Rep. Tom Petri, R-Fond du Lac, has been fighting to change the college loan system for 20 years. Now, President Obama has joined the fight. Obama has come out in support of a plan to eliminate one of the two federal college student loan programs. In the Federal Family Education Loan program, the federal government guarantees loans made by private lenders, with the lenders getting a cut of the money. In the Direct Loan program, the government loans money directly to students. Obama wants to do away with the FFEL program and convert all the loans to direct loans. That's what Petri's been pushing for all this time, without enough success, although studies had backed up the idea by showing cost savings...
...In a speech before Congress in February, (President Obama) called the nation's steep high-school dropout rates and low college-completion rates a "prescription for economic decline," and he urged all Americans to commit to a year of college, technical training, or apprenticeship. If the country complies, the economic returns could be extraordinary. Nationwide some 101.5 million adults over the age of 18 -- a full 45 percent of Americans -- have never attended college, according to the Census Bureau. If each of them took a year's worth of college courses, their earnings would grow by $70-billion, according to estimates by the Center on Education and the Workforce, at Georgetown University... (paid subscription required)
For community colleges in the Golden State, things have gone from worse to worst. The state's 110 two-year institutions will lose about $825 million in funding over the next 13 months, said Scott Lay, president of the Community College League of California. He added that, of this large cut, $200 million will be trimmed in the next 45 days. This drastic funding cut comes thanks to the defeat of a series of budget proposals, on the ballot of Tuesday's special election, which would have minimized cuts to public higher education and other state agencies...Per-student funding will be reduced by around 11 percent, he said, forcing colleges around the state to turn away nearly 250,000 students in the coming year...
To some, Google's mammoth book digitization project with university libraries is the ultimate combination of technology and scholarship, potentially making millions of volumes available to audiences that could never visit major research libraries in person. To others, the project represents a dangerous centralization and corporatization of content...
...But Duncan suggested that today's economic realities seemed likely to compel more changes in colleges' behavior than anything the government might do. Compared to 2003 when McKeon proposed withholding Perkins and other campus-based student aid from colleges that significantly raised tuition, "things have really changed, and students and parents have more options than I think they have ever had, and are going to vote with their feet," Duncan said. With lower-cost community colleges gaining in stature and colleges experimenting with three-year degrees and "no frills" campuses, he said, "smart consumers" will stop going to schools where costs are skyrocketing"...
The H1N1 influenza epidemic has had a devastating impact on Mexico's fledgling internationalization efforts, with more than 30 percent of foreign students fleeing the country since news of the virus broke just four weeks ago, according to university administrators... (paid subscription required)
