Many students across the country are faced with an almost existential challenge. Undocumented students, many of whom arrived as young children and barely remember their country of birth, must often contend with the threat of deportation, being separated from their family, and being forced to live in the shadows.
Students Working for Equal Rights (SWER) is trying to do something about it. SWER Is a student led campaign affiliated with the Florida Immigrant Coalition. It works to both pass the DREAM Act, which would give young people who attend two years of college, or serve in the military for two years, a path to legal status, and challenges the deportation and detention of students that would be eligible for the DREAM Act.
SWER has done some amazing work this month. As part of a statewide day of action, student leaders from across South Florida held a protest outside of the Broward Transitional Center, where several DREAMers are being detained:
Students elsewhere in the state held film screenings and other events, asked their college presidents for endorsements of the DREAM Act, and held a statewide call-in day to urge their Senator to get more involved in this issue.
By the way, if you don’t know much about the immigrant detention “system,” then you should reallylearnmore. The Obama administration recently announced some promising reforms, but there is much more to do.
SWER recently received an Organizing Grant through Campus Progress’s Action Alliance Program. Student and youth-led issue campaigns and movement building projects are eligible for up to $1,500 to organize for progressive social change.
After a full 10 years of contacting representatives, gathering signatures, writing articles, and spreading the outrage, Students for Sensible Drug Policy, along with hundreds of supporting organizations was sure their determined efforts would finally pay off and that Congressional leadership would follow through with their pledge to repeal the counterproductive Aid Elimination Penalty of the Higher Education Act. However, we have yet again been terribly deceived.
If you’ve ever wondered why you’re asked about drug offenses when applying for federal financial aid through FAFSA, thank Representative Mark Souder (R-IN), who somehow managed to slip the AEP into the Higher Education Act in 1998 without any debate or vote. Since then, this amendment has denied over 200,000 students federal financial aid, and in turn access to education. While we assume the reasoning behind Souder’s action was that he thought it would decrease drug abuse, it’s done the exact opposite by forcing students to drop out of school, therefore increasing their risk of drug abuse and criminal activity.
Regardless of the penalty's intentions, it has blatantly attacked hard-working students, people of color, and the lower and middle class. Since the FAFSA already requires satisfactory academic progress in order for a student to be eligible for federal financial aid, the AEP only affects hard-working students who have been doing well in school. While African-Americans make up a fairly small portion of the population, racial profiling leads to an absurdly disproportionate higher number of African-Americans arrested for drug offenses. And since middle and lower class families are depending solely on financial aid, it’s easy to see why wealthy families may not be too concerned.
Many members of Congress who were on our side initially have informed us that they became terrified of facing negative attacks, fearing they’d be labeled as “pro-drug”. In reality,it is precisely the Aid Elimination Penalty they are supporting that continues to increase drug abuse and decrease education. Anybody who is against racial profiling, increasing drug abuse, and decreasing education should be against this penalty. Please fill out this pre-written letter and demand an explanation from your local legislators! Unless they hear from their constituents, they won’t realize what their people want and will continue to follow their misguided instincts.
Click here if you want to get involved in Campus Progress’s efforts around College Affordability, or become a Student Representative for the 2008-2009 school year.
Campus Progress congratulates Congress on the passage of the Higher Education Opportunity Act. This legislation takes another small step toward an affordable and accessible system of higher education, and will finally reauthorize the Higher Education Act of 1965.
In both the US and Iraq there are efforts to get more Iraqi students to American universities.
In the states, educators have been working with their counterparts in Syria to help relocate students. NPR reports that they have formed the “Iraqi Student Project,” in which fourteen universities are currently participating. It sounds like they are doing good work:
…program coordinators visit promising applicants in their homes for personal interviews. Students are selected after further review of their academic performance and grasp of English; then, they spend time working with tutors on their English and other skills. Students then apply to participating American schools that offer programs in their major fields of interest.
