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These Schools Saddling Students With Tons of Debt Aren’t the Ones You Expected

by ChristiXYQ Posted on September 14, 2015

Mother Jones

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The student loan crisis may bring to mind 22-year-old graduates from four-year colleges trying to figure out how to pay off hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. And while this image may have been accurate before the recession, today’s reality is more complicated: According to a recent report released by the Brookings Institution, the rise in federal borrowing and loan defaults is being fueled by smaller loans to “non-traditional borrowers,” or students attending for-profit universities and, to a lesser extent, community colleges.

As Mother Jones has reported in the past, compared with four-year college graduates, nontraditional borrowers are poorer, older, likely to drop out, and, if they do graduate, unlikely to face bright career prospects. The median for-profit university grad owes about $10,000 in federal loans but makes only about $21,000 per year.

The report, based on newly released federal data on student borrowing and earnings records, shows just how much the economics of higher education have transformed since the recession. In 2000, the 25 colleges whose students owed the most federal debt were primarily public or nonprofit, with New York University taking the lead. By 2014, 13 of the top 25 were for-profit universities. In the same period, the amount of student debt nearly quadrupled to surpass $1.1 trillion, and the rate of borrowers who defaulted on loans doubled.

So what happened? During the recession, students poured into colleges to make themselves more marketable in a crummy economy. Community colleges, depleted from plunging state tax revenues, couldn’t expand to account for this exodus from the job market, so many students—and their loans—ended up at the quickly expanding for-profit universities, which promise short courses in tangible skills.

But students graduating from these colleges have notoriously dim job opportunities—some of the colleges have shut down in recent years after Department of Education probes found them to target low-income students and misrepresent the likelihood of finding a job post-graduation. So with the subsequent influx of students back into the job market—and, for many of them, into low-wage work or unemployment—thousands are stuck with debt.

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These Schools Saddling Students With Tons of Debt Aren’t the Ones You Expected

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Can supermarkets supplement failing schools?

by TracyHosking Posted on September 4, 2015

Education

Can supermarkets supplement failing schools?

By on 4 Sep 2015commentsShare

If there’s one thing we know about education in the United States, it’s that the system is replete with socioeconomic and racial inequities. Now, a new study from researchers at Temple University and the University of Delaware suggests that bringing early childhood education outside school walls could help close that achievement gap. And what better place to start than the supermarket? Unless you’re living on a subsistence farm, sooner or later you are going to be visiting a grocery store. You have to get your food from somewhere — and as food deserts are quenched by initiatives like West Oakland’s People’s Community Market, grocery stores will only grow in terms of accessibility. For low-income communities, the study shows, they might even act as natural extensions of the preschool classroom.

The general idea of The Supermarket Study was to leverage the huge variety of food in a grocery store as a vocabulary builder — and then, in turn, to use this lush nutritional dictionary to help forge logical connections. In practice, it’s pretty unobtrusive: All one needs to do is place a bunch of signs around a supermarket. (Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, an author on the study and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, writes, “In front of the milk section for example, you might see, “I come from a cow. Can you find something else that comes from a cow?””)

These kinds of semantic cues can encourage educational conversations between parents and children. Hirsh-Pasek lays out the motivation behind the study:

High-quality preschool prepares children for entrance into formal schooling. But preschools cannot do it alone and preschool failures cannot be blamed for the persistent gaps that have plagued American education since 1975. Perhaps it is time to augment debate about universal preschool with discussions of how to build learning communities that enrich children’s experiences at home, in school and beyond.

Enter The Supermarket Study, a way to change the paradigm in early learning as we re-imagine ordinary spaces as opportunities to build smart communities. Everyone has to buy food. And families—be they rich or poor, working one job or three—frequent supermarkets and grocery stores—places where they roll their children in carts through the aisles and meet basic needs in a familiar and unthreatening space. That’s why this unassuming place proved a perfect staging ground for a proof of concept on how we can enrich children’s everyday environments.

By adding and removing the signs and then acting as a fly on the wall, the researchers were able to test whether or not their learning tools would encourage more parent-child interaction, and whether or not any changes varied by socioeconomic status. In many ways, the intervention pulls a feather from the hat of behavioral economics, in which subtle “nudges” are used to effect consumer change. (A prototypical example is placing fruit — as opposed to cake — in the most appealing display cases in order to encourage healthier food choices in a cafeteria.)

