The St. Louis Fed findings add to the growing body of evidence that higher education benefits some groups more than others, which may help to exacerbate the yawning racial wealth gap instead of shrink it. Black and Hispanic students are more likely to approach college with lower levels of wealth on average and are, therefore, more likely to have to borrow to attend school, according to a report earlier this year from Demos, a left-leaning think tank.
While every single Democratic member of the Legislature has signed on as a sponsor of this bill, not a single Republican has been willing to break from party orthodoxy and let common sense trump caustic partisanship.
Imagine the benefits to our state economy and Wisconsin families if millions of dollars in interest on student loans paid by borrowers every year to the federal government and Wall Street banks would instead stay right here.
Why a return to a debt-free system of public universities and colleges would help revive the promise of affordable higher education regardless of one’s family income.
Today, Sec. Hillary Clinton will announce her plan to return to debt-free public college for future students and relieve the burden for existing borrowers. Tamara Draut, Demos Vice President of Policy and Research, released the following statement:
Today, Sec. Hillary Clinton will announce her plan to return to debt-free public college for future students and relieve the burden for existing borrowers. In anticipation of the release of Sec. Clinton’s plan, Demos prepared two new analyses that underscore the need for bold solutions to our college affordability crisis.
Hillary Clinton just released a bold plan to return the United States to debt-free public college for future students and relieve the burden for existing borrowers.
Declining state appropriations for higher ed is responsible for more than three-quarters of tuition hikes between 2001 and 2011, the analysis found. Increased spending on administration and building projects accounts for only about 12 percent of the tuition increases over that time. During the recession, when many states scrambled to cope with shrinking coffers, lawmakers slashed spending on public universities. But appropriations haven't returned to prerecession figures despite an improving economy.
Executive action on paid sick days for employees of federal contractors would be in keeping with Obama’s steps to raise workplace standards for contract employees.
The use of credit reports prevents people from getting jobs they are qualified for and "can have a discriminatory impact," Amy Traub, senior policy analyst at Demos, a left-leaning think tank said. "Our research shows credit reports don't provide information that is actually useful for employers, don't show who is going to be a trustworthy or reliable and does not prevent theft or fraud."
Today's very high threshold for default rates allows tons of colleges to mask poor student outcomes and doesn't take into account the difficulty students are having with repayment itself. But moving beyond the extreme scenario of student default — which means a borrower has been unable to pay their loan back for at least 9 months in the case of federal loans — is important to developing a more nuanced understanding of post-graduation hardship.
“If we begin to think of education as a part of the economic mobility system, then we can begin to think of education’s implications for children long after school,” Elliott, who also serves as the founding director of the Center on Assets, Education, and Inclusion (AEDI), explained at a recent New America event.
Raising the minimum wage at least somewhat is a wildly popular idea for most Americans. According to a January 2014 Pew poll, 73 percent of Americans—including 53 percent of Republicans—supported raising the minimum wage from its current level of $7.25 to $10.10 an hour.
Treating these issues as mutually exclusive obscures part of why student debt is a major issue for so many, and what debt-free college would hope to achieve.
“This view that college pays off and that most people pay off their loans, is narrow and tragically flawed,” Heulsman said in his opening remarks. “This is a crisis of equity, it’s a crisis of opportunity and we’ll argue it’s a crisis for the economy.”
...while fast food may be an extreme case, it is hardly the only industry – in New York or nationwide – where front-line workers are underpaid and inequality is metastasizing. In fact, our economy is increasingly built on job growth in the most unequal industries: a trend that concentrates more and more income at the top and makes it even more difficult for working people to share in the benefits of economic growth.
That’s why the push to raise wages won’t stop with fast food –or with New York.
The New York fast food wage board today recommended a wage increase in a series of steps to $15 an hour by 2018 in New York City and by 2021 in the rest of the state.
Entire movements are based around these economic realities: the minimum wage is too low to live on. Eligibility for overtime pay must be broadened so that workers are fairly compensated for all of the time they work. Basic workplace standards need to be improved.
The missing link in the inequality debate is not financial stability, but financial domination of the broader economy, what has come to be called “financialization.” Financialization, as a new Demos report demonstrates, is not only measurable by risk and volatility or by the mere expanding volume of financial activities; rather, it should also be measured by how the non-financial economy—the economy of jobs and wages, production and enterprise growth—is increasingly dist
Education-loan borrowing among students pursuing an associate’s degree has increased significantly in the past decade, particularly among low-income students. For the 2011-2012 academic year, 55% of students who received Pell Grants and earned associate’s degrees also graduated with debt, according to a 2015 report from Demos, a progressive policy group in Washington, D.C.