News & Comment

Two Occupy movement volunteers, a Chicago community organizer, an Atlanta health care activist and a crusader against "prison-based gerrymandering" have been nominated for the annual Maria Leavey Tribute Award, which honors an unsung progressive hero. The deserving person you select will receive the award at the June 18-20 "Take Back the American Dream" Conference. read more »

When I was growing up in Harlem, college was a remote possibility even for the most fortunate black and Hispanic students. But times have changed for the better, and today's young minority men and women should expect nothing less from themselves than a college degree. Moreover, they should demand nothing less from their country than affordable options for a higher education. Congress must take action to make college accessible for everyone. read more »

Fifty years ago college was a luxury. Back then, you could still graduate from high school and get a good paying job that would guarantee you a place in the middle class. Those days are gone. A postsecondary education is the ticket to economic success in America. We know that the jobs of the future will all require some kind of education or training after high school. And while it's never been more important to have a degree, a certificate or an industry recognized credential -- it's also never been more expensive. Since 1995, college costs across the country have risen almost five times faster than median household income. Borrowing to pay for college used to be the exception; now it's the rule. Next month, millions of America's newest college graduates will leave school to enter the job market. As they do, a new challenge awaits many of them: how to pay back the student debt they've accumulated over the last four years. read more »

When I graduated from high school, my parents expected that I would go to college. I say "expected," but it was really closer to a demand than an expectation. As my father said, "I don't know where you'll go, but you're going to somebody's university." Education was a high priority in our home. Even though neither of my parents went to college, they saw a college degree as the first step towards a "good job" and upward mobility. We were comfortably middle class. So, I didn't qualify for much in the way of financial aid. But my parents could not afford to foot the entire bill for my education, even at the public university I chose to attend. My grades were good enough to get me a few scholarships to make that first year easier, but that was it. Like a lot people, I financed my education through student loans. I was 18-years-old when I went into debt to get an education — as an investment in my future. That was over twenty years ago. Last year, at the age of forty-two, I finally paid off that debt. Getting an education shouldn't mean decades of crushing debt. Tell Congress to stop student loan interest rates from doubling. read more »

The White House has ramped up its efforts this week for congressional action to prevent interest rates on the Stafford federal college loan program, now at 3.4 percent, from doubling on July 1. As important as addressing that crisis is, it is one skirmish in a much larger fight to return college education to what it has historically been, a boost up the economic ladder, rather than the economic millstone around the neck of young people that it is today. read more »

Public education is under attack around the world, and in response, student protests have recently been held in Britain, Canada, Chile, Taiwan and elsewhere. California is also a battleground. The Los Angeles Times reports on another chapter in the campaign to destroy what had been the greatest public higher education system in the world: "California State University officials announced plans to freeze enrollment next spring at most campuses and to wait-list all applicants the following fall pending the outcome of a proposed tax initiative on the November ballot." Similar defunding is under way nationwide. "In most states," The New York Times reports, "it is now tuition payments, not state appropriations, that cover most of the budget," so that "the era of affordable four-year public universities, heavily subsidized by the state, may be over." Community colleges increasingly face similar prospects--and the shortfalls extend to grades K-12. read more »

An unexpected issue in the 2012 election is whether or not rank-and-file Americans should aspire to a college degree. Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum have both made comments about higher education that could come back to haunt them in a general election. There is a partisan logic to the Republican hostility to higher education: the well-educated — a reliable source of conservative support as recently as the 1980s — have been moving steadily toward the Democratic Party. Not only are Democrats making gains among the better-educated, but these voters are becoming a larger share of the electorate. Exit polls show the growth of the college-educated voting bloc. read more »

I’ve written before in support of Pell grants—federal assistance for college tuition targeted at students from low-income families.  Barriers to college entry and completion have gotten steeper in recent years, as family incomes have lagged far behind tuition increases.  Think of Pell grants as a ladder to climb over those steeper barriers. So the last thing you’d want to do is to cut rungs from that ladder.  Yet that’s exactly what the House Republican budget, authored by Rep Paul Ryan, does.  According to the White House, the budget changes “eligibility and funding under the Pell Grant formula so as to eliminate grants for 400,000 students and cut grants for more than 9 million others in 2013 alone.”  And for what?  So millionaires can get a tax cut of almost $400,000, if you include both the new Ryan and the extended Bush tax cuts. read more »

Talk K-12 education for more than five minutes, and inevitably, the conversation turns to charter schools – those publicly funded, privately administered institutions that now educate more than 2 million American children. Parents wonder if they are better than the neighborhood public school. Politicians tout them as a silver-bullet solution to the education crisis. Education technology companies promote them for their profit potential. Opponents of organized labor like the Walton family embrace them for their ability to crush teachers unions. But amid all the buzz, the single most important question is being ignored: Are charter schools living up to their original mission as experimental schools pioneering better education outcomes and reducing segregation? That was the vision of the late American Federation of Teachers President Albert Shanker when he proposed charters a quarter-century ago. In recent years, major studies suggest that, on the whole, charter schools are producing worse educational achievement results than traditional public schools. read more »

Last week Rick Santorum called the President “a snob” for wanting everyone to get a college education (in fact, Obama never actually called for universal college education but only for a year or more of training after high school). Santorum needn’t worry. America is already making it harder for young people of modest means to attend college. Public higher education is being starved, and the middle class will shrink even more as a result. Public higher education has been the gateway to the middle class but that gate is shutting – just when income and wealth are more concentrated at the top than they’ve been since the 1920s, and when America needs the brainpower of its young people more than ever. This is nuts. read more »