By Bob Hildreth The Trump budget proposes a 14 percent cut for Education spending. Charter schools and new private school choice programs based on a voucher system are the big winners. Higher education is the big loser Trump proposes to eliminate the Federal Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grant (SEOG), which goes to 1.6 million college students in the greatest need…
By Bob Hildreth President-elect Donald Trump’s choice of Betsy DeVos as education secretary signals that his K-12 policy will honor his promise of school choice. As for his higher education policy, though, we have very little concrete information. The Trump website broadly suggests that he would work with Congress on reforms to ensure that colleges lower…
By Bob Hildreth Conscious Parallelism is the legal term when companies post the same prices but show no evidence that they are directly colluding. That pretty much describes what colleges do resulting in very similar tuition and a narrow band for tuition increases. So it was a big deal last August when one college broke ranks…
By Bob Hildreth Take a guess: What is the average graduation rate at America’s four-year, non-profit colleges? Would you guess 85%? 75%? Maybe 65%? (Surely, it can’t be that low.) Guess again. On America’s college campuses, the average graduation rate for students six years after enrolling as freshmen is 55%. That means that a student…
By Bob Hildreth Wick Sloane teaches a college writing class at Bunker Hill Community College, where he also manages the Emergency Assistance Fund. There are weeks, he said, he spends “more time helping students sign up for food stamps than I have correcting essays.” The same thing is true for many of his colleagues. “Hunger…
By Bob Hildreth Each candidate has identified college affordability and high student loan debt as important issues. And, while there is some overlap among their proposed remedies, sadly, none of the proposals get at the real root of the problem. They just put bandages on where some real surgery is needed. High college tuitions and…