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| Unraveling the Complexity of America’s Student-Loan Debt | Beth Akers, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute who focuses on the economics of higher education, put it this way: “The data actually tell us that people who have very large student loan balances are actually doing pretty well. That’s because they have high income that they have access to because of their educational spending…”Akers, of the conservative Manhattan Institute, said she has been disappointed so far in the Democratic candidates’ focus on debt forgiveness and free college. Incremental changes to the existing student-loan repayment programs, she said, would do more to help students repay their debt. [Note: Umm, debt forgiveness and free college will do less to help students repay their debt than holding students accountable to the full repayment terms? Uh-huh. Did the Chronicle of Higher Education have to search far and wide to find this policy expert or is it the first business card in the editors’ Rolodex?]Continue Reading

| Serfs of Academe | Given the parlous state of academic publishing—with Stanford University Press nearly shutting down and all but a few presses ordered to turn profits or else—it should perhaps come as no surprise that one of the best recent books on the contemporary university was instead self-published on Amazon. [Note: Our latest book, Honors of Inequality, would never have been published by a university press. The book explores the neoliberal origins of higher education as a field of study — a history that the scholars of higher education, who control what gets published by university presses, prefer their colleagues in other disciplines and the public not know.]Continue Reading

| U.S. National | “Free College” in Historical Perspective | Also, “free college proposals” today may unwittingly limit student choice if the tuition buy downs are limited to selected institutional categories, such as public colleges and two-year community colleges. [Note: Ah, his point is in the final line. As I argue in _Honors of Inequality_, the federal student loan system exists today largely as an obscene federal subsidy for private, nonprofit institutions to educate the students who “merit” higher education at the expense of “needy” college-goers. “Free [public] college” from the states is the greatest threat to this federal subsidy.]Continue Reading