According to the Washington Post, President Joe Biden will not include any student loan cancellation in his annual budget. While the annual budget, which is expected at the end of next week, only contains major policy plans that have already been released by the Biden administration, it’s another major setback for student loan cancellation… It’s not that Biden doesn’t support student loan cancellation; he does. However, Biden wants Congress — not the president — to enact student loan cancellation through legislation.

Read full article [here].
by Zack Friedman, Forbes.

Posted: May 21st, 2021, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

The University of California Board of Regents convened on May 13 to discuss a new multiyear tuition and financial aid plan that would increase tuition for students enrolling in UC schools beginning in 2022… The plan was originally proposed at the Regents’ March 2020 meeting but was tabled until the May 13, 2021 meeting due to the pandemic. The Regents will vote on this plan in their upcoming July meeting.

Read full article [here].
by Sindhu Ananthavel, The Daily Nexus.

Posted: May 19th, 2021, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

The entire University of California system will now refuse even to consider SAT and ACT scores submitted, a dramatic escalation from other top colleges which had merely allowed applicants to opt-out of taking them. The system cited the supposed racism of these tests. In practice, the departure from specialized tests on the part of the College Board and the entire abandonment of generically standardized tests by colleges will exacerbate the inequality of our college admissions processes. The most privileged students will always have parents ready to dress their resumes with plum internships and volunteering positions and schools keen on grade inflation. In contrast, the nation’s poorest students — especially those in schools with no funding for AP exams and with parents who rely on them for extra income — must rely on standardized testing as an objective measure of their merit to those wealthy charlatans who hide behind letters of recommendation and nonprofit gigs.

Read full article [here].
by Tiana Lowe, The Washington Examiner.

Posted: May 18th, 2021, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

The University of California again is weighing a plan for annual tuition increases across the system’s nine undergraduate campuses, an idea that is drawing criticism from student leaders and some members of the university’s Board of Regents. UC leaders say they need the extra funding from tuition increases because their revenue streams have not kept pace with the university’s undergraduate enrollment growth. But critics say shifting the burden to students to cover those costs is the wrong solution, especially given the state’s budget surplus and the financial hardships brought on by the coronavirus pandemic. The proposal, brought to the Board of Regents as a discussion item Thursday, would go into effect for freshmen entering the university in fall 2022.

Read full article [here].
by Michael Burke, EdSource.

Posted: May 14th, 2021, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

Prestigious and predominantly white universities secure disproportionate shares of research grant money, philanthropic donations, full-tuition-paying national and international students, and corporate sponsorships that compensate for diminished support from state legislatures. In a perverse way, these advantages get translated into supposedly objective measures of quality in college rankings, like that of U.S. News, further helping those institutions draw affluent, advantaged students. This trend has left less prestigious public universities that provide the most accessible postsecondary opportunities with weaker private revenue streams, even while they educate the neediest students.

Read full article [here].
by Laura Hamilton and Kelly Nielsen, The Los Angeles Times.

Posted: March 2nd, 2021, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

In a regents’ committee meeting on January 20th, UCOP officials summarized the governor’s budget in a few slides. The 3 percent base increase is on the new, permanently-reduced amount. The rest are line-items that normally a public university would fund out of general operating money… DM [Deferred maintenance] gets $175m in one-time funds, and more earmarks are added. The DM figure is about 1.25 percent of a reasonable estimate of system-wide deferred maintenance, so at this rate UC will fix this year’s back log about 80 years from now. Except it’s not annual money… In short, Newsom restores Jerry Brown austerity in the form of frozen tuition and sub-inflation net state funding. We all hate the phrase, but this is classic “do more with less”–with no state interest in its effect on UC viability.

Read full article [here].
by Chris Newfield, Remaking The University.

Posted: January 25th, 2021, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

Right now, over 43 million people in the United States are buried under $1.5 trillion dollars in federal student loan debt, including 6.3 million borrowers ages 50-64 and nearly a million borrowers over the age of 65 who may still be paying for a loved one’s education or for their own… We are calling on President Biden and Vice President Harris to immediately cancel up to $50,000 in federal student loan debt. The U.S. Department of Education holds that debt and can cancel it, too. This is exactly what Joe Biden and Kamala Harris should direct their Education secretary to do.

Read full article [here].
by Sens. Chuck Schumer and Elizabeth Warren, CNBC.

Posted: January 22nd, 2021, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

As a new federal administration begins to take shape under President Joe Biden, a growing list of University of California-affiliated alumni and faculty have been nominated or appointed to positions in the new government… Public service is one of the three core elements of UC’s mission, and these former UC faculty and alumni manifest this mission at its highest level. Here are a few of the nominations and appointments so far — just a snapshot as new staffers continue to join the administration.

Read full article [here].
by staff, UC Newsroom.

Posted: January 22nd, 2021, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

Student debt should be cancelled because borrowers haven’t realized the income gains that would enable them to pay it off, the burden of student debt weighs especially heavily on the historically marginalized, and a good deal if not a majority of outstanding student debt isn’t going to be repaid anyway. Why should the government grind pointless payments out of its borrowers for the next many decades? Let’s be done with this failed policy experiment for good.

Read full article [here].
by Marshall Steinbaum, The Appeal.

Posted: January 14th, 2021, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

Newsom’s proposal provides a 3% increase in base funding for UC and Cal State, which would help the two public university systems recover from substantial financial losses and added expenses triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. Both systems were hit with state budget cuts of about $300 million each, massive losses in revenue from housing and dining, added expenses for technology as campuses shifted to online learning, and additional outlays for coronavirus testing and tracing, cleaning and protective equipment. The proposed increase does not cover all of those losses or come close to reaching the level of funding that the systems had asked for. Moreover, Newsom said the increases were being proposed with the “expectation” that the UC and Cal State systems do not raise tuition or fees.

Read full article [here].
by Teresa Watanabe and Nina Agrawal, The Los Angeles Times.

Posted: January 8th, 2021, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.