Governor Cuomo Is Responsible For Higher College Costs At SUNY

Man, sometimes even the NY Post gets stuff right.

Take this editorial on college loans and the Cuomo proposal to have NY State pick up some of the loan for a couple of years for college graduates who remain in NY State but are make less than $50K a year:

On one thing President Obama and Gov. Cuomo are agreed: The answer to high tuition and crushing student debt is more money from the government.

Problem is, it’s precisely government dollars that are driving up the price of college tuition at a rate far faster than general inflation.

Right now, colleges have no skin in the loan game: If a kid drops out before earning his degree, or if she earns a degree that is worthless and so can’t get a job that pays enough to let her pay off her loans, that’s terrible for her.

But the school has already been paid.

The solution the Posties propose?

If you want to lower college costs, don’t just throw more money at the schools. Ensure the universities have some skin in the game — e.g., by forcing them to pick up part of the loans for a kid who fails out.

And make ’em work for their customers by demonstrating why their degrees are worth what they’re charging for them.

I don't know exactly how you do that second thing, since so many of the second and third tier private schools charge a LOT of money for a degree of dubious value that could be gotten from a state school for much less.

But I do know that making the schools pick up some of the loan costs of students who drop out might make these schools think twice about a) tuition costs and b) loading students up with loans.

But the best way to hold down college costs and give students a quality education is for NY State to provide MORE state aid to SUNY.

Under Governor Cuomo, the percentage of SUNY costs covered by state aid has dropped and the percentage of SUNY costs covered by tuition has increased.

Cuomo has instituted five years of tuition increases that will result in students paying more than 25% higher tuition and fee costs from before he became governor.

I posted this when Cuomo first released his loan debt relief plan and I want to post it again:

Governor Cuomo is the reason why SUNY costs are so high in NY State for college students.

I think the Post is right that colleges ought to have some skin in the game when it comes to student loans.

But I also think Governor Cuomo and the state Legislature ought to be providing more state aid to SUNY in order to provide opportunities for an affordable, quality education to all.

College For All Once Again Exposed As Myth

The NY Times shows what's happened to the "American Dream" since 1989 - even for the college-educated:

YOUNG families are better educated than ever before, but they are earning lower real incomes.

The Federal Reserve Board’s newly released 2013 Survey of Consumer Finances indicates that the median family headed by someone under 35 years of age earned $35,509 in 2013 dollars. Adjusted for inflation, that is 6 percent less than similar families reported in the first such survey, in 1989.

Since 1989, the Fed has conducted extensive interviews of consumers every three years. Respondents are asked about their family’s income in the previous year, as well as about wealth, debt, education and attitudes toward financial issues. The results are released by family, not by individual, so the median family income may include the income of both spouses. Single-person households are included in the family calculations.

As can be seen in the charts, younger families have fallen further and further behind older families as time has passed. Nearly a quarter-century after the first survey was taken, families headed by people over 55 generally have higher incomes, after adjusting for inflation, than their predecessors did. But those in groups under 55 generally earn less than their predecessors.

In the first survey, the younger group included families headed by people born after 1954, and so was dominated by baby boomers. The latest group includes families headed by people born after 1984, and they seem not to have done nearly as well early in their careers. The earlier group came of age in a stronger economy and its members were generally not burdened by education loans as many of the latter group are.

The largest declines have come since the 2007 survey — the last one in which participants discussed their income in a year before the Great Recession began. The following survey covered income earned during the recession, and it was not easy to know how much of the falloff was a cyclical phenomenon that would disappear when the economy recovered.

But the newest survey covered income in 2012, three years after the recession ended, and shows that most of the lost ground has not been recovered. In fact, the real median income for all of the age groups except those in the 35-to-44 group declined from 2010 to 2013.

And you know that jive about how education is the issue, that those with higher educational attainment do better than those with lower?

It's jive:

Among families of all ages, those with more education tend to earn more than those with less. But that differential appears to be shrinking. at least for younger families. In 1989, the median income of families headed by young college graduates was twice that of similar families headed by high school graduates who never attended college. Now, the difference is only 52 percent. There are more college graduates in the group, but those graduates have a lower real median income than their predecessors.

They're still pushing college for everyone in schools, selling kids on the myth that people who go to college make more money than those who don't.

It's of course much more complicated than that, as can be seen by the diminishing gap between those with college degrees and those without in the recent surveys.

I know that the NYCDOE is pushing so-called "college readiness" as one of the school metrics for whether a schools is "good" or not.

