Over at Brainstorm, Diane Auer Jones responded to my earlier post critiquing her arguments in favor of preserving a bank-based student loan system. I’ll try to provide some clarifications/critiques.
First, Jones writes that my original post confused private and federal loans because I was talking about the interest rate charged on alternative loans. But that wasn’t [...]
All Posts Tagged: 'U.S. Department of Education'
Student Loan Commentary (Cont.)
Some Additional Thoughts on the Budget
Yesterday afternoon, the U.S. Department of Education hosted its annual public briefing on the budget, where high-level officials provide an overview of this year’s proposals and take questions from lobbyists interested parties. The forum raised a couple of interesting points and ideas that are worth considering.
Not surprisingly, the issue that sparked the most interest from [...]
What do you get for 8 percent?
Last week, the U.S. Department of Education released several new potential regulations aimed at for-profit vocational schools and misuse of the federal student loan program. While much of the attention during this process has focused on other regulations targeted at how for-profit schools pay recruiters for enrolling students, Inside Higher Ed picked up on an [...]
Cohort Default Rates: Who Changed the Most?
As I noted earlier, one result of the new trial three-year cohort default rates are that all sectors have higher average default rates than they did under the two-year measurement window. But these rates also represent a summation of all schools in a given sector, obscuring those who either had very small gains or huge [...]
Federal Student Aid’s Annual Report
Federal Student Aid (FSA), the office within the U.S. Department of Education that handles loans and grants, recently published its fiscal year 2009 report. This document provides a lot of interesting information about the general state of federal postsecondary assistance and also rates the office’s performance over the past year. It’s a fairly long document, [...]
Random Thoughts on the Race to the Top
First of all kudos to the Dept. of Education staff for putting out these regulation and largely sticking to a reform agenda while making reasonable adjustments. While some technical details caught my attention like the myopic calculation of ensuring that education is a funding priority, I found myself agreeing with most of the priorities the [...]
QUICK Hits: RTT Regs Edition
Today, the biggest education news – some might say the only education news – is the announcement of the new regulations for Race to the Top. Where should you get your info? Depends on what you want to know:
Where can I find a detailed summary of the RTT regs? (Eduflack)
Which states bear watching now that the [...]
Stimulating Stimulus Discussion
The Department of Education is in the process or has distributed the first $44 billion of K-12 stimulus funding. Most of this funding will flow to school districts based on established formulas. Clearly this funding provides a great opportunity for local education leaders to do the right thing with the funds and make investments that [...]
Don’t Blame the Weather
On Tuesday the Department of Education released its annual report on student loan default rates. Under their official calculations, the rate jumped from 4.6 to 5.2 percent. In the press release announcing the increase they attribute the rise to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Media coverage bought this line, most obviously the Chronicle [...]
A Faulty Argument
Back in December, I blogged about a proposed Higher Education Act provision that would change the way default rates are calculated by the Department of Education. I hypothesized that this change could increase default rates by about 60 percent, putting some schools at risk of losing their eligibility to participate in the federal loan program [...]
Spellings Stands Firm
I went to the National Press Club today to listen to a speech from the Secretary of Education. I was at a similar event a while back–has to have been more than a year ago–and she seemed more confident this time around. Given enough questions and enough time, you can tell if someone’s just a [...]
Sundaes on Sunday
President Ronald Reagan might have given the cold shoulder to the Department of Education, but he was sweet on ice cream.
“Ice cream is a nutritious and wholesome food, enjoyed by over ninety percent of the people in the United States. It enjoys a reputation as the perfect dessert and snack food…Now, Therefore, I, Ronald Reagan, [...]
Fairfax Gives In To Testing ELLS
As the Post reports today, Fairfax County Virginia has backed down in its battle with the Dept of Ed and will administer grade level reading tests to all of its ELL students (minus those who’ve been in the country for less than a year). This struggle was hard-fought and district officials in Fairfax and elsewhere [...]
SMART Snags
There have been a lot of stories this week about the no-so-smart federal SMART grants. The National Science and Mathematics Access to Retaining Talent (SMART) grant program offers $4,000 to eligible students who are majoring in an eligible field of study. It’s these devilish “eligibility” details that have caused the recent problems.
First, as detailed by [...]
Good Op-Ed, Bad Numbers
William E. “Brit” Kerwan, chancellor of the University System of Maryland, wrote an Op-Ed in the Washington Post today that hits all the right notes when it comes to gives students better odds of graduating from college. But it should be noted that some of the statistics aren’t correct. Kerwan writes:
Of every 100 current eighth-graders [...]
Next They’ll Say That Nigerian Guy Isn’t Sending Me a Million Dollars…
Truth be told, I don’t normally read the mass e-mail announcements I get from the U.S. Department of Education, which tend to deal with grant competitions, statements on Secretary Spellings’ visit to Egypt, and the like. But yesterday one headline–Statement by Deputy Press Secretary Chad Colby Regarding “Certificate of Completion” Hoax EMail–caught my attention. When, [...]
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 Aldeman's False Fronts is quoted on Accuracy in Academia.
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.
03/08/10 | Andrew Rotherham's Eduwonk post on RTT finalists is quoted on Class Struggle.
03/07/10 | Andrew Rotherham is quoted on the success of MATCH in The Times-Picayune.
03/06/10 | Eduwonk's reaction to Ohio's status as a RTT finalist is cited in a Wall Street Journal editorial.
03/05/10 | Andrew Rotherham's reaction to New York's status as a Race to the Top finalist is cited on National Journal.