Higher Education

A California Trend Worth Catching: College For All

February 1, 2018 By Chuck Collins, Otherwords.org Create! California, College, Higher Education, New Economy

America's left coast is showing how to break up concentrated wealth and fund higher education for all. California can be an annoyingly trendy state. Think avocado toast, In-N-Out Burger, Hollywood fashion, even legal pot. But Californians are now in the vanguard to fix the serious problem of how to pay for public higher education. Over 44 million households in the U.S. are saddled with college debt — $37,000 on average. Together they owe over $1.4 trillion, surpassing credit card debt and auto loans. In the 1970s, California led the world with its famously accessible public universities and community colleges. Millions of Californians received a virtually debt-free college education. A friend of mine attended both undergraduate and grad school at the University of California in the 1970s and covered all of his tuition and expenses by painting houses during two months of the summer.

Graduate Student Unions Are Growing — And Fighting For Social Justice

January 28, 2018 By Eleanor J. Bader, Truthout.org Organize! Higher Education, Students, Unions

Not surprisingly, when graduate students heard that the Republican tax bill included a provision to tax tuition waivers, most became both upset and angry. But rather than despair, they organized. On campus after campus, in city after city, they mobilized to protest the 2017 bill. Their concerns extended beyond the injustice of taxing in-kind financial aid incentives as income, to include a broader progressive agenda: opposing racism, sexism, classism and homophobia; denouncing corporate tax giveaways; fighting the growth of anti-intellectualism; and countering attacks on publicly funded education. Austin A. Baker, a Ph.D.-level philosophy student at New Jersey's Rutgers University, joined students from Drexel University, the University of Pennsylvania and elsewhere to oppose the proposed measure.

Duke University Gets Corporate Mining Gift To Help Exploit Indigenous People Of Peru

January 9, 2018 By Gary G. Kohls, Transcend.org Educate! Corporations, Higher Education, Indigenous Peoples, Mining, Peru

3 Jan 2017 – Below are two articles that nicely illustrate the cunning methods that ALL multinational mining, exploration, drilling, energy extractive or oil transporting corporations use to try to sanitize what in reality are greedy designs to enrich corporate stakeholders by raping, stealing, exploiting and permanently polluting the land, water and air that really has always belonged to the indigenous people and who simply want to protect what has always been theirs.The first article illustrates how an otherwise respected major educational institution like Duke University (of Durham, North Carolina) could be easily bamboozled by financial enticements from an exploitive corporation.

Student Debt Slavery: Bankrolling Financiers On Backs Of Youth

December 28, 2017 Ellen Brown, Ellenbrown.com Educate! Banking and Finance, Higher Education, Student Debt

The government, too, had to be enslaved by debt. It could not be allowed to simply issue the money it needed to meet its budget, as Lincoln’s government did with its greenbacks (government-issued US Notes). The greenback program was terminated after the war, forcing the government to borrow from banks – banks that created the money themselves, just as the government had been doing. Only about 10% of the “banknotes” then issued by banks were actually backed by gold. The rest were effectively counterfeit. The difference between government-created and bank-created money was that the government issued it and spent it on the federal budget, creating demand and stimulating the economy. Banks issued money and lent it, at interest.

Betsy DeVos Met With Boos, Protest At Commencement Speech

December 19, 2017 Casey Quinlan, ThinkProgress.org Resist! Betsy DeVos, Higher Education, Protests

Betsy DeVos delivered a commencement speech at the University of Baltimore on Monday, sparking protests from students and members of the community. Her speech focused on the topics of thoughtfulness, selflessness, and perseverance. She also stressed multiple paths to professional success, including certificate programs, micro-degrees, and apprenticeships, and waded into debates about free speech on campus. Students booed loudly as she was announced to speak, but remained mostly silent throughout her speech. When the university first announced DeVos would be the fall commencement speaker in September, student government leaders spoke out against the choice.

