Student Loans
1 Real, 1 Fake, Both True
“Even at elite colleges, most students leave school without a strong enough grasp on how to totally revitalize the manufacturing, housing, automotive, and health care industries of an entire country.”
College Unbound
NPR has an excerpt of of Jeffrey Selingo’s book College Unbound, which economist Tyler Cowen says he liked so much that he read it in a single sitting.
Get Your Student Loan Questions Answered
Rohit Chopra, the Assistant Director for Students at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, is doing an AMA on student loans right now on Reddit. Ask him a question! Or lurk in the threads!
Elizabeth Warren Continues to Kill It
Yesterday she introduced a piece of legislation (her first!) that would cut student loan interest rates to the rate banks pay to borrow money (when rates rise in July, students will pay nine times what banks pay). WARREN FOR EVERYTHING.
Degrees of Value
I like the initial premise of this piece by Kevin Carey, the policy director of a think tank named Education Sector, in The New Republic—the idea that media outlets like to post sad stories about college graduates who are unable to find jobs in their fields of studies so they end up accepting work that doesn’t necessarily require a college degree (i.e. bartending, barista-ing), which ultimately devalues what a college degree is worth these days.
Illustrating the Student Debt Crisis
Matt Phillips posted a series of charts at The Atlantic explaining the student debt crisis, but really, saying that college tuition has been rising stupidly fast pretty much sums it up.
There Are Many Ways to Pay Your Student Loans
For example, you can pay them slowly. Or you can pay them quickly. Or you can not pay them at all.
Sorry, But Financial Literacy Doesn’t Make College More Affordable
Penn State’s literacy program says: “The real problem is not the rising cost of education, it is in the lack of financial planning and lack of financial literacy skills of making sound financial decisions.” Um, really?
