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A new report on student loan debt finds the proportion of community college students saddled with debt at graduation has skyrocketed in the last five years.
The report, a College Board analysis of the U.S. Education Department’s National Postsecondary Student Aid Study, found that nearly half of 2007-08 community college graduates took out education loans to pay for school, up from thirty-seven percent in 2003-04. Of those students who did take out loans, half accumulated debts of more than $10,000.
Borrowing rose from 30% to 38% of graduates of public community colleges, and from 90% to 98% of graduates of for-profit two-year schools. The debt burden among those taking out loans was higher at the private two-years, too — 43% had debts of more than $20,000, compared to just 13% of public community college grads.
All told, 59% of college graduates left school with at least some educational debt in 2007-08, up from 55% just four years earlier. Students’ median debt rose from $13,663 to $15,123 in the same period, an 11% rise.
These figures exclude credit card debt and loans from friends and family, by the way, so the true numbers are even higher.
Update: As the Chronicle of Higher Education notes, debt burdens for four-year college grads vary dramatically by college type too. They point out that “10 percent of students at four-year public institutions had $40,000 or more in loans, while 22 percent of graduates of private four-year institutions and 25 percent of students graduating from for-profit four-year institutions had that level of debt.”
Facebook Ain’t Cool With The Kids No More.
That’s the headline on a post at CrunchGear this morning, claiming that “social networks simply aren’t cool anymore among the 15-to-24-year-old crowd.” That post was based on an article in this morning’s Guardian, a British newspaper, titled “It’s SO Over: Cool Cyberkids Abandon Social Networking Sites.”
So is it true? Are young people abandoning social networking sites in droves? Have the youth of today written off Facebook as uncool?
Well, no.
The CrunchGear and Guardian pieces were both based on a report from the UK media regulatory agency Ofcom. Specifically, they were based on a single piece of survey data from page 289 of that report.
According to Ofcom, social networking use by British youth aged 15 to 24 held steady at 50% from the third quarter of 2008 to the first quarter of 2009, after dropping from a high of 55% in the first quarter of 2008.
That’s it. That’s the whole story. A five point drop in social networking use a year ago among British youth.
Note that there’s nothing here about which young people are dropping out of social networking, or why, or how sure the pollsters are that they actually are. Nothing about the poll’s margin of error, which I wasn’t able to find in the report. And nothing, of course, about “coolness.”
And here’s one other thing. The Guardian article says “part of the reason” that “the kids don’t like social networking anymore … appears” to be “that older users do.” The US trade magazine Billboard dropped the hedge, saying that “adults’ love of social networking sites is driving away teens.” But there’s nothing — literally nothing — in the original report to suggest this. The report said social networking use in Britain dropped a little among 15-to-24s, and that went up a little among older people, but that’s it. There’s no support in the data for any sort of cause-and-effect relationship.
Next up: Mashable’s post on “Why Teens Don’t Tweet.”
At Friday’s plenaries, the Association endorsed two major organizing campaigns, created a new space for conservative delegates to meet at USSA conferences, rejected a proposal that the Association hire an executive director, and passed two dozen administrative resolutions pledging USSA action on various issues.
Friday was quite a day, and yes, I’m still working on that post. But I’m going to dash off something quick on yesterday and today in the meantime.
Yesterday, Saturday, the Association conducted a morning planning session for the upcoming year’s organizing campaigns, then spent the afternoon and early evening on workshops and the meetings of regions and caucuses at which most of the new USSA board of directors was elected. (One of the workshops was my session on social networks and student activism, which I’ll be writing more about after I get back to New York.)
After the meetings and workshops, the students gathered at an off-campus bar for the traditional end-of-Congress party. After a week of long days (and nights) of hard work on the University of Colorado’s dry campus, everyone was ready to celebrate, and exhaustion and altitude ensured that the celebration would be … spirited.
It was a great party.
Today the newly-elected 2009-10 USSA board of directors met for the first time, continuing the planning for the year. They also set dates for their next three meetings, the first of which will be in October in Washington, DC. By mid-afternoon nearly all of the Congress participants had left Boulder.
I’ve been asked several times since Friday’s plenaries how this Congress compares to others I’ve been to, and how I think it will be remembered in years to come. I hope I won’t be accused of cheerleading when I say that this was among the most positive, energetic Congresses I’ve ever attended, and that I suspect it will go down in USSA history as an important milestone in the Association’s progress.
More on why in my next post.
Previously:
USSA Congress Begins Today!
USSA Congress 2009, Day One
USSA Congress 2009, Day Two
Late, Short Wrapup of USSA Congress, Day Three
I just got out of facilitating a social networking workshop at the USSA Congress, and I promised I’d put up a quick post for overflow questions, comments, and links.
Here it is.
5:34 pm update: Jesse just asked me about how I liveblog. This is how.
8:31 pm update: Here are links to some of the sites folks mentioned in the workshop…
DREAMActivist, for organizing around the DREAM Act.
Wikispaces, a site where people can create wikis for free.
The preview site for Google Wave.
On Thursday I was out and about until two in the morning helping out USSA students with plenary meeting prep, and then I was up again at seven to start getting ready for the plenary itself, so I never had a chance to post a recap of the day’s events.
The plenary itself went for more than seventeen hours starting a little after ten o’clock Friday morning, and it was astounding in all sorts of ways. There’s a lot to say about it, and I’ll put up a full post about yesterday’s events later, but first a quick overview of Thursday.
The day was devoted to workshops and caucus meetings. The workshops covered a lot of ground — from “Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: How to Prevent Burnout” to “Autonomous Organizing Down Under,” led by the president of the Australian National Union of Students, David Barrow — but a common thread ran through almost all of them.
USSA sees itself first and foremost as an organization of grassroots student organizers. It conducts regular Grass Roots Organizing Weekend (GROW) trainings for its membership, and many of its staff and officers come up through the ranks of its GROW trainers. Its major campaigns are organizing campaigns, and its closest institutional allies share that perspective.
Over and over again at this Congress, USSA’s formal and informal leadership has framed questions in terms of organizing strategy and tactics, pressing their fellow students to plan concretely for how to run and win campaigns around the issues they care about. This is not a group that’s particularly interested in making abstract statements of principle or engaging in acts of symbolic protest for protest’s sake.
I’m off to run a workshop now, but I’m hoping to find some free time later this afternoon to post about yesterday’s plenaries.
Previously:
USSA Congress Begins Today!
USSA Congress 2009, Day One
USSA Congress 2009, Day Two
studentactivism.net 
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