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Pell Grant expenditures by the federal government fell by more than six percent last year, according to new figures from the federal government, despite the fact that they were expected to rise by some $4.4 billion.
The $2.2 billion (or $6.6 billion, depending on how you look at it) savings won’t be fully explained until more detailed numbers are released, but there are likely three overlapping explanations.
The first, and likely largest, factor was the government’s elimination of year-round Pell eligibility last year. Congress zapped summer Pell Grants as a cost-saving measure, and that policy change was expected to reduce outlays by some $4 billion.
Another $1.4 billion of the gap came from declining grant awards to for-profit colleges, which saw Pell enrollment fall by more than a hundred thousand students, or about five percent.
As for the rest? Experts interviewed by Inside Higher Ed suggested that it might have come from a shift from full-time to part-time enrollment, possibly spurred by higher costs of attendance.
The elimination of year-round Pell was obviously a setback for higher ed access, and if students are dropping down to part-time for financial reasons that’s troubling too. But the shrinkage of for-profit enrollment is good news for a few reasons.
For-profit colleges charge students more than publics, and they pass those costs on to the government. Because average Pell outlays to students at for-profits are higher than those to students at the public colleges they’d most likely be attending otherwise, for-profit colleges have for years consumed a disproportionate share of Pell Grant spending. A decline in for-profit colleges — which often engage in predatory enrollment tactics, deliver shoddy instruction, and dump students into loan default after graduation — is good for students, good for the economy, and good for the government’s bottom line.
After a stint heading up a group called Youth for Western Civilization, a student at Maryland’s Towson University is looking to start a White Student Union on campus.
I wrote about the White Student Union phenomenon a few years ago, saying that I’d never heard anyone make a sincere argument for the creation of such groups:
When someone asks me [why white students can’t have WSUs], my response is always pretty much the same: “Do you actually want to have a White Student Union on campus? Would you be active in a WSU there was one? Is there stuff you’d like to be doing that the absence of a WSU is keeping you from doing?”
So far, nobody has ever answered any of these questions with a yes.
The guy I’ve been talking to on Twitter says he wanted “to make a point about the wrongness of segregation, regardless of purpose.” But you don’t demonstrate that something is bad “regardless of purpose” by showing that it’s bad if it has no purpose, you demonstrate it by showing that it’s bad even if it has a great purpose.
That’s the first fundamental problem with the WSU thought experiment — it doesn’t engage with the reasons that BSUs exist.
While I stand by everything I wrote back then, this case is a little different than the ones I’d seen before.
Matthew Heimbach, the flag-bearer for Towson’s WSU, is an active neo-Confederate who attended a white supremacist conference earlier this year, and paraphrased a notorious neo-Nazi slogan in a recent letter to the Towson student newspaper. He believes that the 69% white Towson campus is “hostile toward white students,” and that white students, who “share a bond that is far deeper than skin color,” must “take a stand for our people before it is too late.”
So yeah, let me rephrase. I’ve never encountered anyone who actually wanted to have a WSU on their campus who wasn’t an aggressively paranoid racist.
Tuesday’s provincial election was a pretty good day for the Quebec student movement.
The Parti Québécois, which had opposed the Liberal government’s tuition hikes and its anti-demonstration Loi 78, won a clear, though not overwhelming, victory at the polls. Though they fell far short of winning majority control of the provincial legislature, their party leader — in a post-election call to the head of one of Quebec’s student unions — promised to reverse the tuition increase by decree, a move that would make a legislative vote unnecessary. Action on Loi 78 is expected to follow.
PQ’s margin of victory was smaller than anticipated, with the party winning just 54 seats in the 125-seat legislature. The Liberals won 50, though their better-than-expected showing was dimmed by the defeat of party leader Jean Charest, architect of the tuition hike in his own race. In another election-night surprise, 20-year-old student activist Léo Bureau-Blouin defeated a three-term incumbent on his way to winning a PQ seat in the city of Laval. Bureau-Blouin, whose decision to run was controversial among some activists, will be the youngest ever member of Quebec’s legislature.
But while this was a big battle, the war is still ongoing. The reversal of the hike sets up a new struggle over higher education funding, and PQ has pledged to index tuition to inflation going forward. Though students at several holdout campuses where students had continued to strike returned to classes on Wednesday, neither the issues nor the tactics of the spring have evaporated. For now, Loi 78 remains on the books, and the fate of students already under investigation for violating the act remains unresolved.
And the Maple Spring was never just about short-term tuition policy or a single authoritarian law. The movement has always been bigger than that, and a (promised, approximate) return to the January 2012 status quo hardly fulfills the movement’s larger goals.
So don’t put away your red squares just yet.
The primary purpose of a political convention is to advance that party’s chances of winning the next election. This is hardly a counterintuitive proposition, but it bears repeating occasionally, particularly in the face of complaints like those offered by Gawker editor Hamilton Nolan today.
Nolan is offended. He’s offended that Michelle Obama sometimes affects a stutter she doesn’t naturally possess, and by the production values of the DNC, and that “no political party stands for honesty.”
“Both parties,” he writes, “and their candidates, and their party machines, and their loyalists, and we in the media that create and nurture the narrative that accompanies all of them, have forsaken all attempts at sincerity. The conventions are a pageant. The speeches are performances.”
