"Senate rejects two plans on student loan rates
WASHINGTON - Though both defeats were preordained, the twin votes gave lawmakers from each party a chance to show they favor easing students’ financial burdens.
The Senate planned to leave town later Thursday for a Memorial Day recess running through next week. Neither party wants to be accused of letting the interest rates grow at a time when voters are focused on coping in today’s rough-edged economy, giving each side an incentive to eventually strike a compromise.
A 2007 law gradually reduced interest rates on subsidized Stafford loans for low- and middle-income students to 3.4 percent. To save money, it mandated that rates return to 6.8 percent for new loans as of July 1.
President Obama has made preventing a rate increase a priority and has appeared at colleges and on television talk shows to promote it. Though some Republicans expressed early concerns that retaining the lower rate would fuel college tuition increases, likely GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney endorsed freezing the rate and most GOP lawmakers have done the same.
Both measures rejected Thursday would delay the interest rate increase for a year, but each side’s bill was paid for in a way the other couldn’t tolerate....
It's only Congress doing a little politicking with your future, kids.
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Kids, I just can't get the number $4 billion -- that's right $4 billion -- for Afghan "security" forces when they are killing our guys, killing our guys, killing our guys -- and the military is lying about it.
I think $4 billion might help with your loans, no?
Related: Kicking Around the Kids For Political Purposes
Would a friend do that to you, kids? Behaving more like a bully.
"Education analysts raise new concern: dropouts with debt" by Suzy Khimm and Ylan Q. Mui | Washington Post, May 29, 2012
WASHINGTON — As the nation amasses more than $1 trillion in student loans, education experts say a vexing new problem has emerged: A growing number of young people have a mountain of debt but no degree to show for it....
That ball-and-chain feeling even heavier.
At least I have a worthless pos for my effort$.
That is raising new questions about the wisdom of decades of public policy that focused on increasing access to higher learning but paid less attention to what happens once students arrive on campus. And some education experts have begun to argue that starting college — and going into debt to pay for it — without a clear plan for a diploma is a recipe for disaster....
Yeah, you may be BETTER OF JOINING the SERVICE, kiddo!
In addition, the sputtering economy has forced a growing number of students to make difficult choices between the benefits of a degree and the burden of paying for it.
We were told the economy has been in recovery for years, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
I'll bet the kids are sick of hearing it, too.
More students are balancing their studies with full- or part-time jobs or signing up for a reduced course load to save money, increasing the likelihood that they will not graduate. According to a 2009 study by Public Agenda, half of college dropouts said work was a major factor in their decision.
‘‘In the end, it’s about money and time,’’ said Anthony Carnevale, director of the Center for Education and the Workforce at Georgetown University. ‘‘There’s almost a synergy between the two that will knock you out of school.’’
Actually, I read that the kids were just a bunch of lazy shits.
The cost to the economy is roughly half a trillion dollars, he said. Though college dropouts make more than those with only a high school diploma, he said they earn about a million dollars less than college graduates over their careers.
Malainie Smith spent a year at a small liberal arts college in Massachusetts before deciding to go to nursing school. She was halfway through her program at Simmons College in Boston when she took what she thought would be a semester-long break. When she tried to return, she found she could no longer get a loan.
Smith said that left her in a Catch-22: She had to quit school but still owed about $100,000 to the Vermont Student Assistance Corp., VSAC, a public nonprofit student lender. Her monthly payments are about $400 a month. Three years after she left Simmons, she is now is a waitress — a recent promotion from her position as a hostess....
You need a college degree for that?
See: Sunday Globe Special: Tempering Student Optimism
Oh, let me tell you, the realization you were lied to and looted will do that.
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Hey, don't worry, the Globe will help you attack that debt and make sure the banksters get paid, you lazy shits:
"College students spending less time studying" by Daniel de Vise | Washington Post, May 23, 2012
WASHINGTON - Over the past half-century, the amount of time college students actually study - read, write, and otherwise prepare for class - has dwindled from 24 hours a week to about 15, survey data show.
And that invites a question: Has college become too easy?
Ashley Dixon, a sophomore at George Mason University, anticipated more work in college than in high school. Instead, she has less....
Dixon is a
full-time student, but college, for her, is a part-time job.
I noticed that, too.
Declining study time is a discomfiting truth about the vaunted US higher-education system. The trend is generating debate over how much students really learn, even as colleges raise tuition every year.
Some critics say colleges and their students have grown lazy.
Insults are quite an ejerkashun aren't they, kids?
Today’s collegiate culture, they say, rewards students with high grades for minimal effort and distracts them with athletics, clubs, and climbing walls on campuses that increasingly resemble resorts.
College just one big party, 'eh?
Related(?): The Bu$ine$$ of Higher Education
Academic leaders counter that students are as busy as ever but that their attention is consumed in part by jobs they take to help make ends meet....
Don't excuse the lazy shits.
Tradition suggests that college students should invest two hours in study for every hour of classes. The reality - that students miss that goal by half - emerged from the National Survey of Student Engagement, a research tool for colleges that examines the modern student in unprecedented detail.
The survey, first published in 2000, queries freshmen and seniors. It reveals that study time can vary widely by college and by major. Architecture majors, for example, study 24 hours a week, while marketing majors only 12....
Evidence of declining study was mostly ignored until 2010, when two economists at the University of California at Santa Barbara - Philip Babcock and Mindy Marks - brought the issue to the fore in a paper titled “Leisure College, USA.’’
A real favorite of the kids I'm sure.
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Maybe if they weren't skipping school and smoking they would be better kids, huh?
Maybe they should, I dunno, go to an Occupy rally or something.
