Pacific Standard March-April 2013 Cover

The Three-Year Engagement: 25 Percent Off College Term

August 1, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Wesleyan

Morning Edition. MacBooks. Golden retrievers. Kale. Few things are so unimpeachable among Americans of a certain, shall we say, sensibility as a four-year college education. Why waste the best years of your life working when you could be on campus, singing a capella, hosting a radio show, and drinking PBR tall-boys out of tube socks on the sidelines of your intramural dodge ball game? Oh, and, right, studying. Never mind that few Ivy League universities and liberal arts colleges offer anything but a fixed, four-year path to graduation. Considering that the unemployment rate for men under ... Read More

More like this: Education
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Should Uncle Sam Attend For-Profit Schools?

July 30, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment

The late-night infomercial time slot is typically reserved for products people later regret buying — ab rollers, Ginsu knife sets, bad classic-rock compilations. Higher education hardly seems to fit. The sector of the industry that advertises there, however — for-profit schools like University of Phoenix and DeVry — has been booming. The industry has tripled in size over the last decade. The University of Phoenix, the Chronicle of Higher Education recently noted, has an enrollment now bigger than the entire undergraduate population of the Big Ten. Critics, including officials in ... Read More

More like this: Education, Politics, The Idea Lobby
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The State of Student Loans

January 28, 2010 • By • 2 Comments

In his State of the Union speech last night, President Obama took on the topic of steep student loans, touching on an issue Miller-McCune looked at earlier this week. He urged the Senate to pass a bill to "revitalize our community colleges," and he added that this bill will end taxpayer subsidies for student loans (for detailed commentary on this issue, see Tim Dickenson's Rolling Stone article) and re-channel this money into Pell grants. The Pell Grant program gives need-based grants to undergraduates and some grad school students, based on their estimated family contribution, cost of ... Read More

More like this: Findings, Politics
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An Imperfect Solution to Toppling Student Loans

January 24, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment

In May, Jenny Cooke graduated from the George Washington University (the most expensive university in the nation) with a degree in nonprofit management and a job at the Association of Air Medical Services, where she had interned as an undergraduate. Although 75 percent of her college education was funded by grants, she still was $39,000 in debt. Today, she budgets about $300 a month to repay her loan, about an eighth of her monthly income. Jenny can afford to make these payments; many others in public service jobs, however, cannot. Taylor Orr also works at a nonprofit. She also graduated ... Read More

More like this: Business & Economics
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