The Chronicle of Higher Education

Jason Delisle in The Chronicle of Higher Education | 'Higher-Education Funds in Limbo as Congress Prepares to Head Home'

Communications — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 11:22:00 -0400

New America in the News:
That policy change has made it less appealing for Congress to postpone paying for the Pell Grant program, says Jason Delisle, a former senior analyst on the Republican staff of the Senate Budget Committee who now works for the New America Foundation, a public-policy institute. LINK (subscription required)

How to Encourage Families to Save for College

Articles — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 08:31:00 -0400

This month, as parents of college-age students sign promissory notes for student loans and watch tuition checks diminish their bank accounts, Congress is encouraging all parents to wake up and start planning. While National College Savings Month -- meant to spread awareness about the need to save for higher education -- has a laudable goal, promoting the importance of saving won't do much to help struggling families afford the cost of higher education.

The decline of home prices means that most families can no longer count on equity to finance their children's college costs. That loss, combined with rising food and fuel prices and stagnant wages, makes the idea of… more

Education Program event in the Chronicle of Higher Education | 'Higher Education and the 2008 Candidates'

Communications — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 07:12:00 -0400

New America in the News:

(Chronicle U.)-Sen. John McCain’s chief education adviser, Lisa Graham Keegan, found herself in a tough spot Thursday when asked by the moderator of a New America Foundation forum to lay out the Republican presidential nominee’s agenda for higher education.

“I can’t do that because the Senator hasn’t done that yet,” Ms. Keegan said. “I apologize for the timing.”

“I am going to let him do that when he wants to,” Ms. Keegan said, “and simply say that he has been a long-term supporter and enthusiast about the idea that we have to connect kids in high schools immediately into their postsecondary experience, whatever that’s going to be. That transition is so fragile mostly because we are not doing a good job in the K-12 system.”

It was not like Ms. Keegan had nothing at all to say about education. The forum on John McCain and Barack Obama’s education plans focused mainly on how the two presidential candidates would improve public education from kindergarten through 12th grade, and she had plenty to say about Senator McCain’s plans to try to get more good teachers into schools through alternative certification. LINK to Article

Treatment Options

Ron Tang — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 21:00:00 -0400

In his new book, The Healthcare Fix: Universal Insurance for All Americans (MIT Press, 2007), Laurence J. Kotlikoff demonstrates that at some point between 2035 and 2050, the costs of Medicare and Medicaid (two health-care programs that serve only a minority of the population), combined with the costs of Social Security, will approximate the total current cost of the entire federal government as a percentage of GDP. Medicare and Medicaid, without Social Security, will surpass the current cost of government by 2082. To cover the deepening long-term deficits of those two programs would require raising roughly $70-trillion and putting it… more

New America Foundation in Chronicle of Higher Education | 'President Bush: A Friend of Higher Education After All?'

Communications — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 17:00:00 -0500

New America in the News:
President Bush: A Friend of Higher Education After All? (The Chronicle of Higher Education, subcription only)

... Mr. Bush has, however, given researchers, and their colleagues throughout higher education, something else of value: money. The president has been "highly successful" in winning increases for higher education from Congress, according to an analysis published last month by the New America Foundation, a Washington-based research and advocacy group that is often critical of the Bush administration.

"Congress adopted nearly all of the significant higher-education funding and policy proposals included in the president's budget requests from 2002 through 2008," including increases in Pell Grants and loan-forgiveness programs, the foundation noted. more

The Atlantic Highlights Shannon Brownlee's Ideas on Health Reform

Communications — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 12:15:00 -0500

New America in the News:

In the next eight years, medical schools intend to increase enrollment in order to accommodate the medical needs of aging baby boomers and replace retiring doctors from that generation. But Shannon Brownlee, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, writes that adding more doctors does not necessarily mean better care.

The Association of American Medical Colleges, which advises the federal government on how many medical residents to support, says that the country will be 100,000 doctors short by 2025 unless the average number of medical-school graduates rises. Ms. Brownlee says more than 12 new medical schools are now being constructed or considered, and many existing schools are expanding, with a goal of increasing the number of graduates from 16,000 a year to 21,000 a year.

Some experts are saying, however, that many doctors are choosing their location based on patients' wealth and quality of life. Ms. Brownlee says that doctors are in control of how much care their patients receive and that when there is an influx of doctors in one area, they can still keep their schedules busy, creating unnecessary expenses for the patients and sometimes putting them at risk. This attraction to heavily insured areas makes for shortages in parts of the country where more people lack insurance, such as rural areas.

Ms. Brownlee points to other ways in which too many doctors can have an adverse effect on the quality of care and drive up costs. In hospitals that have a high ratio of specialists to primary-care physicians, for example, having different doctors for the same patient can lead to mishaps such as duplicate tests, unwise prescriptions, and mistaken assumptions about care, she writes. Medical schools are graduating more specialists and fewer primary-care doctors, a trend that she believes could make such problems worse. ...

For the complete article, visit The Chronicle of Higher Education Online, which previewed The Atlantic Monthly article.

New America in The Chronicle of Higher Education on Sallie Mae

Communications — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 07:34:00 -0400

New America in the News:

The student lender Sallie Mae, after trying to force colleges in at least three states to provide it with contact information for potential student borrowers, is backing down.

The company, which is the nation's largest student-loan provider, described the shift in strategy after a Washington-based policy group revealed this month that the lender had filed a New York Freedom of Information Law request asking community colleges in the State University of New York system to provide it with student names, telephone numbers, and mailing and e-mail addresses. ...

The company filed its demands for the information late last month, around the time that President Bush signed legislation cutting more than $20-billion from the subsidies provided to lenders in the federally guaranteed student-loan program.