The results are promising. In stores in low-income communities, presence of the signs was associated with a 33 percent increase in conversations between parents and children, placing the parental chatter on par with the baseline level apparent in middle-income stores. Interestingly, when the researchers put signs in stores frequented by middle-income customers, they failed to produce the same effect.

The team now plans to expand the reach of the study to more grocery stores and communities to see if they’re onto something. Other future ideas include attempting to take advantage of check-out aisles for math skill development.

“Our focus has been squarely on school reform,” writes Hirsh-Pasek. “And school reform is important. But schools exist within the context of a wider community and if the community does not reinforce the learning opportunities that are outside the school walls, they cannot succeed.”

Source:

When the supermarket becomes a classroom: Building learning communities beyond the school walls

, Brookings.

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Can supermarkets supplement failing schools?

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The Amtrak Crash Hasn’t Stopped Republicans From Trying to Cut Its Funding

by Fausto6951 Posted on May 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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Last night, an Amtrak train traveling from Washington, DC, to New York City derailed in Philadelphia, causing hundreds of injuries and at least seven deaths. As investigators were piecing together what happened, the House of Representatives moved to reduce Amtrak’s federal funding. The Republican-led Appropriations Committee voted on Wednesday to slash grants to Amtrak by over $250 million—a 15 percent cut from last year. (Amtrak’s new budget would be about $1.1 billion.) The vote had been previously scheduled, but in the wake of Tuesday’s accident, Democrats and transportation experts criticized the move, asserting that increased rail funding was more important than ever.

For decades, Amtrak has been a political football, with politicians arguing over how much, if any, federal money should go toward funding it. Amtrak is a government-supported company, but it is under a federal mandate to turn a profit, while providing nationwide service—something it’s struggled to do for nearly all of its history. In the 1970s and 1980s, Amtrak hemorrhaged cash and cut back on routes. Since 1997, however, ridership has exploded—particularly on the DC-to-Boston Northeast Corridor.

According to a Brookings Institution study, Amtrak use grew 55 percent nationwide from 1997 to 2012. Along the Northeast Corridor that growth was huge: Boston had a 211 percent increase in ridership; New Haven, Connecticut, experienced a 192 percent boost. Nearly 11 million people got on or off an Amtrak train in New York City in 2012; over five million did so in Philadelphia. On routes shorter than 400 miles, Amtrak turned a $47 million profit in 2011.

Yet as more people use Amtrak, the rail service is struggling to maintain its existing infrastructure—much less make the improvements needed to match the quality of rail service in Europe or Japan. A 104-year-old bridge near Newark, New Jersey, is the linchpin of the Northeast Corridor, and it requires an estimated $940 million in improvements. Joseph Boardman, president and CEO of Amtrak, wrote in his budget request to Congress, “It is clear that Americans want a national system of intercity passenger rail…but to maintain and improve that system will require both an increase in the overall capital levels and a real federal commitment to deliver the needed financing.”

Explanations abound as to why Washington—particularly the GOP—has been loath to spend more on Amtrak. The Washington Post pointed out that improved rail service isn’t something many Republican legislators can sell to constituents at election time. People who live in GOP-held districts are six times less likely to use Amtrak than residents of Democratic districts. Also, as National Journal detailed last month, Republicans have long tried to privatize Amtrak.

But some Democrats and rail advocates contend that investing in Amtrak is like investing in highways: It’s a matter of public interest. On Wednesday, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest touted President Barack Obama’s support for Amtrak funding. “Unfortunately,” Earnest said, “we have seen a concerted effort by Republicans for partisan reasons to step in front of those kinds of infrastructure advancements.” Obama had asked for $2.5 billion in Amtrak funding in his 2015 budget.

It’s not yet publicly known what happened to Amtrak 188, but media reports on Wednesday afternoon noted that that the train was traveling at over 100 miles per hour before derailing—more than double the mandated speed for that stretch. Reuters reported that Amtrak has begun installing technology designed to stop high-speed derailments, but the Philadelphia tracks where Amtrak 188 crashed did not have the system yet.

Whatever the cause, the tragedy should spur more discussion of the need for better rail, says Joseph Kane, a transportation policy expert at the Brookings Institution. “It’s a shame that it takes a disaster to shift attention in this direction,” he notes. “We need to ask the hard questions…beyond the individual factors of this derailment: Are we investing adequately in our rail network, prioritizing areas of national significance?”