Tax Bill: Stealing Money From College Education For Tax Cuts For Wealthy

December 14, 2017 Jeff Bryant, educationopportunitynetwork.org Educate! Higher Education, Tax cuts for the rich, Tax Reform, Taxes

New tax bills Congress just passed with zero input or support from Democrats hit higher education hard, but new legislation House Republicans are crafting will likely worsen the damage. As The Wall Street Journal reports [paywall], the House education committee recently gave a preview to its new legislation, a long overdue reauthorization of the Higher Education Act (HEA). Like recent tax bills passed by the GOP-controlled House and Senate, this proposed rewrite of HEA will have the effect of further constricting learning opportunities for students, adding to the costs students and families take on for education, and steering more public money for learning to private businesses.

Arrests, Anger, Anxiety As Grad Students Visit Paul Ryan’s Office

December 7, 2017 Nick Roll, insidehighered.com Resist! Higher Education, Student Activism, Tax Reform

By Nick Roll for Inside Higher Ed - WASHINGTON -- As the competing Republican tax plans from the House of Representatives and the Senate head to a conference committee that will square the differences and create a final piece of legislation, graduate students are worried. A group of 40 or so activists and graduate students, organized in part by Faculty Forward and the Service Employees International Union, took their concerns to Capitol Hill Tuesday in a protest outside the office of Representative Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House. Upon coming to the office’s locked door, the protesters held their demonstration in the hallway. It was a short-lived affair, with police quickly arresting nine people who declined to move after being given a warning. However, the protest captured the anxiety some graduate students expressed regarding the tax legislation, especially provisions stemming from the House bill. “If it’s filled with any, or most of, the provisions aimed at higher ed, then I’ll have to drop out of my program,” said Tom DePaola, a doctoral candidate in education policy at the University of Southern California and one of the nine protesters arrested. Graduate students who took to the Hill, many of them organizers at their respective graduate student unions, took issue with a broad range of measures presented in the tax overhaul, for reasons related to higher education and not. But, some said, if the tax legislation was going to pass, they hoped that some of the provisions in the House bill would be stripped in conference.

Creston Davis On Forming Global Center For Advanced Studies

November 27, 2017 James Crossley, truth-out.org Create! Debt, Education, Higher Education

By James Crossley for Truthout - Creston Davis: Starting an independent school run strictly by intellectuals was always my dream. Back in 2002, I remember talking with Slavoj Zizek about the need for a Frankfurt School for the 21st century. Years later, after I was teaching at Rollins College, this idea came to the fore again when, year after year, I had students report to me not only how deeply in student loan debt they were, but also how job prospects were difficult (if not impossible) to come by, especially [if] they were from the working or poor class. Over the years, and before I was promoted to associate professor, I began looking into the structural logic and root causes my students, sometimes called "the lost generation," faced. In the end, it became clear to me that I could no longer continue teaching about emancipation and liberation when my very students (and soon, my sons) had to indenture themselves to banks (via student loans) in order to learn about liberation. It was a contradiction that my conscience could not reconcile. So, in late 2012, and after lecturing for a semester in Poland on my sabbatical, I resigned, took out my retirement and used those funds to help start an education initiative designed to create a debt-free high-quality education alternative. Over 100 leading academics, writers, filmmakers, artists and intellectuals quickly joined.

Washington’s War On Poor Grad Students

November 18, 2017 Jill Richardson, otherwords.org Educate! Congress, Higher Education

By Jill Richardson for Other Words - The Republican tax plan winding its way through Congress includes a special middle finger to the nation’s graduate students. It’s a little bit wonky, so stay with me here. I’ll explain how it affects me, since I’m an actual graduate student. Going to grad school would’ve been entirely out of reach for me if I had to pay full tuition for my education. Getting a PhD takes at least five years and often more. I don’t have a spouse, trust fund, or parents to cover my cost of living or my tuition. If I had to pay for my own education, it would’ve been simply out of the question. This is hardly uncommon. How many adults do you know can forego five or more years of income while simultaneously paying thousands of dollars in college tuition each year? Since the answer to that question is “not many,” universities employ graduate students as poorly paid labor in exchange for an education, health insurance, and a very low wage. In my case, I’ve worked as a teaching assistant for the past three years while also attending classes at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Other students worked as research assistants. A lucky few got funding that allowed them to pursue their own research. The rest of us had to work. Forbes mentions some magical places where graduate students are given stipends up to $50,000 per year. At Wisconsin, we weren’t so lucky.

