Public colleges and universities took in $62 billion in tuition in 2013. These are schools that educate three of four American college students, and eliminating that entirely could be done just by rearranging what we already spend on student financial aid.
This past Friday, in a speech to the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, the Federal Reserve Chair, Janet Yellen, spoke out on the evils of economic inequality in the United States. She noted that the steady growth in inequality over the past several decades represents the most sustained rise since the 19th century.
No matter who wins each of the hundreds of elections today, one thing's for sure: a relative handful of large donors and spenders are setting the agenda and terms of debate, while the rest of us are on the sidelines.
Polling showed that 70 percent of respondents believed SDR to be necessary to protect voter participation in Montana, with 66 percent also believing that SDR protects Montana’s democracy overall.
On November 10, 2014, the Brennan Center for Justice released a new report, Outside Spending and Dark Money in Toss-Up Senate Races: Post-election Update, which describes the rise in spending by outside groups—many of which do not publicly disclose all of their funds’ sources—in eleven competitive races. Highlights of the report include:
In the wake of increasing voter identification requirements in Texas, analyzing voter turnout is becoming critically relevant to fully comprehend political outcomes.
While Corinthian and its campuses may downsize or disappear completely, we should be concerned the students who attended its campuses and are currently in no man’s land.
Today, President Obama announced a proposal to make two years of community college tuition-free. It’s a big deal. But it would be just as powerful a signal if we promised students a debt-free system of public higher education, one that could be financed entirely through part-time or summer work and modest savings.
Inequality is growing because the increased wealth of the wealthiest no longer spawns income opportunities for the less well-off households and may actually diminish them.
Policies like this would incent states to return to an era when college could be funded through a summer job, part-time employment, and maybe modest savings when available, for the largest and most diverse generation of students in our history.
In the case of for-profits, not only has the government been unable to properly force institutions to account for their behavior, but it has been unable to stop providing the majority of money that keeps these colleges standing in the first place.