Sallie Mae said it wanted the student contact data to help it make more students aware of all their low-cost loan options. The company has acknowledged, however, that as a result of the federal subsidy cuts, it expects its future profitability to depend more heavily on its ability to write unsubsidized private loans that are marketed directly to students. ...

Sallie Mae's pursuit of the student data was revealed by the New America Foundation, a Washington-based policy group. The lender, after being asked about the report, issued a written statement saying it was acting in the best interest of students. The company said it wanted to make students aware of their ability to obtain federal grant money, and of the maximum amount of federally guaranteed loans, before they accept higher-cost private loans.

The company sent the freedom-of-information requests "to colleges and universities in states where we have seen a significant increase in deceptive marketing practices and misinformation about student loans," it said in the statement.

"If a school decides to willingly share the nonsensitive information, their students will receive information that reinforces the importance of first exhausting free money and federal loan options before turning to private education loans," the company said.

Such data requests are nevertheless discouraged under new ethics guidelines that the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators has been promoting in the aftermath of the student-loan scandals revealed this year. ...

For the complete article, please visit The Chronicle of Higher Education website.

The Chronicle of Higher Education Quotes Michael Dannenberg

Communications — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 07:48:00 -0400

New America in the News:

Nebraska’s attorney general, Jon Bruning, attacked his counterpart in New York on Tuesday over his investigation of Nelnet, a student-loan company based in Lincoln, Neb.

In an interview with the Omaha World-Herald, Mr. Bruning called the New York attorney general Andrew M. Cuomo’s investigation of Nelnet and other student-loan companies “ridiculous” and “political.” Mr. Cuomo expanded his investigation last week to include alleged improper ties between lenders and 40 athletics departments.

Mr. Bruning has himself come under fire in connection with Nelnet. Higher Ed Watch, a blog run by the New America Foundation, has reported that Mr. Bruning’s outspoken defense of the company comes on the heels of a $9,200 donation by Nelnet’s chief executive officer, Mike Dunlap, to Mr. Bruning’s campaign for the U.S. Senate. (Mr. Bruning received an additional $6,900 from other executives at Nelnet and from the Union Bank & Trust Company, which Mr. Dunlap’s family owns.)

Last month, on the same day Nelnet agreed to pay $2-million and sign a code of conduct to settle the New York investigation, Mr. Bruning relieved the company of its obligation to pay $1-million to Nebraska as part of a separate settlement with the state.

In his interview with the World-Herald, Mr. Bruning called himself “a friend of Nelnet” and said he would “never apologize” for his relationship with it. “Nelnet is an ethical, decent, honest company,” he told the newspaper. “Unless you want to publicly fund campaigns, you are going to have individuals contributing to candidates.”

Michael Dannenberg, director of education policy at the New America Foundation, said in an interview on Wednesday that he was surprised anyone would say Nelnet had done nothing wrong because Margaret Spellings, the education secretary, has agreed that Nelnet’s manipulation of the subsidy floor on 9.5-percent loans was illegal.

“To say this is a company with clean hands is belied by the facts,” he said.

For more on this story, please visit The Chronicle of Higher Education web site.

Chronicle of Higher Ed Quotes Michael Dannenberg on Loan Auction

Communications — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 15:07:00 -0400

New America in the News:

Congress is considering a plan that would require banks and other lenders to compete for the right to make federally guaranteed student loans.

The proposal, which has bipartisan support, would set up government-run "auctions" in which lenders would bid on loans based on the size of the government subsidy they would be willing to accept. Those lenders that agreed to the lowest subsidy rate would "win," earning the right to lend to students in a particular state, region, or subset of institutions for a set number of years.

If enacted, the plan would radically change the way the government sets student-loan subsidies. Subsidies are now set by Congress. Under the auction plan, the marketplace would dictate lenders' profit margins. Supporters say that shift could save the U.S. Treasury billions of dollars, freeing up much-needed money for student aid...

But critics say auctions would allow larger lenders, like Sallie Mae, to increase their dominance of the student-loan market. They argue that larger companies, with their economies of scale, could easily underbid smaller lenders and state-based nonprofit groups, and force them out of business...

Proponents acknowledge that there will most likely be some consolidation in the industry. But they point out that the industry is already highly concentrated, with 1 percent of lenders controlling more than 90 percent of the market.

"The small lenders don't originate a lot of volume, and when they do, they often sell it to the big guys pretty quickly," said Michael Dannenberg, director of education policy for the New American Foundation, a public-policy group that has endorsed the auction idea.

For the complete article, please visit The Chronicle of Higher Education website.

Chronicle of Higher Education Cites Higher Ed Watch

Communications — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 08:28:00 -0400

New America in the News:

The investigation of New York State's attorney general, Andrew M. Cuomo, into the questionable practices of lenders in federal student-loan programs has helped raise public awareness of one of the greatest scams in our government: The Federal Family Education Loan program, otherwise known as the guaranteed-student-loan program, is unnecessarily expensive, structurally broken, and rife with corruption. It is increasingly clear that our convoluted federal student-loan delivery system, through which private lenders provide government-backed loans to students, cannot be fixed by incremental reform. It deserves a swift and timely death.

The recent series of scandals involving student financial-aid administrators and a Department of Education official's acquiring and holding stock from a student lender is merely the latest in a string of problems that have plagued federal student-loan delivery for years. On April 4, the New America Foundation's Higher Ed Watch first reported that it had found that several financial-aid administrators had "significant personal investments in a publicly traded, for-profit student loan company," Student Loan Xpress. It also discovered a potential similar conflict of interest with an official who oversaw lenders participating in the guaranteed-loan program at the Department of Education...

For the complete article, please visit The Chronicle of Higher Education website.