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 standards.
Jeff Jacoby ends his June 29 column by asserting that black citizens’ right to vote “is no longer endangered anywhere in America.” What America is he talking about?
Having to register to vote is a practical barrier for some people, especially those who are poor and marginalized. So shifting that burden to the state leads to more people voting.
North Carolina’s recent voting law changes will disproportionately affect black voters in the state, according to a study published Wednesday by Dartmouth University.
“The study provides powerful ammunition for the pending legal challenges,” says Brenda Wright, a voting rights expert with the liberal think tank Demos. “It shows that virtually every key feature of North Carolina’s election legislation will disproportionately cut back on registration and voting by African Americans in North Carolina as compared to whites.”
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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.
Student debt can weigh you down long into adulthood, and might make you less likely to ever be able to retire.
That's according to a new analysis from Demos, a progressive think tank.
This chart shows the clear benefit of getting a college degree. Households with some college but no degree are unlikely to own a home, while homeownership is the norm for households headed by someone who finished college.
A separate report this week by the left-leaning think tank Demos suggests that black students may also be disproportionately impacted by such policies.
The nation’s yawning wealth gap is a major reason why minority students end up borrowing more for college. Structural racism has created disparities in home ownership rates, income and other wealth-building vehicles, providing minority borrowers with fewer resources to tap to pay for college, on average.
In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson vowed that no student wishing to attend college would "be turned away because his family is poor."
Half a century later, a shift in the way college is funded and the declining fortunes of minorities and poor families since the recession have created a college-debt system that the left-leaning think tank Demos calls "deeply biased along class and racial lines."
Because college is increasingly financed by debt taken on by students, it's creating a system that's impacting differen
Most students go into debt to pay for college. And while no one wants to be in the red, a new report from left-leaning think tank Demos argues that the increasingly debt-financed higher education system in the United States is especially harmful to low-income, black and Latino kids.
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Given growing levels of student debt combined with stagnant incomes over the past few decades, “something has to give somewhere,” said Mark Huelsman, a senior policy analyst at Demos, a left-leaning think tank.
Black culture and the role racism plays in black American history are discussed at length in the national dialogue around race relations. We regularly debate use of the “n-word,” for example, and the impact of historical racism on outcomes for black Americans.
“More than half of education and related expenses at public universities is now paid for through tuition, up from about 35 percent in 2001,” wrote study author Robert Hiltonsmith, Demos’ senior policy analyst.
In essence, public universities are no longer public, he said: They have become de facto “subsidized private institutions.”
Mark Huelsman, senior policy analyst at Demos, said that the debt-free concept relies on what many higher education policy groups have long been saying: that states need to boost their spending on higher education and that student loan debt is crushing some borrowers and a drag on the economy.
Looking at the types of programs named last month, opponents to cuts see what they call a guise to squeeze a public education system tasked with growing demands and enrollment but declining funding.
"There are people in the policy and political sphere who really feel this issue is getting toward full-blown crisis level," said Robert Hiltonsmith, a senior analyst at New York-based policy center Demos.
Students living in President Hillary Clinton’s America could go to college debt-free, her campaign manager hinted earlier this week.
Making college more affordable is part of Clinton’s plan to boost quality of life for ordinary Americans, Robby Mook, “Hillary for America” campaign manager, told CNBC in response to a question about which age demographic will be the toughest for Clinton to lure.