Well, yeah. But what else should they be? The point of a convention is to help its candidate get elected. That’s what it’s for. If it didn’t exist to do that, it pretty much wouldn’t need to exist at all. (The last major party convention that selected a presidential candidate was the Democrats’ in 1952. It ended badly for them.)
“It is considered gauche, juvenile, ignorant, downright simple,” he continues, “to insist that the process of selecting the most powerful person in the world be conducted in an adult manner, with a serious conversation between the candidates and the country on the serious issues that we, collectively, face.”
If I had Nolan here in front of me, I’d ask him to walk me through this. Because it seems to me that he’s saying one of two things, and neither of them makes much sense. On the one hand, he could be saying that a “serious” convention — one with less artful stuttering and crappier production values and a more adult approach to the issues — would be more likely to be successful electorally. But that doesn’t seem particularly likely, and it’s not an argument he even advances explicitly.
The second possibility is that he’s saying that parties should take this more “adult,” less-calculated approach even if it harms their chances at the ballot box. And that I just don’t get at all. You run candidates in elections because you want to win them. And if giving your candidate elocution lessons and hiring talented producers helps you win, then by all means, do that. Right? If not, why not?
Like Nolan, I wish the Democratic party weren’t the drone party. But the Democratic party is the drone party, and since they are, I don’t have a hard time understanding why their leaders (and their base, pro-drone or anti-) prefer not to talk about drones at their convention. That’s not what they’re in North Carolina for, to talk about drones.
Talking about drones during the DNC is probably good for Nolan’s blood pressure, and it may even be good for the country. But it’s no more noble to talk about drones during the DNC than before or after, and just talking about drones isn’t likely to do anything to stop the drones anyway. Because as much as I wish it was, the president’s drone policy isn’t an aberration in Democratic party policy.
One of the most praised moments of the DNC’s first night was for me one of the fakiest — Deval Patrick’s rousing call for Dems to at long last “grow a backbone.” Set aside the fact that Patrick, who most recently made headlines defending Mitt Romney’s vampire capitalism from Obama’s attacks, is hardly a credible messenger on the topic. Set that aside, like I say, because the big problem that folks like Nolan and I have with the Democratic Party isn’t that it doesn’t have sufficient backbone, it’s that the folks who run things don’t want to do a bunch of the stuff that we want them to do.
There’s a lot of stuff that Democrats do that I want them to do, like supporting abortion rights (kinda, mostly), and funding workplace safety inspections and appointing demonstrably-less-horrid judges to the federal bench. We’ll be worse off as a country if the Republicans win the presidency and control of Congress this fall. I believe that.
But replace a few dozen of the Republicans in the House and the Senate with moderate Democrats and we still don’t get a bunch of the stuff that I — and the folks who cheered the backbone line the loudest — want to get, because moderate Democrats (and Obama is one) aren’t interested in that stuff. That’s the problem with being a left-leaning Democrat, and it’s not a problem that gets solved by making the DNC more of a downer or Michelle Obama a less effective speaker. It’s a problem that gets solved, if it gets solved at all, by organizing — inside the electoral arena and outside it as well.
Hamilton Nolan’s piece today is called “Stuttering and Sincerity.” I don’t know if he chose that title or not, but I’m not expecting to see him disavow it, either. And nor should he. Though alliteration is, like the hitch in a faux-choked-up first lady’s voice, a contentless rhetorical move, that doesn’t mean it’s evil. It’s a tool like any other, and I’d no more ask a writer to give up his rhetorical tools than I would a conventioneer.
Harvard University announced yesterday that it is investigating more than a hundred students in a single section of an introductory Poli Sci course on suspicion of cheating on an open-book final exam. When the news broke I tweeted my suspicion that the structure of the final might have contributed to the temptation to cheat, and a new article in the Harvard Crimson appears to confirm my suspicion.
The final exam in professor Matthew Platt’s “Introduction to Congress” course was designated as “completely open-book, open-notes, open internet,” but students were warned “not [to] discuss the exam with others,” including their fellow students, tutors or anybody else.
The test included what the Crimson describes as “three multi-part short answer questions,” questions that one anonymous student — who is not suspected of cheating — described as “find the answer and basically say why this is the way it is.” Students were apparently confused by at least two of these questions, with one writing in a course evaluation that more than a dozen had descended en masse on a teaching assistant’s office on the day the assignment was due:
“Almost all of [us] had been awake the entire night, and none of us could figure out what an entire question (worth 20% of the grade) was asking,” that student said. “On top of this, one of the questions asked us about a term that had never been defined in any of our readings and had not been properly defined in class, so the TF had to give us a definition to use for the question.”
The professor’s own office hours that day were canceled on minimal notice.
Students have an ethical obligation not to cheat, of course. But faculty also have an obligation not to create situations in which cheating is likely to occur. To give an “open internet” take-home exam in which any conversation with your classmates is defined as “cheating” is — even in the best of circumstances — to establish a context in which some cheating is all but inevitable, and virtually impossible to detect. When you declare behavior that you can’t police, behavior that may be entirely benign, to be cheating, you erase the bright-line distinction between proper and improper behavior that is essential to academic integrity. And when you craft a take-home test that’s potentially confusing and deny students any licit mechanism for resolving their confusion, you place students in an entirely untenable position.
studentactivism.net 
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