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Increases in public college tuition are often linked with, and justified by, corresponding increases in financial aid. In this setup, raising tuition is portrayed as a cost-shifting measure — charging more for those who can afford it to keep costs down for those who can’t. But that’s not how it works out in practice, for several reasons.
First, financial aid increases rarely match tuition hikes, and if you think about it for even a moment, it’s easy to see why. Tuition hikes carry high political costs, and financial aid increases bring less political benefits. If the only reason to raise tuition was to improve financial aid, most politicians wouldn’t bother. You raise tuition to raise revenue, and a revenue-neutral tuition increase isn’t likely to be a political winner.
Second, it’s a lot easier to cut financial aid than to raise tuition, which means that a tuition-for-financial-aid deal often exchanges a short-term benefit for a long-term burden.
And finally, as the Chronicle noted a few weeks back, many prospective students are far more aware of tuition prices than the often complex financial aid options available to them. The higher your tuition, the fewer applicants you’ll get, particularly among the most in-need and at-risk student communities.
The Resident Assistants in the dorms at the University of Massachusetts Amherst are, they say, unique in the country — they’re the only RA’s in the country who are represented by a union.
The Resident Assisants union at U Mass Amherst dates back to 2002, when an RA was fired for missing a single staff meeting, but there have been bumps in the road since then. Most recently Residential Life, the administrative department that oversees the RAs, eliminated 19 Apartment Living Assistant positions and attempted to cut the jobs of another 54 peer mentors.
Right now the Amherst RAs are in the middle of contract negotiations with the university, seeking minimum wage pay and protection against termination without just cause. Those negotiations have been ongoing for more than a year, and last week week fifty Amherst students marched on the contract negotiations, lining the halls outside the meeting room for four hours in support of the RAs’ union representatives.
More on this story as it develops.
December 6 Update | I’ll have more details in a later post, but I’ve just learned that the RAs approved the new contract last night. It provides for a 30% pay increase, and was ratified in an overwhelming vote.
Last week a former Amherst College student’s harrowing account of being raped on campus — and of the administration’s subsequent appalling failure to support her or deal with the incident responsibly — was published in the college newspaper and almost immediately began to draw attention across the country.
Angie Epifano’s story of rape, involuntary institutionalization, and administrative failure brought other campus rape survivors forward, sparked vigils and other organizing, and prompted Amherst president Biddy Martin, until recently the chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, to announce an investigation of Epifano’s allegations and a series of possible revisions to campus policy.
In her statement, released six days ago, Martin declared Epifano’s experiences “horrifying,” and declared that the administration’s approach to rape complaints “must change.” As a result of an open meeting with students, she said, students would immediately be added to the campus Title IX and student life planning committees, campus penalties for sexual assault would be reviewed, and new regulation of off-campus fraternities would be considered.
On Friday a group of students secured a meeting with the Amherst board of trustees to discuss the crisis on campus, and the next day the board announced the establishment of a committee, to include student representation, which will conduct a review of campus policy in the area. The committee will make a public report in advance of the board’s next meeting in January, though it will have no formal institutional authority.
A crucial question going forward will be which students are brought into these processes, and how they are chosen. The president of the Amherst student government, not the administration, chose the delegation for the trustee meeting, but some students have been critical of the composition of that group, and are pressing for a less “manufactured” process for choosing representatives to the upcoming advisory committee.
Some activists also express concern that a narrow focus on written policies evades the core issues at stake. “The policy in place isn’t the heart of the problem,” senior Alexa Hettwer told the school paper. “Its enforcement by the administration has been shameful. This is more than just tinkering with policy; it raises serious questions about the direction and inclusiveness of the College in the future.”
Meanwhile, organizing continues. A new student website devoted to exposing sexual assault at Amherst appeared in the immediate aftermath of the publication of Epifano’s story, and yesterday they posted a photo essay of survivors (and allies) “featur[ing] eleven men and women who were sexually assaulted at Amherst College and the words that members of our community said to them following their assaults.” (The photos appeared on that site in slideshow form. They can be seen here in a single page format.)
And the impact of Epifano’s statement continues to be felt, most recently just this morning with the publication of another student’s account of how the Amherst administration mishandled her own rape complaint, leading to her transfer. (This student was enrolled at Mount Holyoke, a nearby college closely affiliated with Amherst, and was raped on the Amherst campus.)
Many undocumented immigrants eligible for a reprieve from deportation under the Obama administration’s DREAM Act-inspired policy shift are choosing not to apply because of fears of their applications being used against them if Mitt Romney wins the presidency.
In June President Obama announced that he would be establishing a process by which those young people who would be eligible for permanent residency and eventual citizenship under the DREAM Act — those brought to the US by the age of 15 who completed two years of college or enlisted in the military — could apply for a pre-emptive deferral of deportation proceedings. The policy, known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), took effect in August.
The administration’s shift followed directly on the mounting of a series of increasingly high profile occupations of Obama campaign offices by DREAM Act-eligible activists.
Romney has pledged to end the DACA policy, but says he will honor any reprieves from deportation already approved when he takes office. Given the program’s complex documentation requirements and high fees, however — and the glacial pace of government bureaucracy — many DACA-eligible young people are hanging back, afraid that an incomplete application could give the government ammunition to use against them in the future.
Only seven percent of the nation’s estimated 1.2 million eligible immigrants applied for DACA in its first month, and though that number has since doubled, only a tiny fraction of applications have so far been processed. Of 180,000 applications submitted so far, only 4,591 have reached final approval. That’s less than three percent of applications, and 0.4 percent of the total eligible pool.
Romney has sent mixed signals on policy for undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children. He opposes the DREAM Act but says he’d work to give them a chance at permanent residency as part of comprehensive immigration reform. What that policy would look like, however, and how it would be implemented, remain impossible to assess.
Three weeks ago for-profit college giant Kaplan announced it was closing thirteen campuses. Yesterday the Apollo Group, owner of Phoenix University, announced even larger cuts.
With Phoenix enrollment falling nearly 14% in the latest quarter, the company plans to close 115 of its 227 locations throughout the country.
Although the “campuses” facing closure are mostly among Phoenix’s smaller locations, the retrenchment reflects a dramatic reversal for Apollo and the industry as a whole. Apollo profits are down more than half from a year ago, and Phoenix enrollment has declined by more than 70,000 students from its peak.
As I noted when reporting on the Kaplan closures, for-profit students represent a bit more than a tenth of the students enrolled in American higher ed institutions, but they account for a quarter of student-loan borrowers and half of student loan defaults. Because the vast majority of for-profit college revenue comes government-backed student loans, these defaults are a significant drain on taxpayer money.
The government has been slow to regulate for-profit colleges as the scope of their malfeasance has become clear, but the regulatory pace has been picking up in recent months. At least as important, students are wising up about for-profits’ defects, and abandoning the schools in droves.
That’s good news, for them and for the rest of us.
studentactivism.net 
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