Students from the Campus Anti-War Network and other groups helped to pass a referendum at UW-Madison that would raise money from student fees to help bring Iraqi students to campus. Apparently, it wasn’t too hard (so you should do it too!):
“It was actually a lot easier than I thought it was. I wasn’t expecting people to be as supportive of this as they were,” said Wustmann, who was heavily involved in collecting signatures. “Some reactions were so enthusiastic, like ‘how can I help this? It’s such a great idea.’”
As you have probably heard by now, the “credit crunch” has been making the student loan market less lucrative for many lenders, and has caused a bit of a controversy in the world of higher education.
To recap – lenders are trying to argue that problems in the credit markets will lead to a crisis for students who need loans to attend school, while most othersthink that the affects for most students will be small. Congress and the Education Department have created new policies to make sure that, no matter what happens, students will be able to access financial aid, but lenders, who already receive government subsidies to make loans to students, keep pushing to get a sweeter deal for their bottom line (as opposed to sweeter deals for students or taxpayers).
I thought this new article in the Chronicle of Higher Education might help point to the difference between planning for the worst (good), and unnecessarily wasting taxpayer money (not so good):
Today Emily Bazelon looks at a story in the Chronicle of Higher Education that talks about how colleges and universities with the biggest endowments -- usually over $500 million -- are working at increasing class and race diversity, but somehow the number of students who receive Pell grants are falling. So if these schools were really successfully recruiting lower-class students, wouldn't the Pell grant numbers be going up? The answer is, they're not. The answer, then, isn't to increase recruitment in schools where they might find lower-class students, but instead Yale and Harvard are expanding to upper middle class families with incomes up to $200,000.
These premium colleges and universities seem to be so out-of-touch with the lower class students that they're not recruiting successfully. I grew up in a small town full of middle- and lower-class working folk, something those coastal elitists like to call "flyover country." Part of the problem is that education for a lot of people that might be in the classes that they'd want -- the kind that are in the Pell grant-receiving brackets -- view education as a much more practical venture. They want to earn a degree that will take them the furthest without breaking the bank.
As you have probably heard, we are going through some rocky financial times. A “credit-crunch” fueled recession means that many financial institutions will have a harder time making ends meet, and this, of course, includes student loan companies, as the Washington Post points out today.
Higher education advocates are worried that these lenders are exaggerating the effects of the crisis on the student loan industry as a way to secure unneeded bailouts and get back some of the wasteful subsidies that Congress cut last year in order to increase student aid. They are also worried that all of the hype will mean debt-averse students may be discouraged from “investing” in a college education. Don’t worry – it is very unlikely that you won’t be able to get the loans you need to finance you education.
Starting about a year ago, my school's college counselors gravely informed us that because of demographics, this year would be the hardest ever to get into college. According to the Times,however, the number of high schools seniors is going to peak in about two years, making about 99% of colleges less selective:
Projections show that by next year or the year after, the annual number of high school graduates in the United States will peak at about 2.9 million after a 15-year climb. The number is then expected to decline until about 2015. Most universities expect this to translate into fewer applications and less selectivity, with most students likely finding it easier to get into college.
Although it's certainly true that good schools have gotten more selective, there's a bit more to this trend then simply admittance percentages going down. The first oddity is that while the elite schools have gone from incredibly selective to total crapshoot (Harvard, Yale and Princeton admit less than 10% of their applicants, despite 85% being perfectly qualified to go), the number of good, selective schools has skyrocketed. Schools like Emory and USC, which only a decade or two ago were considered mediocre rich kid schools, have, because of their bulging endowments, been able to snatch up the best professors and students. USC, for example, will not only offer scholarships to good students, but will just straight up hand out cash. Also, due to the increasing financial returns to a college education, the number of objectively highly qualified students, with good SAT scores and what, has also increased due to the incentives. This means that, from the other end, the number of good schools has to go up because there's been a downward flow in where the good students are going to school. Add on the fact that because of applications being predominately online and most schools accepting the Common Application, it's become much, much easier to apply to a bunch of good schools, and consequently, acceptance rates have to go down.
But while the stress and amount of work associated with trying to get into a competitive school has certainly gone up - as I can attest - the actual quality of American higher education, at the highest level, has probably gone up more.
