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The May jobs report from the Department of Labor is out, and while 280,000 jobs were added to the economy, 43% of all job gains were in the low wage sector. The overall unemployment rate is 5.5%, and the rate for African Americans and Latinos is still higher than the rate for whites, coming in at 10

"We're at a really interesting and troubling point where student debt has become sort of normalized," Mark Huelsman, a senior policy analyst at the think tank Demos, told Mic. "Tuition used to be low enough and grant aid used to be high enough that total cost of attendance at higher university was

Retail workers — sales clerks, cashiers and stock people — account for one in six jobs in the United States and a large share of the new positions created in the years since the recession. Many of the jobs are low-paying, making retail a major culprit in one of the most difficult challenges

Black and Latino Retail Workers Are More Likely to be Underemployed and Underpaid “The striking persistence of racial inequities in employment is present in the retail industry and beyond, but these norms do not have to continue.”

In FY 2014, per-student state appropriations for higher education were 24 percent below the funding level in 1989. The result, also shown in the chart, is that net tuition revenue (the tuition received by public colleges and universities after grant aid is subtracted) has more than doubled during

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Senator Bernie Sanders may be shaking up the 2016 presidential election already, but he’s also continuing to make waves in Congress. The senator from Vermont has proposed something pretty radical: free college for all at public four-year colleges and universities for those who meet admission

[...] The debt-free college initiative is based on a plan sketched out by liberal think tank Demos. It calls for the federal government to award grants to states that increase spending on higher education and increase need-based grant aid.

The fact that student debt continues to soar is troubling enough. Now there is clear evidence that it also deepens the gap between the haves and the have-nots.