That means there is pressure on administrations to push as many students into college DIRECTLY after graduation as they can.

Here's a lesson you won't hear much in schools these days, but one that needs to be given:

If students are not careful, going to college can harm them irrevocably for life.

Taking on tens of thousands of dollars in debt at the start of their adult lives for a piece of paper that doesn't do much for them is irrevocable harm, whether the NYSED, the NYCDOE or the USDOE want to use that piece of paper as an emblem for college readiness or not.

Yesterday, Fred Klonsky linked to a Huffington Post piece about senior citizens swamped with student debt who are having their Social Security checks garnished:

The Education Department is demanding so much money from seniors with defaulted student loans that it's forcing tens of thousands of them into poverty, according to a government audit.

At least 22,000 Americans aged 65 and older had a part of their Social Security benefits garnished last year to the point that their monthly benefits were below federal poverty thresholds, according to the Government Accountability Office.

Education Department-initiated collections on defaulted federal student loans left at least another 83,000 Americans aged 64 and younger with poverty-level Social Security payments, GAO data show. Federal auditors cautioned that the number of Americans forced to accept poverty-level benefits because of past defaults on federal student loans are surely higher.

More than half, or 54 percent, of federal student loans held by borrowers at least 75 years old are in default, according to the federal watchdog. About 27 percent of loans held by borrowers aged 65 to 74 are in default. Among borrowers aged 50 to 64, 19 percent of their loans are in default. The Education Department generally defines a default as being at least 360 days past due.

As unpaid student debt approaches $1.3 trillion, the federal watchdog's findings underscore the consequences of increased student debt burdens and the risk they'll wreak havoc on households in the coming years if U.S. workers continue to see little increase in their paychecks, the economy barely grows, and the Education Department's contractors keep borrowers in the dark on repayment options.

22,000 senior citizens having their Social Security benefits garnished now.

Just wait and see what those numbers look like when the younger generations surveyed by the Federal Reserve start getting older and are still swamped by student debt.

This is where we're at these days - the American Dream, circa 2014.

As Carlin said, it's called the "American Dream" because you have to be asleep to believe it.

What Good Is "College And Career Ready" When There Are No Jobs For College Graduates?

I'm so sick of hearing Common Core proponents issue the boilerplate jive about how the CCSS are helping to make students college and career ready to compete in a global 21st century economy.

The truth is, there are few jobs out there for college graduates and the prospects aren't getting better:

While members of the class of 2014 have some cause to celebrate, they also know they are a few short months away from starting to pay down their share of the $1 trillion-plus student-loan debt.

The most shocking number of all is that only 17 percent of these soon-to-be grads have a job lined up, according to AfterCollege Inc., which crunches these numbers and also tries to help match employers with recent graduates.

Despite our being a year further along on the road to economic recovery, this year’s 17 percent is actually down from the class of 2013’s 20 percent who had a job lined up before graduating.

Most kids who go to college do so to get skills for work after graduation. It’s never going to be 100 percent or even 90 percent of graduates who have job offers waiting, but it shouldn’t be that 83 percent of seniors have nothing lined up, either — especially when 73 percent say they were actively looking for work.

Oddly, even 82 percent of supposedly more “marketable” majors (engineering, technology, math) were still empty-handed.

Some think the job situation will get better for college graduates as the economy gradually improves, but we're already five years post-recession and the economy still hasn't improved for many in the job market.

The reality is, the economy has changed such that fewer jobs for college graduates exist and that number is dwindling every year and greatly diminishing the value of a college degree:

Large numbers of college graduates can only find employment in jobs paying the minimum wage. Currently, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, 260,000 people with college or even professional degrees are so employed. Moreover, the percentage of college graduates who work in jobs that don’t require any advanced academic preparation (the “mal-employed”) has been rising for years, and now stands at 36 percent. If college degrees are becoming more valuable, why are so many graduates either unemployed or employed at low-paying jobs?

What jobs are being created these days?

The kind that don't - or shouldn't - require college degrees:

The BLS has a handy chart of the fastest-growing jobs in America (h/t Erica Grieder), and the vast majority are not the “knowledge economy” jobs we usually think of. In fact, this chart seems to prove things that we already know: the rising importance of the healthcare sector to the economy (especially with an aging population) and the transition of the economy to services, where “services” is not a euphemism for “computers” but, like, actual services.

So the list has your odd “Biomedical Engineers” (fancy!) and, at the bottom, your “Medical Scientists, Except Epidemiologists” (sorry epidemiologists!), but the vast majority of jobs are jobs like “Home Health Aides” and “Reinforcing Iron and Rebar Workers.”