A new trade school in Oakland, CA is preparing its students for a highly competitive career in a burgeoning field: medical marijuana. For $200, Oaksterdam University (clever, huh?) teaches students how to cultivate and cook with pot, and equips them to navigate the legal restrictions on the use of medical marijuana.
"My basic idea is to try to professionalize the industry and have it taken seriously as a real industry, just like beer and distilling hard alcohol," said Richard Lee, the activist and medical marijuana distributor who founded the school.
While Lee’s students seem excited about learning to “grow pot at home for fun, health, public service — or profit,” not everyone is thrilled. Though Lee’s school is totally legal, Michael Chapman, an assistant agent in charge with the Drug Enforcement Agency's San Francisco office, thinks it’s more of a detriment than a public service. "I think they are sending the wrong message out to the community and it's something that could only facilitate criminal behavior," he said.
Fun fact: According to Lee, entry-level workers at medical marijuana dispensaries earn over $50,000 a year on average, and managers and owners often make over $100,000.
Gene Nichol, the president of the College and William and Mary, stepped down today after a relentless smear campaign was waged against him by conservative lawmakers in Virginia. Ryan Powers, a former Center for American Progress intern and a senior at the College of William and Mary, has a great post over at Think Progress summarizing and analyzing the unfortunate series of events.
Nichol's greatest sins seem to have been his decisions to allow a student-funded organization to host a sexually themed art show and to have the university remove a crucifix from the non-denominational chapel on campus. He explained his decisions in an email sent to the school community this morning:
The Center for American Progress and Campus Progress are pleased with today’s passage by the House of Representatives of the College Opportunity and Affordability Act (H.R. 4137). This legislation continues to build on Congress’s commitment to making college more affordable and ensuring that Americans are prepared to compete in an increasingly knowledge-based economy.
An amendment has been introduced that would give important protections to private student loan borrowers.
Since student loan companies lobbied their way into the Bankruptcy Bill in 2005, borrowers have been virtually unable to discharge private student loans through bankruptcy. Instead of treating these loans like credit cards or any other form of consumer debt, they are treated more like a criminal fine. This leaves borrowers few ways to deal with what are often high-cost loans if they run into financial troubles.
Later this week, the House of Representatives is taking up its version of the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act - the law that governs almost every federal program and policy towards higher education. We have a chance, if we act fast, to change this situation. Rep. Danny Davis proposed an amendment that would extend bankruptcy protections to private loan borrowers.
California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger just released his proposed budget for 2008-2009, and it includes deep cuts to higher education programs. The reduced spending is a response to a $3.3 billion budget gap. Read More »
The conservative Center for College Affordability and Productivity has a great post up explaining why we shouldn’t be overly impressed by Harvard and Yale’s recent decisions to spend more of their massive endowments on financial aid. Read More »
Check out the Chronicle's new group blog, Brainstorm: Lives of the Mind. They have a roster of professors who come mainly from arts or cultural studies backgrounds. Let's hope this works out better than the New Republic's Open University, which has been moribund for months at this point. The last post was Nov. 29, and the one before that was Nov. 22.
Minority enrollment in graduate schools continues to rise, according to a study released yesterday by the Council of Graduate Schools and the Graduate Record Examinations Board.
According to Inside Higher Ed, overall enrollments increased 2% in 2006, and most of that growth is attributed to increasing numbers of minority, female and international students. White, male and U.S. citizen enrollment stayed constant.
This year’s growth follows an overall trend: underrepresented minority enrollment increased from 14% in 1996 to 22% in 2006.
Kenneth E. Redd, director of research and policy analysis at the Council of Graduate Schools noted that though this growth is encouraging, there are still barriers to break down.
While making up a nearly proportional 13 percent of students that are U.S. citizens or permanent residents, for example, African Americans still are only 8 percent of those studying sciences and engineering. For most members of minority groups, the most popular field remains education.
Ansley A. Abraham Jr., director of the Doctoral Scholars Program of the Southern Regional Education Board, congratulates professors for increasingly encouraging minority students to consider graduate school. "By no means does this mean that we should let our foot up off the pedal," he said.
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