Education and Class

The Atlantic blog recently published this chart on  student loan debt:

My colleagues and I often have to decide on policies that will increase the costs of our programs (like required credit loads, the enrollment status under which a particular course is taken, or fees that we’re considering) and someone will typically bring up the question of  how these policies may affect students’ eligibility for “financial aid”.   I almost always interrupt to say “loans”.

Mindful of how obnoxious that might become, it is so important to me that faculty — especially those who did not pay for their own education — understand that our decisions may drive students more deeply into debt.  I need this to be plainly on the table, especially now when it’s far from certain that our graduates will find jobs.

How do we talk to students who are set on being the first in their family to finish college about what debt like this will be like?

How do we talk to them about whether, in the end, it’s going to be worth it?

• Where Children Sleep: James Mollison’s Poignant Photographs | Brain Pickings

  “Perhaps most interestingly, the book was written and designed as an empathy tool for 9-to-13-year-olds to better understand the lives of other children around the world, but it is also very much a poignant photographic essay on human rights for the adult reader.”

  tags: social class

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• The Decade of Lost Children – NYTimes.com

  “One of the greatest casualties of the great recession may well be a decade of lost children.”

  2009-2009 witnessed the biggest single-year increase of children “falling”/being pushed into poverty ever recorded.

  The argument that we can educate increasing numbers of poor children out of poverty while cutting education budgets would seem very very hard to defend.

  tags: Social class

• Planning Summer Breaks With Eye on College Essays – NYTimes.com

  “A dizzying array of summer programs have cropped up to feed the growing anxiety that summer must be used constructively. Students can study health care in Rwanda, veterinary medicine in the Caribbean or cell cloning at Brown University, or learn about Sikkim, India’s only Buddhist state.”

  High school students who can, buying summer experiences that they believe will boost their competitiveness in college admissions.

  tags: Social class

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

On the table during negotiations around federal budget cuts are subsidized federal student loans in which low-income students don’t pay interest that accrues while they’re still enrolled in school.

I finished school just before the significant cuts in grants in the 80′s yet still deferred buying my first car or taking out my first mortgage or buying decent work (and interview) clothes until long after other friends whose parents paid for undergraduate and graduate school.    My friends still in school the year after I finished who were supporting themselves suddenly and unexpectedly found themselves deeply in debt.

And now if Eric Cantor has his way, students will be thousands of dollars even deeper in debt when they graduate, even now, when so few are finding jobs.

Many of my students are taking out tens of thousands of dollars of loans to become teachers.   They understand that the few who will get jobs in the next few years will be expected to prepare all children to be “college and career ready”, even while college becomes less and less attainable, and certainly as college becomes less the vehicle for opportunity than it was when I sat in my first lecture hall years ago.

• The Unemployed Somehow Became Invisible – NYTimes.com

  Historical perspective on the the relative apathy around high unemployment now, compared to other times in history when unemployment was a catalyst for political action

  “Word came Friday from the Labor Department that, despite all the optimistic talk of an economic recovery, unemployment is going up, not down. The jobless rate rose to 9.2 percent in June.

  What gives? And where, if anywhere, is the outrage? “

  tags: social class

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.