Tuesday, August 12, 2014
Federal Aid Is Likely Driving College Costs Up
Federal financial aid for higher education was supposed to grow the market, bring down costs and help families afford this critical step to financial security.
But a recent report finds the effort to provide educational assistance to students has turned into decades of unaccountable federal spending on higher education.
According to the report from the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, the federal student aid system “contributes to skyrocketing costs, finances a wasteful academic arms race, weakens academic standards, lowers educational opportunity, and worsens the underemployment/overinvestment problem.”
As authors Richard Vedder, Christopher Denhart, and Joseph Hartge explain:
“The most striking thing to observe is that, not only have tuition fees risen after adjusting for inflation, but the rate of increase is rising since 1978. Federal involvement in providing student financial assistance is also growing over time… Before 1978, increases in tuition fees after adjusting for overall inflation were roughly 1 percent a year. In the era of substantial federal student aid after 1978, inflation-adjusted tuition fee increases have ratcheted up to 3-4 percent a year.”
It’s not just students who feel this burden. Taxpayers currently shoulder nearly $90 billion of the $1 trillion dollars of student loan debt now in default. The CCAP report also details shortcomings on the part of the federal government to account for risk in making federal student loans:
Friday, August 1, 2014
Another mom arrested for sending her kid to the park
“I’m totally dumbfounded by this whole situation,” says Nicole Gainey. She’s not the only one. The Port St. Lucie, Florida, mom was arrested on Saturday for letting her 7-year-old son, Dominic, walk alone — in the daytime, with a cellphone — a half-mile to a local park. “I honestly didn’t think I was doing anything wrong,” she says. “I was letting him go play.”
During his approximately 10-minute walk, the boy passed by a public pool, where a patron asked him where his mother was and other questions. As he told a local news station, “I got scared and ran off to the park, and that’s when they called the cops.” Police picked up the boy at the park, brought him home and arrested his mother for felony child neglect. In their report, police noted that “numerous sex offenders reside in the vicinity.” Gainey says the cops “just kept going over that, you know, there’s pedophiles,” which sounds to me like the kind of problem that perhaps there’s a better approach to than whisking kids off playgrounds and arresting mothers. The state’s sttorney’s office notes that there is no law regarding how old children can be before they can travel unaccompanied.
Yet punishing parents seems to be easier than, say, targeting potential offenders. Earlier this month in South Carolina, Debra Harrell was arrested for sending her 9-year-old daughter to play in a local park while she was at her job at McDonald’s. The daughter was briefly put in the custody of the Department of Social Services, and Harrell’s lawyer told the media she’d subsequently lost her job. She is now, fortunately, both back with her daughter and at work, and a crowd-funding effort to help her pay her legal fees has raised over $40,000. But Harrell, who has a court date in September, still faces up to 10 years in prison if convicted of neglect. And Gainey has had to pay nearly $4,000 to bond out after her arrest. She says she will fight the neglect charge but won’t send her son out alone anymore for fear of a further visit from the police.