The Time Of The Intellectual-Activists Has Come

November 6, 2017 Creston Davis, truth-out.org Educate! Activists, Higher Education, Intellectual

By Creston Davis for Truthout - A crucial element of change happens when people realize that the current state of things no longer works. Change is a fundamental aspect of all areas of life -- growth requires change. But institutions that benefit from keeping things the same have a vested interest in resisting change. The more powerful the institution, the more it seeks to resist change. Even the threat of change is a threat to powerful economic and social institutions because change shifts perspective and imagines a different world. There are many examples of how established institutions resist change. Take the example of religion. The Christian church in both its Protestant and Catholic variants is notorious for resisting change, in part because it claims to hold absolute truths about the meaning of life, and so the act of challenging the authority of the church is to threaten the very foundations of its monopoly on the absolute. The more in debt a citizen becomes, the less likely they will participate in local democratic processes. Another example is the dogmatic belief of a "free-market" economic ideology that sides with privatization of goods and services for the 1 percent, over a public and shared commons for the 99 percent. Financial institutions like banks, insurance companies and hedge funds, private corporations like mainstream media, even the European Union and the United States are institutions that have greatly benefited from this neoliberal economic ideological monopoly.

Making Your Own Education When College Isn’t An Option

November 1, 2017 Staff, blackyouthproject.com Create! Black Youth, Education, Higher Education

By Staff of Black Youth Project - At this point in human history, college has become damn-near mandatory for acquiring employment and, dare I say, being validated as a functional adult in our society. The “prestige” of attending an institution of higher education yields visions of flying graduation caps, late nights studying in the library, and long, long, looong walks across campus to get from this class to that. The whimsicalness of attending a university also comes with continually rising tuition costs that dump mountains of debt upon the shoulders of teenagers and young adults who may not have access to enough scholarships and government assistance to ease those burdens, which can take a toll on your mental health. The internet–a virtual space which we are continually told is only for memes, Black Twitter draggings, and long rabbit hole journeys on Wikipedia–can be a great resource for alternatives to university. It provides opportunities to help create a cheap, independent curriculum that can help Black students to build a career or business. Here are a few ways that one could create a sustainable career by using the internet to cultivate an untraditional education and acquire skills necessary to succeed in the workforce or as an entrepreneur. Rewarding careers that contribute to society are not limited to STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields. And white knowledge production through the academic institution is not the only legitimate way to learn.

Public Higher Ed Skews Wealthy

October 28, 2017 Rick Seltzer, www.insidehighered.com Educate! Higher Education, Tuition, wealth inequality

By Rick Seltzer for Inside Higher Education - A majority of the country’s top public universities have grown less accessible for the most financially strapped students since 1999 -- and at the same time, they have grown more accessible for wealthy students. More than half of selective public institutions, 54 percent, have reduced the share of students they enroll from families with incomes in the lowest 40 percent of earners, while also increasing the share of students they enroll from families that are among the country’s top 20 percent of earners. Put differently, 217 out of 381 top public institutions enrolled a larger share of wealthy students even as they reduced their percentages of low-income students. That statistic is key to a provocative argument about dwindling access in a new report being released today by the left-leaning think tank New America. The think tank is releasing its findings as part of a reportanalyzing publicly available data from the Equality of Opportunity Project, a study of U.S. social mobility combining public information on higher education with deidentified tax records from students and their parents. The Equality of Opportunity Project received coverage early this year for showing that a handful of prestigious colleges enrolled more students from the top 1 percent of families sorted by income than they did from the bottom 60 percent. Other coverage of the project included the argument that college rankings incentivize institutions to favor wealthy students. New America has also published a series of blog postslooking at the data and what they show about higher education and mobility.

