While the latest legislation will provide more money than the March package did, the amount is just a fraction of the $120 billion that higher-education associations have sought in recent months. Since last spring, colleges have shed more than half a million jobs — the largest decline in the higher-education work force since the federal government began collecting such data… Another disappointment for some was the removal of a provision to extend the pause on student-loan repayment until April. The U.S. Department of Education has allowed borrowers to refrain from making such payments through the end of January, so the administration of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. will have to issue an order to extend that period. The result will be weeks of unnecessary chaos and uncertainty…
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by Eric Kelderman, The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Posted: December 21st, 2020, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
Chancellors and senior leaders at five of the nine UC undergraduate campuses told The Times that the staggering financial hit to their operations triggered by the coronavirus crisis and a $300.8-million proposed state budget cut this year have underscored the pressing need to open talks about tuition rates — which regents have increased just once for California students since 2011. The financial squeeze has prompted campuses to slash budgets, dig into reserves, borrow funds, substantially halt hiring — and, at UC Riverside, propose axing its athletic program, drawing hundreds of protest letters, emails and calls.
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by Teresa Watanabe, The Los Angeles Times.
Posted: December 12th, 2020, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
Mr. Biden has endorsed canceling $10,000 in federal student debt per borrower through legislation, and insisted that chipping away at the $1.7 trillion in loan debt held by more than 43 million borrowers is integral to his economic plan. But Democratic leaders, backed by the party’s left flank, are pressing for up to $50,000 of debt relief per borrower, executed on Day 1 of his presidency… To truly break the debt cycle, though, forgiveness would need to be paired with policy changes addressing the underlying cause of America’s skyrocketing student debt: affordability, an issue Democrats have tried to address… Mr. Biden’s campaign platform proposed making public universities tuition-free for families making less than $125,000 a year.
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by Erica L. Green, Luke Broadwater and Stacy Cowley, The New York Times.
Posted: December 10th, 2020, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
DeVos, who is related by marriage to the Amway multilevel marketing empire and sister of Erik Prince, founder of the mercenary military firm Blackwater, also condemned Biden’s proposal for tuition-free college as “a socialist takeover of higher education.” Of course that overlooks the tradition of free public university education that was once exemplified by the University of California, which was once guaranteed tuition-free by the state constitution. That tradition is relevant to the student debt debate, because one factor in the debt explosion is the withdrawal of government support for public higher education. “States withdrew funding for public higher ed, tuition went up, and the whole premise of higher education went from being a public good to a private good…” America is a land that never ceases to pay lip service to the value of education and almost never manages to back up its honeyed words with the resources necessary to make them true.
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by Michael Hiltzik, The Los Angeles Times.
Posted: December 2nd, 2020, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
President Trump or Education Secretary Betsy DeVos could try to bridge the gap between December 31, 2020 and January 20, 2021 by further extending the CARES Act’s moratorium on student loan payments and interest for another month or more. But will they? In August, President Trump strongly suggested that he would, and that we would know at around this time… This timeframe makes sense, as student loan servicers would need sufficient lead time prior to December 31 to stop payment and billing notices from being generated and sent to borrowers. Conversely, it would be much more difficult for student loan servicers to manage the whiplash of millions of borrowers entering repayment, then re-entering a payment suspension, all within a few weeks. But so far, President Trump has not given any indication that he intends to follow through with his promise that he made in August.
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by Adam S. Minsky, Esq., Forbes.
Posted: November 30th, 2020, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
“Student loan debt is holding back a whole generation from buying homes, starting small businesses, and saving for retirement – all things we rely on to grow our economy,” said Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren earlier this week. Warren is a leading voice in the push to cancel student debt. And if Biden cannot succeed in passing student loan forgiveness legislation through Congress, activists and advocates are calling on him to pursue executive action, instead. “Executive action to cancel student debt would be a huge economic stimulus during and after this crisis,” Warren said.
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by Adam S. Minsky, Esq., Forbes.
Posted: November 19th, 2020, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
Joe Biden is calling on Congress to cancel $10,000 of student loans immediately… Why $10,000 of student loan forgiveness? Biden adopted the plan contained in the Heroes Act, which is the $3 trillion stimulus plan that House Democrats proposed… the Heroes Act (which is a legislative proposal and not law) does not provide student loan forgiveness for every borrower. Rather, only borrowers who have been struggling financially due to the Covid-19 pandemic would be eligible to “cancel student loans.” It’s unclear what the financial litmus test for student loan forgiveness would be, or if Congress would broaden the definition to include all student loan borrowers.
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by Zack Friedman, Forbes.
Posted: November 18th, 2020, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
The Biden team has been floating a number of names for education secretary, a job that many thought would go to Darling-Hammond before she said recently that she didn’t want it… All the signs at the moment indicate that Biden’s education agenda will be significantly different from Duncan’s (and certainly DeVos’s) and start to address the issue of educational equity in ways that Darling-Hammond has always thought were important, including how public schools are funded.
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by Valerie Strauss, The Washington Post.
Posted: November 12th, 2020, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
Drake opened the meeting by acknowledging the impacts of COVID-19 on the university and said he was “inspired by the flexibility and resilience of our student body.” He praised students and faculty for adapting to a remote learning environment, which he said is not a preferred method of delivering instruction but is “serving us well.” Questions about tuition hikes came as the UC system faces a $258.4 million decrease in funding from the state government, according to the enacted California state budget of 2020-21. “I’m sure that we won’t have an increase in tuition of any kind coming up this year,” Drake said during the teleconference. “We wouldn’t think about anything like that during the time we are still remote.”
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by Amudha Sairam and Kaleo Mark, The Daily Californian.
Posted: November 11th, 2020, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
CSU’s policy to hold between three to six months of uncommitted reserves likely offers sufficient reserves for it to respond to some economic downturns. At one to three months of core reserves, UC’s policies still offer some protection against economic downturns, but the smaller reserve level leaves campuses more vulnerable to unforeseen events… While CSU provides readily available data through a publicly accessible portal, UC does not maintain publicly available reserves data. We recommend the Legislature direct UC to create a plan to develop a financial transparency data platform that includes key information about its reserves.
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by Lisa Qing and Jason Constantouros, The Legislative Analyst's Office.
Posted: November 10th, 2020, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
