“Don’t cry about the economy, deal with it.” The CEO of AIG is preparing to give a commencement speech at New York State’s Alfred University. His advice? Take whatever opportunity comes your way and “treat it as if it’s the only one that’s coming your way, because that actually may be the truth.” (Bloomberg)

The next big thing in education? Google Glasses may be tContinue Reading »

Jason Delisle and Alex Holt continue to uncover new and shocking information about Income Based Repayment (IBR) program, which I’ve officially upgraded from “boondoggle” to “fiasco”:

[O]nce a borrower takes on $65,000 in debt, he bears none of the incremental cost of borrowing an additional dollar under the new IBR, even if he goes on to earn over $100,000 forContinue Reading »

Representative Petri has introduced a new bill that would replace our mess of student loan repayment programs with a new one based on the principles of income contingent lending (ICL). The commentary to date is quite confused, which is understandable since there are a lot of different versions of ICL. There are the international versions (see the appendix of this Education Sector report for a gContinue Reading »

“A cure worse than the disease.” Andrew Kelly explains how the federal government’s new income-based repayment program for student loans could cost billions in the next decade. Education Sector analysts have a better idea. (The American)

Committee business. Sens. Tammy Baldwin (Wis.), Chris Murphy (Conn.), and Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) are expected to be new Democratic additions to the SeContinue Reading »

The Income Based Repayment (IBR) program already has some issues and the changes going into effect next week exacerbate one of the main problems – ill-targeted loan forgiveness. A clever calculation by Jason Delisle and Alex Holt asks how much of Senator Marco Rubio’s student loans would have been forgiven if the new IBR policies were in place back when Rubio went to school.

DelislContinue Reading »

The name of the newest student loan repayment program – Income Based Repayment (IBR) – is an Orwellian abuse of language. It implies that student loans will be repaid, but under IBR, – typical undergraduate borrowers will not repay their loans.

And changes to IBR that are going into effect soon mean they will repay even less. We know this courtesy of the awesome calculaContinue Reading »

Changing standards. Fifth-graders in Pittsburgh Public Schools are delving into sixth-grade math topics, as the district makes the transition to Common Core State Standards. (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)

The “new” liberal arts. A call for the liberal arts to “show some spine and create a response” to the critics who say a degree in “soft studies,” like humanities and social sciences, has no Continue Reading »

The sorry state of student lending in this country is understandably generating considerable interest in alternative systems. Unfortunately, the best replacement, income contingent lending, is getting less attention than two others: “skin in the game” and equity based financing.

For those not up to speed on these various concepts:

Income contingent loans (ICL) tie payments to the Continue Reading »

Recently, my colleague Anne and I wrote about our personal experiences with student loan repayment in order to underscore how confusing loan repayment is to navigate, even for a well-informed consumer. I thought I had the whole process figured out, but within a couple days of my post, I found myself running into more roadblocks. Interestingly enough, much of the difficulties I encountered in coContinue Reading »

Image: Daniel Goodman / Business Insider

Two weeks ago, my colleague Rachel described the “baffling, scary, frustrating, and stressful” process of figuring out how to repay her student loans. Like her, I took out loans to pay for my graduate education. Unlike her, I had never taken out a loan and knew absolutely nothing about the student loan program. But I fillContinue Reading »