A key point here: The jobs of the future are only “low skilled” if you define “low skilled” as not requiring college. Being a good carpenter (56% growth, Jesus is still with us) or, for that matter, a good medical secretary (41% growth), takes smarts (actual smarts, not just book smarts), hard work, and dedication.

Relatedly, the jobs of the future will be high-paying. It’s simply not true that all high-paying jobs require a college degree. It’s very very possible to make a very good living as a tradesman, because good tradesmen are–and always will be, unlike Fortran programmers and data entry clerks–in high demand.

“Helpers–Brickmasons, Blockmasons, Stonemasons, and Tile and Marble Setters” sounds like bottom-of-the-barrel work, but follow someone like Samuel-James Wilson, an award-winning bricklayer, on Twitter, or visit Guédelon Castle where contemporary tradesmen are building a 13th century castle with 13th century tools, to see that being a good bricklayer is as hard as being a good lawyer. Obviously I’ve been influenced by Shop Class as Soulcraft, which should be required reading for any discussion of the future of work and education.

And finally–and this is perhaps the most important thing–some jobs of the future only “require” college because we’re very dumb. Very few of those occupations require college in the sense that 90+% of people who pursue that occupation will benefit from having learned about it in college. But my guess would be that more than a few of these occupations “require” college in the sense that employers expect that applicants will have a BA. And this is our problem.  A “Diagnostic Medical Sonographer” is a highly-skilled job that doesn’t require college training in the sense that you can learn everything you need to do the job in a manner of months. But many colleges offer programs to help you become a Diagnostic Medical Sonographer. And when you compare unemployment rates for college graduates and non-college graduates, you see why someone might want to go to college to become a Diagnostic Medical Sonographer even if it means taking on huge, unnecessary debt. And once there are enough college graduates who can become Diagnostic Medical Sonographers, you can see why employers would rationally toss out of the pile any resumes that don’t have a college degree on them.

This is something that we urgently need to fix, because we’re wasting ginormous amounts of money, time, and resources. The first step is to recognize what the actual jobs of the future are.

One problem is, college is a huge money-making industry - for the college themselves, of course, but also for the ancillary industries like the testing companies, the test prep companies, the banks (via the loans) and even the government (which also makes money from student loans.)

These entities all help to push college for all because they make a ton of money off of it.

Second problem is, we live in a culture that denigrates occupations that require people to work with their hands (farming, construction, etc.) and denigrates service occupations that are necessary to make things work right (medical secretaries, doormen, etc.)

What I think we are going to need to do in this so-called 21st Century global economy is re-order how we think about work, stop privileging finance and tech over everything else, start to re-think how we handle compensation for all jobs (both the overpaid ones, like finance and tech, as well as the underpaid ones, like service jobs) and re-do how we handle training so that apprenticeships and on-the-job training replace some of the so-called college programs out there.

Oh, and there are way too many colleges - especially these expensive second and third tier private schools that load students up with debt for diplomas that are barely worth the paper they're printed on  (I'm looking at you, College of New Rochelle!)

Time to see these things go out of business and stop saddling students every year with debt.

I'm under no illusion that this will happen easily, without a fight or even, in the end, happen at all.

There's too much money to be made selling the "college dream" to as many as are willing to buy it.

But as more and more graduates find themselves slinging coffee at Starbuck's or working retail, there might be a natural movement away from reflexively saying every kid must go to college or else.

Let's hope.

Making SUNY And CUNY Tuition Free

From State of Politics:

Assemblyman James Skoufis is sponsoring legislation to give students free tuition to SUNY and CUNY schools if they agree to certain requirements. Participants would have to do 250 hours of community service each year, and then after graduation they’d need to stay in the state for at least five years. The goal is to help make college more affordable and assist non-profits around the state.

Pell grants and TAP do not come close to covering tuition, room and board at SUNY anymore.

Pell Grants and TAP still do cover CUNY costs if a student is eligible for them.

Still, I have seen way too many students have to take out $5000+ a year in loans lately to go to a SUNY school.

It would be great if there was some kind of program that gave students the opportunity to attend a SUNY school without having to go $20,000+ into debt to do it.

I have my doubts that Sheriff Andy Como would want this to happen - he likes to pass on the costs of tax cuts for rich people to working class and middle class college kids and their families.

But good to see this legislation introduced.

