Student Loan Blog : Georgetown University

Bill Gates To Give Low-Income Students $70 Million In Grants

Student Loan Girl — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 00:16:00 GMT

To help ensure that low-income students can afford a college education in the midst of a recession, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is committing nearly $70 million in grants toward its goal of doubling the number of low-income students who earn a college degree or vocational credential by age 26, The New York Times reports (“Gates Grants Aim to Help Low-Income Students Finish College,” Dec. 5, 2008).

Anthony Carnevale, director of the Center on Education and the Workforce at Georgetown University, says the foundation’s latest efforts to assist low-income students couldn’t come at a more opportune time since college-educated employees are more likely to get jobs during a recession. The unemployment rate for people without a college education is generally four times as high as for those with a two- or four-year degree, he says.

Low-income students are already at a disadvantage, graduating from college at only a 25-percent rate. And a majority of the 560,000 high school students in the U.S. who graduate in the top of their class, Carnevale adds, don’t earn a degree within eight years of their high school graduation and come from families that earn less than $85,000 a year.

“We console ourselves that we’re going to be fine in the world because we have this great higher education system and all our kids are going to college,” said Hillary Pennington, who will direct the Gates Foundation’s postsecondary effort. “But [low-income students are] not finishing. That is enormously debilitating for young people.”

Foundation Proposes Far-Reaching Initiative

While the Gates Foundation — the world’s largest philanthropy — has given almost $2 billion to help U.S. high schools make needed improvements over the last eight years and dedicated another $2 billion for minority college scholarships, this is the foundation’s first endeavor into postsecondary education reform and it hopes to gain the support of other groups and organizations.

“The Gates Foundation can’t address the financial burdens by itself, but its focus on what types of programs work best may help spur action by the federal government,” said Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow with the Century Foundation.

If the foundation meets its goal, the number of U.S. college graduates each year would increase by 250,000.

The foundation will dedicate $33.2 million of its $70-million grant initiative to help prepare postsecondary education students to better succeed in college and $13 million in grants to assist the MDRC, a nonprofit education research organization, in expanding its performance-based scholarships for low-income college students.

Share this post: email this | del.icio.us | reddit

New York AG Examines Colleges’ Relationships With Health Insurers

Student Loan Girl — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 23:30:00 GMT

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo is investigating the relationships between colleges and the health insurance companies they do business with just two years after he launched a similar investigation that uncovered conflicts of interest between some colleges and student loan companies, The New York Times reports (“Cuomo Investigating Colleges’ Deals With Health Insurers,” Nov. 17, 2008).

Investigators will focus on determining if schools adequately disclose the policy terms and costs of their school-sponsored health insurance plans to their students, as well as whether or not insurers offer schools a monetary incentive to require that their students buy health insurance through a particular provider.

In an e-mail message, Benjamin Lawsky, special assistant to the attorney general, wrote “We are primarily focused on whether insurance companies are paying schools to push students into health coverage they don’t really need and shouldn’t really want.”

“With students and their families being financially squeezed at every turn,” he added, “colleges must ensure that they are looking out for students’ best interest first and foremost as opposed to their own financial bottom line.”

Cuomo has requested health insurance–related documents from six State University of New York schools — Binghamton, Buffalo State, Oswego, Purchase, Stony Brook, and the University at Buffalo. Investigators have asked to see copies of the schools’ requests for proposals from insurers, insurance contracts, and the information given to students about the health plans available to them, as well as statistics on the health insurance premiums paid by students.

Four institutions, Georgetown University, Columbia University, Cornell University, and Sarah Lawrence College, said they had received subpoenas.

Parents have complained that some schools require students to purchase school-sponsored health insurance, even though the student is already insured under a family health insurance policy, said James Boyle, president of College Parents of America, an association of parents of college students.

Although “the vast majority of college students” are covered under their parent’s health insurance, most campus health centers don’t accept insurance plans that aren’t affiliated with the school, Boyle added.

“Instead,” he said, “some schools force the student, as a condition of enrollment, to purchase health insurance policies offered by the school.”

Share this post: email this | del.icio.us | reddit

College Employees’ Donations to Obama Far Outweigh Contributions to McCain

Student Loan Girl — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 17:38:00 GMT

College employees have given eight times as much money to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign — $12.2 million — as they have to John McCain’s — just over $1.5 million, making it the widest gap in donations by academics in the past five presidential elections, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics.

Obama, who taught constitutional law as a lecturer at the University of Chicago, has received donations from dozens of college presidents, from professors from a variety of liberal arts disciplines, and from faculty members at business, law, and medical schools, reports The Chronicle of Higher Education (“Donors From Academe Favor Obama by a Wide Margin,” Oct. 24, 2008).

A large amount of McCain’s donations from academic sources also came from a handful of college presidents and from faculty members at business, law, and medical schools. McCain also received donations from the head football and basketball coaches at the University of Arizona, a school in his home state.

Among the top 10 academic institutions to make donations to Obama’s campaign were the University of Chicago, Columbia University, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in political science, and Harvard University, where he earned a law degree.

Top 10 Colleges With Donors Giving to Obama Campaign

University of California: $778,000
Harvard University: $496,000
Stanford University: $342,000
University of Chicago: $285,000
Columbia University: $267,000
Northwestern University: $179,000
Georgetown University: $179,000
University of Washington: $165,000
University of Pennsylvania: $162,000
New York University: $158,000

Top 10 Colleges With Donors Giving to McCain Campaign

University of California: $40,000
Harvard University: $39,000
Columbia University: $35,000
University of Texas: $33,000
University of Pennsylvania: $28,000
Northwestern University: $21,000
Stanford University: $19,000
University of Minnesota: $18,000
George Washington University: $17,000
Washington University in St. Louis: $16,000

Share this post: email this | del.icio.us | reddit

Controversial Saudi Prince Funds Islamic Centers Abroad

Student Loan Girl — Tue, 13 May 2008 23:34:00 GMT

Prince Alwaleed bin Talal bin Abdul Aziz Alsaud, a member of Saudi Arabia’s ruling family, has endowed $31 million to Britain’s Cambridge and Edinburgh universities to create research centers devoted to Islamic studies.

The two academic centers will focus on projects designed to encourage understanding between Islamic and Western cultures. The prince has also financed the creation of two centers for American studies in the Arab world, at the American University of Beirut and the The American University in Cairo.

Yasir Suleiman, director of the Centre of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at Cambridge, told The Chronicle of Higher Education the prince’s donation has not yet raised any concerns about each centers' scholarly independence, as the prince’s similar donations to Harvard and Georgetown universities did three years ago (“2 British Universities to Benefit From Saudi Prince’s Gifts,” May 9, 2008).

In 2005, the prince donated $20 million to each Harvard and Georgetown to further the schools’ long-standing traditions of scholarship in Muslim and Arab cultural studies.

At the time, some U.S. lawmakers expressed their concerned that the prince, who completed his undergraduate and graduate degrees in the United States, would attempt to use his donations to exert influence over the academic direction of the centers. But John Esposito, director of Georgetown’s Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, said the prince has been hands off in his endeavor.

The prince has been attempting to foster intercultural dialogue with the United States since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Chronicle reports. However, his $10-million offer to the Twin Towers Orphan Fund — an educational and welfare assistance program for children orphaned after Sept. 11,2001 — was rebuffed after Rudolph Giuliani, then mayor of New York City, learned the prince said the United States’ policies in the Middle East were among the “issues that led to such a criminal attack.”

Share this post: email this | del.icio.us | reddit