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    As the Trump administration tries to roll back education regulations, one city is attempting to stay a move ahead by fortifying its own protections for some college students. The Milwaukee Common Council unanimously passed legislation last week to prohibit financial assistance to for-profit institutions unless they meet federal financial aid regulations. The legislation, which updates a previous rule, means the city won’t provide monetary aid to for-profits or to related development projects if the involved colleges fail to meet federal financial aid regulations that were in force on Jan. 1, 2017, before Trump's inauguration. “Considering the leadership change at the federal level and who is now over the Education Department and her relationship with private for-profit colleges, it was thought that the federal guidelines could change, and our ordinance was predicated on what the federal guidelines were at that time,” said Alderwoman Milele Coggs, who sponsored the legislation. “So if those guidelines change, it doesn’t affect the standard we set as a city for education.” Coggs said Milwaukee has a right to be concerned about the types of education institutions that want to do business there. The original ordinance was put into effect following the 2009 arrival of Everest College, which received development money from the city. “We had major reservations about them coming in here, and we put them through the paces and [made them] jump through a series of hoops to demonstrate they could be successful in serving students,” said David Dies, executive secretary of the Wisconsin Educational Approval Board, the state’s for-profit oversight agency. Coggs said she and other residents in the city also had reservations about Everest. But the institution eventually opened its doors with the help of $11 million in bonds from the city’s redevelopment authority, she said. It wasn’t too long after Everest opened that the EAB noticed problems. “They only operated here about 18 months, and early on we started sensing issues based
    6 years ago by @prophe
     
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      Student debt is a personal challenge for more than 44 million Americans, but a lucrative business opportunity to the firms that manage the more than $1 trillion now outstanding. With a delinquency rate currently exceeding 11 percent, some see student loans as a major risk to the U.S. economy, one rivaling the mortgage loan market that crashed in 2007. There has also been widespread concern about the effects of college debt on the lives of individual students “what authorities describe as systematic mistreatment of borrowers.” Because these loans are guaranteed or are made directly by the federal government, the U.S. Department of Education is responsible for managing this complex system and balancing the competing interests of the various stakeholders. Last week, Education Secretary Elizabeth DeVos took action to reverse the course she inherited from the prior administration. In 2015, President Obama announced his Student Aid Bill of Rights, which aimed both to create a more efficient loan management system and to “reduce student loan defaults and encourage borrower success.” In recognizing the needs of borrowers, it sought to more fairly balance the interests of individual borrowers with those of the federal government and those doing business managing the debt under government contract. Two policy directives from the Obama administration’s Department of Education, which Bloomberg News described as directing the Federal Student Aid office to “do more to help borrowers manage, or even discharge, their debt,” were cancelled. The Obama administration sought to balance the interests of those taking out student loans and the business interests of the private firms contracted to service and collect these debts. Ideally, by taking borrowers’ interests into account, the amount of unpaid debt would be decreased, as would the cost to the federal government, and the harmful effect of predatory practices could be lessened. In her memo to the FSA, Secretary DeVos showed that efficient repayment was the singular goal of her
      6 years ago by @prophe
       
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        Universities are caught in a privatization trap that they built themselves and that will be difficult to take apart, argues Christopher Newfield. This country’s public universities face the Trump administration in a weakened condition. That is partly because they have suffered years of state funding cuts and still aren’t back to pre-2008 levels. But it’s also because they have long embraced a private-funding model that doesn’t work and whose weaknesses Trump and his people can exploit. A painful example is the proposed 18 percent cut to the National Institutes of Health, which Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price has contended would not hurt research, as it would mostly focus on cutting back on overhead expenses to universities. An 18 percent budget slash sounds catastrophic -- until you remember that companies take these kinds of hits and survive. So do American families, where illness or job loss lead to cuts far greater than that. The same goes for public universities: few have not had a cut on that scale sometime in the past 25 years, and still fewer have admitted that such losses hurt educational quality. Since universities survived the financial crisis with little damage -- that they have disclosed -- what would keep the citizenry awake at night about an 18 percent cut for medical research? Research directors reply that it would be terrible indeed: National Science Foundation Director France Cordova, for example, has said the proposed cuts endanger the economy, since “half of our present GDP is due to investments in science and technology.” Researchers have noted that the current funding austerity already appears in the form of the declining average success rate for grant applications, which has been cut nearly in half since 2001, from 27 percent to 16 percent. Four in five applications go unfunded, with presumably valuable results to medical knowledge possibly lost. Such arguments might work if voters thought science needed public funding to get to the public. But the unfortunate fact is that
        6 years ago by @prophe
         
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