Ohio State Denies Request To Have Richard Spencer Speak On Campus

October 21, 2017 Brandon Carter, www.thehill.com Educate! Higher Education, Ohio, White Nationalism

By Brandon Carter for The Hill - Ohio State University has denied a request to rent space for prominent white nationalist Richard Spencer to speak on campus, citing public safety concerns in the wake of Spencer's appearance at the University of Florida earlier this week. “The university has deemed that it is not presently able to accommodate Mr. [Cameron] Padgett’s request to rent space at the university due to substantial risk to public safety, as well as material and substantial disruption to the work and discipline of the university,” a lawyer representing Ohio State said in a letter to an attorney representing Spencer’s associates and obtained by The Guardian. Earlier Friday, a lawyer for Spencer said he would file a federal lawsuitagainst the university if it denied a request for Spencer to speak on campus. WOSU reports that Ohio State senior vice president Christopher Culley told Michigan attorney Kyle Bristow last week that the university could not accommodate a request to rent space, but the lawyer held off suing while the school looked into "other alternatives." Bristow told WOSU he is seeking an injunction to force the school to rent space for Spencer’s speech.

College Rankings Promote Economic Inequality On Campus

October 2, 2017 Benjamin Wermund, www.politico.com Educate! Higher Education, Income inequality

By Benjamin Wermund for Politico - Meanwhile, there is no measurement for the economic diversity of the student body, despite political pressure dating back to the Obama administration and a 2016 election that revealed rampant frustration over economic inequality. There is, however, growing evidence that elite universities have reinforced that inequality. Recent studies have produced the most powerful statistical evidence in decades that higher education — once considered the ladder of economic mobility — is a prime source of rewarding established wealth. One report by the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation found that kids from the top quartile of income earners account for 72 percent of students at the nation’s most competitive schools, while those from the bottom quartile are just 3 percent. Fewer than 10 percent of those in the lowest quartile of income ever get a bachelor’s degree, research has shown. The lack of economic diversity extends far beyond the Ivy League, and now includes scores of private and public universities, according to the Equality of Opportunity Project, which used tax data to study campus economic trends from 2000 to 2011, the most recent years available. For instance, the University of Michigan enrolls just 16 percent of its student body from the bottom 60 percent of earners.

Protesters Confront Betsy DeVos At The Harvard Kennedy School

September 30, 2017 Spencer Buell, www.bostonmagazine.com Resist! Betsy DeVos, Harvard, Higher Education, Protests

By Spencer Buell for Boston Daily - Protesters, some standing with their fists in the air and waving signs that included the words “white supremacist,” swarmed to greet Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos Thursday night at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. DeVos, despised by advocates for public schools and victims of on-campus sexual assault, was there to give a talk about her pro-“school choice” views on education. As she has done since her appointment to the position by the Trump administration, DeVos in her speech argued for the promotion of alternatives to public schools, advocating for policies that would give parents the option to send their kids to privately-run charter schools, diverting funding from public schools pay for it. “I came into office with a core belief: it is the inalienable right and responsibility of parents to choose the learning environment that best meets their child’s unique, individual needs,” she said, according to prepared remarks provided by the Department of the Education. “Now, I’ve been called the ‘school choice Secretary’ by some,” she continued, “I think it’s meant as an insult, but I wear it as a badge of honor!” During the speech, video taken at the event shows a pair of students standing up silently in their chairs and unfurling a pair of signs. One read “white supremacist” in all-caps. The other read “Our students are not 4 sale.” Dozens more students stood silently in the hall, also brandishing signs.

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