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Student loan giant Sallie Mae has released a new study, How America Pays for College 2009, that misrepresents the state of college lending today.
Sallie Mae is facing potentially crippling losses of revenue under the government’s planned shift to direct lending for college students. Right now, the company manages $188 billion dollars a year in college loans, revenue that would be threatened if direct lending becomes a reality. (The government anticipates that student loan reform would save $87 billion over ten years.)
In its new report, Sallie Mae trumpets the results of a survey it commissioned that found that “58 percent of families invested in higher education last year without borrowing.” It uses this finding to claim that “American families are making the investment in higher education the smart way – by pursuing grants and scholarships more frequently than borrowing.”
But Sallie Mae’s figures are for a single year, not the length of an undergraduate career, and they’re based on survey results, not hard data. As it turns out — and as we reported less than two weeks ago — a new study by the College Board has just been released that uses real numbers and a multi-year perspective, and it found that 59% of college students borrowed, almost half again as many as Sallie Mae suggests.
Via Kevin Prentiss (@kprentiss on Twitter) comes a link to the University of North Alabama’s Sidewalk Chalk Reservation Form.
The form states — in all caps, bolded, and underlined — that “chalking on university sidewalks requires reservations and approval from designated building supervisors or other assigned personnel.”
Chalking also requires, according to the form, advance notice and reservation of space. It requires compliance with a five-point list of restrictions, including a prohibition on chalking near doorways, near the university amphitheater, or with non-pastel chalk. “Chalking,” it states, “is only to be used to beautify the image of the UNA campus and to promote the organization using it.” Violation of any of the above rules will, according to the form, subject the organization responsible to a fine “in excess of $150.”
Over on Twitter, Kevin is a little abashed about linking to the form (“Apologies to the uni involved. I’m sure this is common.”), but I’ve got no such qualms. This is no way to run a university. Hell, it’d be no way to run a junior high.
The university is a community, and its public spaces are, in a very real sense, student space. If a little chalk dust gets tracked into the dining hall, or folks attending a concert at the amphitheater have to run a gauntlet of chalked announcements for Take Back the Night and the chemistry club semi-formal, that goes with the territory. It’s part of being a university.
UNA hands out the Sidewalk Chalk Reservation form — and free chalk! — at its Office of Student Engagement. But you can’t foster student engagement by treating students like guests. When you make students fill out a form to reserve sidewalk space for chalking. You’re telling them that they’re interlopers on campus. You’re telling them that this is your university, not theirs.
And you shouldn’t be surprised when they decide to take it back.
I haven’t posted much about the Russell Athletic story this last while, but I got an email yesterday from United Students Against Sweatshops that demonstrates that their work has really been moving forward.
When I posted last, in early May, USAS had won fifty-seven campus disaffiliations from Russell over the course of the spring semester in protest of the apparel company’s labor policies in Honduras, specifically its decision to close a newly-unionized factory Jerzees de Honduras factory in the wake of its unionization.
Since then, nearly thirty more campuses have joined the Russell boycott, bringing the total to eighty-four. New recruits to the cause include merchandising bigwigs the University of Arizona, Brown, Louisville, the University of Florida, and North Carolina State. USAS is now calling this “the largest collegiate boycott of an apparel company in history.”
You can follow the story as it develops at USAS’s Boycott Russell Athletic blog, which I’ve added to our blogroll today.
The Washington DC Council is considering a set of reforms to the district’s elections that would have the effect of encouraging youth voter turnout — and allowing some currently ineligible teens to vote in primary elections.
Among other things, the Omnibus Election Reform Act of 2009 would:
- Allow 16-year-olds to “pre-register” to vote.
- Grant the vote in primary elections to 17-year-olds who would turn 18 by the time of the general election.
- Establish same-day voter registration, eliminating a deadline that’s currently a month in advance of election day.
Each of these reforms is designed to get young people (and, in the case of the third, not-young people too) engaged with electoral politics. The evidence shows clearly that if you register, you’re likely to vote, and that if you vote once, you’re likely to vote again.
Eliminating barriers to voting is the biggest step we can take toward higher turnout, and all of these proposals are worthy of adoption in DC and throughout the nation.
In a speech this afternoon, President Obama is expected to unveil a ten-year, $12 billion proposal to improve American community colleges.
The bulk of the money will take the form of challenge grants to support curricular and other innovation. The plan also includes $2.5 billion in seed money for facilities renovation and $500 million for free, public domain, online courses.
White House sources say part of the funding for the project could come from the $4 billion a year in savings expected from a pending restructuring of the nation’s college loan system.
studentactivism.net 
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