A Sensible Education Week Article On Vocational Training

By Renee Moore, a National Board-certified teacher of English and journalism:

The majority of high school graduates in America do not go to college, at least not directly. But wait—in all of the high schools where I've worked, half of the students who enroll never graduate, and that's reflective of a longstanding national trend. So where are all those young people going?
The vocational career pathway has always been treated as low status in our antiquated educational hierarchy. In reality, this is just academic snobbery; the vocational careers have been some of the most lucrative and bountiful entryways to the middle class in America for a long time. For example, while almost 50 percent of four-year college graduates are unemployed, 60 percent of all nursing graduates in the U.S. come from the nation's community colleges. Add to them the dental hygienists, plumbers, electricians, heating and air conditioning technicians, auto mechanics, chefs, office workers, medical-equipment operators and technicians, cosmetologists, barbers, truck drivers, and machine handlers, just to name a few of the people on whom we rely daily, and we realize it's the traditional college route that should be called alternative.

Many of the traditional "college bound" students I have worked with over the years ended up being less prepared for the workplace than their vocational-career peers. Consider how many students have graduated from four-year colleges with degrees that were, for all practical purposes, worthless in terms of the job market. What promises (and overpriced loans) were they sold as they matriculated through those majors? Consider that we are graduating too many elementary teachers (and for the wrong reasons) rather than advising career seekers to go into the fields and geographic regions where they are actually needed.

The ugly truth: Much of our current educational system is more about maintaining social stratification than helping individual students reach their full potential. I see a need for more merging of all the post-secondary options rather than maintaining rigid, predetermined pathways. I support more blending of options, instead of needlessly pitting the vocational versus the academic. For instance, The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and others are tackling our senseless devotion to making all college-bound students, regardless of their majors, master algebra, arguing for the option to take statistics or probability. Changes like these make even more sense given that our children and grandchildren are likely to have multiple careers rather than choosing one field for a lifetime. Education can no longer be something a person "does" once formally before entering the "real world."

As I see it, continuing education, re-training, and lifelong learning are the new reality.

All our children should be encouraged to do more real learning, and all types of learning should be available to whomever is interested. 

 I would add one thing to her piece.

It is not a mistake that the capitalists who run the system have de-skilled us so that we can no longer cook, clean, sew, fix stuff around the house, etc.

In a system that relies on charging money for services, they don't want you to know how to do those things.

They want you to have to purchase those services instead.

Even if students are on a college track, I see nothing wrong with teaching home economics, plumbing, fashion and other "vocational" skills to these same students too.

I know I would have complained about having to take these classes when I was in school - until I figured out that having learned these skills, I could now take care of myself better in the "real world."

So I think it's time we have this discussion - why have all the vocational classes been replaced with pre-college calculus when the vocational classes are just as valuable (and arguably more valuable) then the pre-college calculus?

Federal Government Makes Money On Student Loans

Interesting - the federal government actually makes money on student loans.

No wonder those in power seem to want the interest rates to double:

The interest rate on many student loans is scheduled to double on July 1, to 6.8 percent from 3.4 percent — just as it was last year, when in the midst of an election campaign, Congress voted to extend the lower rate.

...

On Tuesday, the day before the White House plans to send its budget to Congress, student advocacy groups are releasing an issue brief charging that the federal government should not be profiting from student loans, while more and more students bear a crushing debt burden. 

The brief, citing a February report from the Congressional Budget Office, said the federal government makes 36 cents in profit on every student-loan dollar it puts out, and estimates that over all, student loans will bring in $34 billion next year.

“Higher education loans are meant to subsidize the cost of higher education, not profit from them, especially at a time when students are facing record debt,” said Ethan Senack, the higher education advocate at the United States Public Interest Research Group, which is issuing the brief with the United States Student Association and Young Invincibles, an organization for people 18 to 34.

“The revenue from student loans should be used to keep education affordable, and should never be used to pay down the deficit or for other federal programs,” Mr. Senack said. 

While it has long been known that the government makes money on student loans, the numbers in the issue brief are surprising, said Terry Hartle, senior vice president of the American Council on Education. 

“If the numbers are accurate, the government will make more money on student loans than Ford makes on automobiles,” he said. “Using student loans to create a profit center is not what anybody intended.

Seems like everybody is making money off the college students.

There's the College Board and the SAT prep companies and the colleges themselves and the companies that hire these students or graduates as interns and pay them nothing and now we see that the government makes more money off loans than Ford makes off cars.

Generation Debt really is screwed.

Bloomberg Will Grade Schools On How Well Students Do In College

But there few jobs for those who graduate college:

In post-recession America, it’s a coin toss whether college graduates will wind up fully employed.

