285. Summer College News

Here are some links to today's stories
about college access and success.
by
Joe Rottenborn
Executive Director, Mahoning Valley College Access Program (MVCAP)

1. Loans and the Deficit, by Libby A. Nelson and Doug Lederman - Inside Higher Ed: http://bit.ly/qeubRC - "The federal government is making a lot of money on students and on parents," says Becky Timmons, assistant vice president for government relations at the American Council on Education. "There’s a risk of almost treating students like an ATM machine."

2. More Default Danger Ahead, by Libby A. Nelson - Inside Higher Ed: http://bit.ly/nsoXw0 -"While they recommended several strategies, including financial literacy classes, advising students to borrow as little as possible and requiring counseling sessions for those who are borrowing a large amount of money, they also said that many of the factors that go into defaults are ultimately outside of institutions’ control -- except for one. Students who complete college are far less likely to default than are those who drop out, said Jacob Gross, policy and planning research analyst at the West Virginia Higher Education Policy Commission. “The most important thing we can do to help students not default is to help them finish their credential,” Gross said at one of two default-rate sessions Sunday."

3. At Two-Year Colleges, Less Scrutiny Equals Less Athletic Equality, by Katie Thomas - http://nyti.ms/r6ujU1 - "Even as they play an increasingly vital role in American higher education — enrolling more than eight million students nationwide last fall, a 20 percent jump since the fall of 2007, just before the start of the recession — community colleges are routinely failing to provide enough athletic opportunities to women, as required under Title IX, the federal law banning sex discrimination in education. Many community colleges offer an array of options for men but just a single team for women. And dozens of colleges over the years had no women on their athletic rosters, according to federal education statistics."

4. Law School Economics - Job Market Weakens, Tuition Rises, by David Segal - http://nyti.ms/nxcd2n -"Legal diplomas have such allure that law schools have been able to jack up tuition four times faster than the soaring cost of college. And many law schools have added students to their incoming classes — a step that, for them, means almost pure profits — even during the worst recession in the legal profession’s history. It is one of the academy’s open secrets: law schools toss off so much cash they are sometimes required to hand over as much as 30 percent of their revenue to universities, to subsidize less profitable fields."

5. After The Recession, Students Borrow Reluctantly, by Lisa Lambert - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/18/after-the-recession-stude_n_901381.html - "To cope, many students turn to federal loans. In the 2009-10 school year, 35 percent of all undergraduate students took out a federal Stafford student loan, compared to 23 percent 10 years before, Draeger said. Students may also use private loans and parents can take federal "PLUS" loans. Paying for college has usually involved many parties, Draeger said, including universities themselves pitching in."We're seeing this gradual shift in the burden for paying for college to individual students and families and the way that students do this is through loans," he said."

6. Concern grows about default rates on student loans in Kentucky - http://www.kentucky.com/2011/07/17/1814399/concern-grows-about-default-rates.html - "They quit school last year because of day care problems with their son and defaulted on the loans. That buried them in debt. They haven't filed for bankruptcy, in part because changes to bankruptcy law make it difficult to erase student loans. Daymar College financial aid officials "signed us up" for the loans and controlled access to the accounts, Donald Lee said last week as he prepared to start another shift washing dishes at a Chinese restaurant."It's an awful lot of money for just two years at this little school," he said. "When the loan papers came in, they just handed them to us, told us to sign them and took them back. We never saw them again."