Overseas students subsidize other students and programs, as they often pay higher fees, said Mark Huelsman, a senior policy analyst at Demos, a left-leaning think tank. “Many colleges and, in particular, public colleges have relied on international students paying full-freight in order to make up for budget shortfalls elsewhere,” he said. [...]
[T]he pain of retail sector hemorrhaging will be most severe for Black workers considering retail is the second largest Black population employer. Nearly 12 percent of retail workers are Black – close to their overall population ratio. And 54 percent of Black retail workers are supporting households, according to think tank Demos, the highest proportion of any demographic group in that sector. Black retail workers also suffer the highest poverty rates.
The Bill of Rights has been a central touchstone for Americans throughout history, especially when faced with existential challenges to the legitimacy of American government.
[M]ark Huelsman, a senior policy analyst at the think tank Demos, who focuses on student debt, says “we’ll see more and more” programs like Mission Scholarships. “There’s everything right with an institution looking at a labor market shortage” and trying to ameliorate it. “Free education is an obvious carrot.” [...]
Last fall, Point Loma began offering some of its 4,500 students money to pay for college in exchange for a percentage of their future earnings. The model, known as an income share agreement, requires colleges and students to take a chance on each other, a shared responsibility that attracted Point Loma. [...]
“There were fewer jobs available. So you had students or older workers wanting to retrain for a job,” said Mark Huelsman, senior policy analyst at Demos, a national public policy advocacy group.
The increased economic anxiety among black and Hispanic workers is not surprising when considering the fact that working-class workers of color tend to be paid less on the job and, therefore, hold less wealth.
No-loan policies at selective institutions can be eye-catching for low-income students that may not have viewed those schools as a viable option said Mark Huelsman, a senior policy analyst at Demos, a left-leaning think tank. But they do little to increase equity in higher education because the group of low-income students educated at these schools is so small, he added.
“You hear the apocryphal story of being able to work your way through school, because it was true,” said Mark Huelsman, a senior policy analyst at Demos, a left-leaning think tank. “If you were a student in 1980 and you took on a full-time summer job and a part-time job in the school year, your college costs would be covered and your living expenses would be covered.” [...]
Demos, a liberal think tank, and the Institute on Assets and Social Policy at Brandeis University found African Americans are far more likely to have student debt, regardless of income. Black families, after decades of being shut out of traditional ladders of economic opportunity, have the fewest resources to cover the costs of college or to protect against the risk of borrowing.
“You’re going to have deductions and credits that primarily benefit the middle- and upper-class go away, but it’s not done in benefit to the working class,” said Mark Huelsman, a senior policy analyst at Demos, a left-leaning think tank. “It’s just done as a revenue raiser.”
Democrats have all kinds of ways of addressing this problem. One would be to cultivate the class identity of white voters by embracing populist rhetoric that paints “the billionaire class” as an out-group they can define themselves against. Another would be to invest more resources into registering nonwhite voters. According to the Census Bureau, 74 percent of non-Hispanic whites are registered to vote in the United States.
Employees would likely contribute less to IRA accounts
If the proposal passes, there is a strong indication that U.S. workers will either shift their savings to Roth Individual Retirement Account (IRA) accounts, where contributions are taxed immediately or employees and employers will contribute less for retirement.
Some are heartened to see functioning-for-free college popping up in places like New York and elsewhere. Mark Huelsman senior policy analyst at Demos, a left-leaning think tank and the author of an influential white paper on free college, said he hopes they’ll serve as “laboratories” for policymakers to understand both the benefits and the limitations of different free college program designs.
Another solution — though one that is often a struggle to achieve — is to unionize, which has worked before in industries like teaching, policing, and manufacturing. “If retail workers were able to organize strong unions across the country, there’s no reason retail jobs couldn’t be good jobs like manufacturing jobs,” Amy Traub, Associate Director for Policy and Research at public policy organizationDemos, tells Bustle.
“If you’re a college and you’re offering a very low level of prospective debt to students, that means nothing if the people who overall have more unmet financial need, or are more likely to have to borrow, can’t get into your institution,” said Mark Huelsman, a senior policy analyst at Demos, a left-leaning think tank.
Rankings can also subtly push colleges away from spending on financial aid for needy students and, instead, toward things rewarded by the rankings, like small faculty-to-student ratios, Huelsman said. [...]
Some, like Mark Huelsman, a senior policy analyst at Demos, a left-leaning think tank, say the rankings’ incentives push colleges to take steps that often come at the expense of educating a wider swath of qualified students.