Education Funding

The Education Department's Inspector General has called on student loan giant, Nelnet, to return more than $278 million in taxpayer subsidy payments and halt billing the U.S. Treasury an additional $882 million. That's almost $1.2 billion in taxpayer subsidies that could go to students instead of Nelnet.  It's now up to Education Secretary Margaret Spellings… more

The U.S. Department of Education will report Wednesday that the national student loan default rate jumped 13.3% last year, going from a historic low of 4.5% to 5.1% for the year ending September 2005. Why?

Two key factors are driving an increase in the national student loan default rate.

First, the… more

Most of us place enormous faith in our universities. We trust that they are autonomous, independent institutions committed to education, scholarship, academic freedom and the production of knowledge free from the influence of special interest groups. Right?

Wrong. In the last 25 years, the United States has given birth to a market-model university, one where professors increasingly work "for hire." Just last week, The Wall Street Journal reported that a major academic study -- which found that antidepressants were safe… more

When President Bush announced his support for an American Competitiveness Initiative in his State of the Union address in January -- including $136 billion over 10 years to boost research funding in the physical sciences and train 70,000 math and science teachers to improve the skills of American students -- many of California's scientists and teachers were stunned. Bush hasn't exactly shown much respect for science during his two terms as president.

Many Americans still deeply resent the… more

On Feb. 24, 2006, New America Education Policy Program Director Michael Dannenberg testified before the Secretary of Education's Commission on the Future of Higher Education.

Danneberg's prepared remarks are available in PDF format below.

A trend toward privatization and a shift in spending priorities is putting California's public colleges and universities at risk of forsaking their mandate to deliver a quality public education to the state's growing ranks of would-be college students.

The eye-popping compensation packages paid by the University of California to its top administrators--even as Sacramento raised fees, cut services and increased class sizes--are the latest sign that the state's higher-education system is in trouble. Last year, according to recent reports, UC quietly… more

Selected reviews of University Inc. are featured below:

American universities are the envy of the world, but they may be on the brink of discarding the very values and practices that have made them so successful, argues journalist Washburn, as secretive connections between private industry and the academy have begun to "undermine the foundation of public trust on which… more

In the fall of 1964 a twenty-one-year-old Berkeley undergraduate named Mario Savio climbed the steps of Sproul Hall and denounced his university for bending over backwards to "serve the need of American industry." Savio, the leader of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, accused the university of functioning as "a factory that turns out a certain product needed by industry" rather than serving as the conscience and a critic of society. To the modern ear this sixties rhetoric may sound outdated.… more