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The Free-College Fantasy | Any new federal free-college plan should be guided by four principles. First, help students who need help the most. Second, reward states that invest their own money in higher education. Third, create incentives for colleges to cooperate with one another. Fourth, make sure that college is good as well as free. At the same time, such a plan needs to avoid the pitfalls…which would reward the stingiest states and devote more money to four-year students, who are, on average, less needy. [NOTE: The subscription-based Chronicle of Higher Education has generously made the fantasy of free college freely available for everyone to read. In principle, one might think that readers should have to pay their own money to learn why college must not be free. The Chronicle‘s affluent readership easily can afford to pay for the subscription, which may have served to make this article good as well as free. Instead, the Chronicle grants a needless and gratuitous subsidy to all readers that threatens to diminish the quality of its journalism for the most needy.]Continue Reading

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| Can higher education be saved in California? | In California, 80% of community college students were being sent to remedial courses in English or math, and only 16% of them earned a certificate or associate degree within six years, according to the PPIC. In response, in 2017, California’s community colleges began putting less-well-prepared students into credit-bearing introductory courses with extra tutoring. The CSU system, too, started doing this last year, and now also funnels students with low high school grades or standardized test scores into special preparation programs in the summer before their freshman years. Though some faculty members have objected to the changes, early studies suggest they’ve led to big improvements: 63% of community college students who went directly into transfer-level English composition courses with tutoring successfully completed them, compared to 32% who went to remediation.Continue Reading

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| The Dangerous Myth of the Student Loan | In the US, the groundwork for the present loan-dominated system goes back to 1972 with the Student Loan Marketing Association, which was created with the intention of servicing federally insured loans. By 1986, a market-based credit system was the system of choice for the World Bank, which advocated it in order to fund the rapid gap in higher education demand and supply that was occurring in the developing world.Continue Reading

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| Is international higher education just an elite club? | [A]s we draw near the end of the second decade of the new millennium, it is difficult to see how international higher education has evolved into a phenomenon which is ‘good’ and ‘meaningful’ for everyone. On the contrary, it has remained a tiny club based on physical mobility which is accessible only to the healthy, wealthy and brainy.Continue Reading