since only roughly 3% of student debtors make more than these limits… In an effort to exclude 3% of student debtors, the Biden administration is going to make 45 million navigate a complex obstacle course. Most of them may, but many won’t. Those excluded will be precisely the most vulnerable, the poorest, those with the least access to the internet…

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by Thomas Gokey, MarketWatch.

Posted: May 19th, 2022, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

…since SB 118 removes student enrollment from CEQA consideration, more emphasis will be placed on total campus population, including faculty and staff. California legislative analyst Jennifer Pacella noted that no university campuses exceed the total campus population estimate in their long-range development plans, though UC Berkeley, UCLA and UC Santa Barbara have slightly more than their student enrollment targets.

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by Maria Young, The Daily Californian.

Posted: March 14th, 2022, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

The California Legislature and Gov. Gavin Newsom moved with lightning speed on Monday to pass a bill that would prevent UC Berkeley from having to cut its student enrollment by several thousand… Senate Bill 118 changes the California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA, so that student enrollment, or changes in enrollment, by itself does not constitute a project subject to that law. It also applies retroactively, meaning it applies to the UC Berkeley case. Newsom signed the bill into law Monday evening, just hours after its passage.

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by Andrew Sheeler, The San Luis Obispo Tribune.

Posted: March 14th, 2022, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

Kennedy owned a piece of property on Oxford Street, directly across from campus, that was approved for 56 apartments. Kennedy, who was short of cash at the time, was willing to sell it to the university for a bargain price of $500,000. There was some initial interest from UC Berkeley’s administration, but after months of going back and forth, the deal fizzled out… “UC Berkeley couldn’t get it together to buy it,” Kennedy said. “At that time they were a bureaucracy that couldn’t act nimbly if their lives depended on it.” A quarter-century later, it would not be much of an exaggeration to say that UC Berkeley’s life — or at least its ability to grow as one of the premier public universities in the world — depends on whether it can act nimbly to produce student housing as fast as possible.

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by J.K. Dineen, The San Francisco Chronicle.

Posted: March 14th, 2022, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

Signed into law in 1970 by then-Gov. Ronald Reagan, CEQA requires local governments to study the potential environmental impacts of building projects before approving them. Over the years, the law has been wielded by groups that oppose developments for numerous reasons, going far beyond its original intent, according to housing advocates. California has added 3.2 times more people than housing units over the past 10 years.. Since 2015, UC campuses have added 21,700 beds while enrollment grew by about 43,000… In the fall of 2001, the median rent for a studio apartment for new leases was $900, according to data from the city of Berkeley. Last fall, it was nearly $1,800.

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by Christine Mai-Duc, The Wall Street Journal.

Posted: March 14th, 2022, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

Anthropology Library was scheduled to permanently close Feb. 28 due to staffing shortages… According to MacKie-Mason, the campus libraries currently receive 40% fewer funds per enrolled student than in 2014. The budget reduction requires the campus libraries to cut crucial scholarly materials used for research, teaching and learning.

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by Lily Button, The Daily Californian.

Posted: March 10th, 2022, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.