The last time major Amtrak funding was passed came in 2008—right after a deadly rail accident in California.

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The Amtrak Crash Hasn’t Stopped Republicans From Trying to Cut Its Funding

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What the fiscal cliff would mean for our cities and food

by Myrna Posted on December 22, 2012

What the fiscal cliff would mean for our cities and food

By Susie Cagle

Over the last several weeks of fiscal-cliff frenzy, we’ve heard a lot about taxes, taxes, taxes. It’s apocalypse now-ish! With only 10 days left before we go careening off that cliff, President Obama and congressional leaders are trying (so they say!) to stop the crazy train that they set rolling in the first place.

Atlantic Cities warns of the horrors awaiting us in the ravine below: big cuts for transportation and urban infrastructure, from housing to roads. The Section 8 low-income housing program and Community Services Block Grants could be slashed, as well as assistance for the homeless, which would mean hard times for the poor plus local layoffs.

The thing that makes all of this so troubling is that direct federal funds make up only a fraction of a city’s budget. Much more money comes from state governments. Maryland, for example, stands to lose $100 million if the government goes over the fiscal cliff.

And without clarity on just how the federal government will try to plug up its debt, states are struggling to create a road map for their own infrastructure efforts.

Even if the fiscal cliff doesn’t come to pass, all this uncertainty will likely have a long-term impact. “Cities and metros are getting the picture that the federal government is not a reliable partner,” says Bruce Katz, vice president at the Brookings Institution and founding Director of the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program.

Today the National League of Cities released a statement saying, “Local elected officials have been at turns appalled, stunned, and dismayed, at what is passing for ‘serious debate and negotiation’” around the fiscal cliff.

Meanwhile, leaders from states that stand to benefit from a new Farm Bill are urging Congress to summarily lump it into the last-minute budget agreement. That would affect food stamps, big ag subsidies, and a lot more. The Atlantic details some of the less-discussed risks of a last-minute Farm Bill:

Attached to the House Agriculture Committee’s draft bill, for example, are a handful of riders that should sound alarm bells for anyone who cares about healthy food. A series of amendments were approved by the committee and included in its bill to strengthen the already enormous powers that the industrial agriculture complex wields over the food system.

Those amendments include restrictions on states’ abilities to regulate agriculture, such as in animal-welfare initiatives; weakened pesticide regulation; weakened anti-monopoly regulation; and fast-tracking USDA approval for genetically modified crops.

Bonus: The current Farm Bill also includes $6 billion in cuts to conservation programs. From the Environmental Working Group:

Industrial agriculture — not manufacturing, gas drilling or mining — is the largest contributor to America’s water pollution problem. And despite the high cost to taxpayers and businesses, most farm operations are exempt from the federal Clean Water Act. State governments, meanwhile, have little authority to compel farmers to control soil, pesticides and chemical fertilizers that flow off their fields and into water supplies. This leaves the farm bill’s current conservation programs — the ones slated for deep cuts — as the only line of defense.

Land protected under conservation programs is also particularly effective at fighting climate change because it keeps large amounts of carbon out of the atmosphere. The carbon that would be released as a result of the likely conservation cuts in a fiscal cliff cum secret farm bill could equal the annual emissions of two million passenger vehicles.

To make things worse, the centerpiece of such a bill would almost surely be lavish new subsidies for bloated crop insurance policies, which already allow some farmers to turn a profit by plowing up and cultivating poor and environmentally sensitive land on an industrial scale, pumping still more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Super double-point bonus: The bill’s cuts to the already arguably underfunded Food and Drug Administration could also jeopardize food safety. Food Safety News reports:

“The Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, which has a central role in implementing the Food Safety Modernization Act, has had the same permanent [full-time equivalent] staffing level as it did in 1992, before the explosion of imports, before the overall growth in the complexity and size that we see in the food system, even before FSMA was enacted,” [FDA Deputy Commissioner for Foods Michael Taylor] said. “We need to beef up the staffing at CFSAN and other parts of the program, so anything that forces us backward — you can just imagine the effect that it would have.”

Also, if we do careen off the cliff and into the Farm Bill ravine, milk prices could double (not that you need milk anyway).

So with 10 days left, what are you hoping for from Fiscal Cliffsmas: Five golden rings to help fund low-income housing, or maybe just a partridge in an organic, pesticide-free pear tree?

Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for

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What the fiscal cliff would mean for our cities and food

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