Sallie Mae Undercounts Student Borrowers

August 24, 2009 in Access, Financial Aid, Politics | by | Leave a comment

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.

Wolfram Alpha, 100 Days Later

August 22, 2009 in History, Students | by | Leave a comment

I wrote about the new search engine Wolfram|Alpha shortly after it debuted this spring, and concluded that whatever its strengths in mathematics and the hard sciences, it was pretty much useless as a tool for scholars of higher education. As I wrote at the time, “it has no idea what college enrollment or tuition is, and can’t tell me anything about trends in those arenas. It doesn’t know that Howard University is a HBCU, or even what proportion of Howard’s student body is black.”

The team behind W|A say they’ve been working on expanding its “knowledge domains” this summer, so I took it out for another spin this morning, re-running all the searches I ran last spring. Unfortunately, it did no better with any of them this time around.

If and when Wolfram|Alpha expands into social science and demographic research, it may well be something spectacular. But that day is apparently still pretty far off.

Mad Men, Sal Romano, and the Closet of the Early Sixties

August 17, 2009 in Gender, History, Media, Sexual Orientation | by | Leave a comment

I’m not planning to blog regularly about AMC’s early-sixties drama Mad Men, but there are aspects of the stories it tells that connect up with the stories I tell in my work as a historian, and I’m going to talk a bit about that this morning. Spoilers for previous seasons, and for last night’s season three opener, follow.

Read the rest of this entry »

Quote of the Day: Frederick Douglass

August 16, 2009 in History, Quotes, Race | by | Leave a comment

“The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. … If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.

“This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. … Men may not get all they pay for in this world, but they must certainly pay for all they get. If we ever get free from the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and if needs be, by our lives and the lives of others.”

–Frederick Douglass, West India Emancipation Speech, August 3, 1857.

“Only Pastel Colored Chalk Should Be Used”

August 15, 2009 in Administration, Civil Liberties, Politics, Student Bashing, Student Power, Students | by | 2 comments

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.

About This Blog

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StudentActivism.net is the work of Angus Johnston, a historian and advocate of American student organizing.

To contact Angus, click here. For more about him, check out AngusJohnston.com.