Nearly 50% of grads over the last five years are unemployed or underemployed, according to a Rutgers University study released Thursday.

The research compared the job outlook for “post-recession” grads with that of graduates before the U.S. economic collapse in 2008.

Declining opportunity for even top students is squashing optimism in today’s youth, most of whom worry the American Dream is beyond their reach, researchers found.

Only one in five college graduates said they expected their generation would be more successful than the generations before them.

...

Students from the Class of 2008 and later faced a significantly bleaker future than grads from prior years, according to the study. Less than half were able to find jobs within one year of graduation, down from 73% before 2008.

Those who did find work were often disappointed with the jobs and salaries they wound up accepting. The average starting salary dropped from $30,000 to $27,000, the study found.

The 1.4 million graduates from 4-year colleges who will enter the workforce this spring face a U.S. unemployment rate of 8%, according to the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics.

And the gloomy outlook is confounded by the fact that tuition prices for higher education keep going up, forcing student debt up, too. The majority of graduates left school about $20,000 in debt, the Rutgers study found.

As a result, recent grads are likely to delay getting married, having children or buying a house, are are more likely to go back to graduate school to better their career chances, said Van Horn.

Well, I guess some of these college graduates who can't find work outside of Starbucks can go to grad school and increase their job opportunities and earning potential, right?

Uh, maybe not:

In this economy, even having multiple degrees isn't a guarantee against poverty.

The number of PhD recipients on food stamps and other forms of welfare more than tripled between 2007 and 2010 to 33,655, according to an Urban Institute analysis cited by the Chronicle of Higher Education. The number of master's degree holders on food stamps and other forms of welfare nearly tripled during that same time period to 293,029, according to the same analysis.

The boost in PhD recipients receiving food stamps is just the latest indication of how Americans are struggling in a down economy. Overall, the number of Americans on food stamps rose 43 percent over the past three years to 46.3 million Americans as of February 2012, according to the Department of Agriculture.

In addition, even graduate degrees that many used to consider a guarantee to a life of wealth and success are going down in value. The sluggish economy has pushed graduates with law degrees to look for jobs outside of the legal profession, according to U.S. News and World Report.

The situation is particularly dire for faculty working outside the tenure track as cuts to funding for public colleges have squeezed their salaries. Many adjunct faculty members are likely to be on welfare, since they live on "poverty wages," the Chronicle of Higher Education reports.

Meanwhile, secure tenure-track jobs are disappearing as adjunct faculty positions become more the norm, according to several news sources. While more than half of all university faculty members were tenured or on the tenure track in 1975, that percentage has plunged to less than a third of all faculty members as of 2007, according to Department of Education data cited by the Chronicle of Higher Education in a separate report.

All of these factors, plus a less-than-stellar job market, have forced many PhDs to work in menial jobs. There are 5,057 janitors with PhDs, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data cited by the Houston Chronicle.

Janitors with PhD's.

With a hundred thousand in loan debt, of course.

Now there's an emblem for the Obama Age.

How come nobody grades Bloomberg on whether he creates a job market for all these people he's pushing to go to college?

How come nobody grades Obama on that either?

It seems the teachers who have taught these people are blamed for the problem, and of course the schools they went to are blamed as well.

But nobody blames the politicians and business leaders and corporations who have created the very economic environment that is going to make it so hard for the current youth generation to make a viable living.

NYU Students Carry Most Debt Of Any Private College In Country

NYU students take to Washington Square to protest debt levels at the college:

NYU students have a lot of debt and they are sick of it, apparently. Earlier this afternoon a group of students raged (peacefully) against the machine in Washington Square Park, donning masks and t-shirts on which they had written how much they owe. The aim was to bring attention to the fact that NYU's students carry a cumulative $659 million in debt, the highest in the country for a non-profit college or university.

The majority of the peaceful demonstration revolved around those in attendance donning masks and shirts emblazoned with their debt while standing very, very still for a few moments. It was organized by NYU Local and MTV's Andrew Jenks.

The Local's EIC Charlie Eisenhood—who spoke in the park about the burdens of student debt without blaming anyone—had some high hopes. Before it he told the Washington Square News that "I'd like NYU to feel compelled to put out a statement both on their own policy on financial aid and maybe what we could do nationally. If anybody who could offer a solution, it should be NYU." We'll find out soon enough if NYU takes the bait.

Yeah, the brain trust at NYU was too busy buying up downtown real estate to respond to the protest.

They did, however, raise tuition and fees just a little bit to cover the higher real estate costs (the market's up these days, you know!)