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There’s a lot of chatter this morning about Groupon’s latest deal in the Chicago area: A 60% discount on university tuition at National-Louis University.
Sounds amazing, but the full story isn’t quite as impressive.
The offer is for one graduate-level course. Not one course as in “any one course,” but one course as in “one particular course.” A course that was concocted specifically for the Groupon promotion. It does apply toward a master’s in teaching, but only if, after completing it, you apply for, are accepted to, and enroll in NLU. (Given the nature of the class, it’s hard to imagine it being accepted as transfer credit at any other school.) All in all, this “deal” is clearly more a marketing initiative than an educational innovation.
And that shouldn’t come as a surprise, given National-Louis University’s past…
Until 1990, NLU was known as the National College of Education. It changed its name to National-Louis University to honor to its largest donor, Michael W. Louis, who had made a $30 million pledge to the college the previous year. In 1982 Louis had given NCE three million dollars to create a college of arts and sciences, which the school had also named for him. In 1983 they granted him an honorary doctorate as well.
So. Yeah.
The California State Senate has passed a bill expanding financial aid to undocumented students in the state’s public colleges and universities. The California Dream Act now goes to the Democratic-controlled State Assembly, which is expected to pass it next week. Governor Jerry Brown has not said whether he will sign the bill, but he approved similar legislation this summer and is considered likely to do so again.
Undocumented students make up about one percent of enrollment at California’s public colleges and universities, a rate of attendance far below undocumented immigrants’ representation in the state’s population (in the range of two or three million out of a total of thirty-seven million).
Charlie Webster, the state chair of the Maine Republican party, has produced documents claiming to show that over two hundred of the state’s college students have committed fraud by voting in Maine while paying out-of-state tuition.
This is a lie. It’s an evil lie. It’s just … jeez.
Here’s the deal. If you move to Maine for college, you have to pay out-of-state tution your first year. And your second. And your third. And your fourth. And your fifth. You have to pay out-of-state tuition forever, in fact, until you demonstrate that you have “established a Maine domicile for other than educational purposes.”
And as long as you’re attending college full-time, you’ll be “presumed to be in Maine for educational purposes and not to establish a domicile.” Again: Forever.
You can arrive in Maine fresh out of high school, move into your own place, live there 365 days a year. Work there, spend summers there, get married there. Finish your undergraduate degree, go on to grad school. But as long as you’re still a student, you’re “presumed to be in Maine for educational purposes and not to establish a domicile,” and the burden of proof is on you to show otherwise. (“No one factor can be used to establish domicile,” by the way. “All factors and circumstances must be considered on a case-by-case basis.”)
Paying out-of-state tuition isn’t evidence that you don’t live in Maine, in other words. It’s not evidence of anything at all. Out-of-state tuition is a revenue stream for the university and the state, and as such, it’s designed to put every possible burden on the student who’s looking to get out from under it.
Which brings us back to Charlie Webster.
What Webster is doing here is deploying a state regulation designed to deprive Maine’s college students of their money as a mechanism to deprive them of their votes. There’s no other way to describe it. Take their money, take their votes. Justice, fairness, and the Supreme Court of the United States be damned.
It’s really that simple.
I’ve just hit Tallahassee for the 61st annual National Student Congress of the United States Student Association, and I’ll be blogging from the ground here for the next six days.
USSA is the oldest and largest student-led national student organization in the United States. Founded in 1947, it’s a confederation of student governments and State Student Associations that prioritizes grass-roots organizing and legislative lobbying from its headquarters in Washington DC.
Much more about USSA, and this year’s Congress, to come…
Students at the University of California and the California State University are already facing tuition increases for the fall semester. But new state budget cuts passed this week could mean an additional mid-year hike — and that’s if everything goes according to plan with the budget from here on out.
Tuition has more than tripled in California in the last decade, and fees are slated to rise another 8% at CSU and 10% at UC in the fall semester. State legislators just cut an additional $150 million each from UC and CSU, compounding a combined cut of $1 billion planned this spring. In total, the reductions amount to a more than 20% cut from just least year.
The just-passed budget assumes new revenues of $4 billion for the state which have not yet been approved. If those funds fail to materialize, UC and CSU stand to lose another $100 million each.
studentactivism.net 
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