Ravi Shankar
Totally Romney, Dude
To emphasize the importance of limiting student debt, Chattanooga is in the second year of its “Live Like a Student” campaign, a universitywide approach to financial literacy. The key is making the ideas of living within one’s means and borrowing only what one needs an integrated part of undergraduate and graduate education, not just “a random drop-in process,” Ainsworth said.
“We have banners and posters all over campus to advertise this,” he said, in addition to “emphasis months,” when bankers and other financial experts visit campus and speak to students about interest rates, scholarships, investments and other topics. Business students also have signed on to become peer financial counselors, and financial literacy has been incorporated into university orientation days for students and parents.
“Living Cheap Enough?” Colleen Flaherty
I am going to coin a new term: a Romney (after our former beloved candidate). A Romney is a person so out of touch that it’s either funny or shocking or some disturbing combination. These administrators now suddenly concerned with student debt are total Romneys. I am not sure how they missed it but graduate student debt has been a very public issue for at least 15 years. Not that these Romenys listen to graduate students much.
When I was a graduate student in Austin, Texas, in the 1990s, I taught writing classes to earn my way. My wages were so low that I was eligible for government food assistance. (We couldn’t actually get our food help, though, because a special provision made students ineligible.) As if this weren’t enough, I had to pay tuition as well, since at that time there were no tuition waivers. We were taking classes, too, but in essence we paid for our jobs.
We were experts in living on almost nothing, we rarely took vacations, and we ate a lot of rice and beans. Unless you had parents– or a spouse– who could support you, debt was inescapable. It was especially bad in the second half of your Ph.D., when you were required to fly to conferences all over the country. There was little money for these trips either. Some people used student loans for that, but I used credit cards. It took years to pay them off.
Mariah Carey, Jimmy Fallon, and the Roots with Several Children: “All I Want For Christmas”
Two Steps Forward, Three Steps Back
Most college students today do not live on campus, go to school full-time and have their tuition bills paid by their parents. According to Complete College America, 75 percent of students juggle their classes with a family, a job or a commute — and local colleges and universities are responding to their needs by making more degrees available online.
Online classes are seen as a key to increasing the number of Americans with a college degree. Distance learning programs provide adults the flexibility they need, which could help close the gap between the 57 percent of new jobs in the state that will require a college degree by 2018 and the 36 percent of working-age Ohioans who currently have that credential, according to the Lumina Foundation.
“More students, adults turning to online for college degrees” Meagan Pant
My economics professor, Dr. Cleaver, used to laugh when someone complained that he saw the class war in everything. How could it not be in everything, he’d say. It’s easy to think of the class struggle or class war in theatrical terms, as if it could only happen like a scene from the Terminator movies. It isn’t only politics in the simple sense, either; the struggle over the control of wealth happens in every realm and often in very indirect ways.
Sometimes it is very dramatic and violent, of course, although less so in the U.S. in recent years. Most often in industrialized countries the class war is more quiet, a steady erosion or evolution more than a revolution, and, while in some sense capital always has the upper hand, there’s no final victory. Online education is an almost perfect example. On the one hand, it’s a victory for labor that’s made education (and information) more accessible.
On the other hand, online education is also a kind of workplace speed-up, forcing labor– us– to do more work in less time without any short-term compensation. We could once take off a few years, or delay our work lives for a time, while we went to college. More and more, though, we are asked to go to college part-time, while we work. There’s no reason this has to be so but it won’t change until the balance of power shifts in favor of labor.