In the last decade a handful of elite colleges have announced new financial aid policies, things like eliminating student loans and reducing the net cost of attendance to $0 for very low-income students, to much fanfare. These generous policies, which earned the schools great free publicity, turn out to be for naught. Today’s InsideHigherEd has [...]
All Posts Tagged: 'Student Financial Aid'
Why CBO Says Pell Grants Will Cost More
A few weeks ago, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released its mid-session review, a document that updates certain budgetary information from its spring estimates. While review mainly concerns macroeconomic budget matters, it did contain a significant increase in the projected cost of the president’s proposal to fund all Pell Grants as a mandatory [...]
More on PLUS Denials
Andrew Gillen over at the Center for College Affordability and Productivity challenges my post yesterday on how PLUS loan denials could be used as a tactic for driving some borrowers toward private loans.
One of the certainly pertinent questions that Gillen raises is why would a lender deny a borrower’s PLUS loan application if they then [...]
Who Gains From the Perkins Loan Low Tuition Incentive Formula?
Contained within the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act (PDF) is a proposal to reform the Perkins loan program by increasing its funding to $6 billion and distributing this money through three separate formulas. According to the legislation, one-quarter of this funding, or $1.5 billion, would be given to schools through a new low tuition [...]
Making Pell Mandatory
President Obama’s budget proposal included several major changes in student financial aid, including a proposal for the biggest change in the federal student loan system since its inception. People on either side of the student loan issue can debate the pro’s and con’s of the President’s proposal to end subsidies to private lenders – and [...]
The Google and The Internets
Are you a Virginia resident looking for more information about higher education? Need information on financial aid? The State Council on Higher Education in Virginia has an excellent resource list including the “Internet” and “Libraries.” According to the site, libraries, “have resource books with information about national financial aid programs” and the [...]
The Ivy League Just Keeps Getting Greener
But not the trendy, Al Gore kind of green—the old-fashioned, John D. Rockefeller kind of green.
I received an email this morning from Stanford University announcing that it (like Harvard, Princeton, etc.) will be expanding its financial aid program. Now a family with an income of less than $100,000 will not need to pay tuition, and [...]
Ask And You Shall Receive
Last week, I asked whether there were any colleges with unique strategies for controlling tuition and aiding students, but without the help of a gigantic endowment. Lo and behold, Inside HigherEd reports on Blackburn College, a small, private college in Illinois (chances are this school is off the NYT’s radar), that is trying to do [...]
The Dangers of Defaulting
FinAid.org has a loan default calculator on its website that calculates how much it costs to default on student loans. I calculated the default costs with my current federal loan and the results were startling. In my situation (long repayment term, low interest rate), the total cost of my loan after 12 months of non-payment [...]
Hillary Clinton and the Never-Ending College Fundraising Campaign
Hillary Clinton unveiled her presidential campaign higher education agenda yesterday. On the whole it’s quite good and by far the most substantive proposal from any of the major candidates thus far. The safe thing for a Democrat is to focus on financial aid — everyone’s in favor of making college more affordable — so it’s [...]
Miserly Colleges
Lynne Munson of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity turns in a thought-provoking op-ed at Inside Higher Ed today. She takes colleges to task for hoarding vast sums of money in endowments while still charging students high tuition rates:
Stanford University spends $76 million on undergraduate financial aid, a sum that sounds generous but [...]
Doing the Math on Borrower Benefits
As the financial aid legislation in both the House and Senate have moved forward over the past couple of weeks, lobbyists for loan companies have been going full throttle trying to derail efforts to cut subsidies to lenders. They are even using the new legislation to intimidate borrowers into consolidating their loans—my mailbox has been [...]
Investing in Harvard Graduates (for real)
Richard Vedder offers some fairly radical ideas about how higher education financial aid could be different, particularly at elite schools:
Rich schools like Harvard, Yale and Princeton should let students in for free in exchange for a share of student earnings beyond subsistence for X number of years after graduation. In other words, Harvard should buy [...]
Oberlin’s Money, Mouth at Odds
In the middle of an Insidehighered.com piece on Oberlin College’s recent effort to integrate the word “fearless” into their latest marketing campaign, we find this:
“The timing of this marketing effort coincides with a financial concern that is specifically mentioned in the strategic plan, which calls for an enrollment reduction of 163 undergraduate students by 2010 [...]
Lowering Student Loan Default Rates: What One Consortium of Historically Black Institutions Did to Succeed 
College and Career-Ready: Using Outcomes Data to Hold High Schools Accountable for Student Success
03/11/10 | Kevin Carey is quoted on the rising costs of education in The Economist.
03/10/10 | Chad Aldeman's False Fronts paper is quoted on Accuracy in Academia.
03/09/10 | Ben Miller is quoted on Federal Family Education Loan defaults on The Huffington Post.
03/09/10 | Ben Miller is quoted on loan origination on the Firedog Lake blog.
03/07/10 | Kevin Carey calls for a Race to the Top in higher education in a column in The Chronicle of Higher Education.