Student Loan Blog : college degree

Down Economy May Be Driving Students to Online Education

Student Loan Girl — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 21:05:00 GMT

As jobs continue to disappear and unemployment soars, large numbers of adult learners may soon be enrolling in online programs, particularly at two-year colleges and for-profit institutions, according to a new online education survey (“Recession May Drive More Adult Students to Take Online Courses,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, Jan. 9, 2009).

These two-year colleges and for-profit institutions, which offer programs tailored to working adults, will likely see the biggest boost in enrollment, but all types of colleges could experience an enrollment surge as more people turn to higher education to gain marketable skills in the recession, revealed the 2008 online education survey by the Sloan Consortium, a non-profit organization working to improve online education.

“A lot of people want to increase their skill levels or get that degree they didn’t have,” said I. Elaine Allen, one of the report’s authors. The threat of losing their job can be as big a motivator for people to get a degree as actually losing their job, Allen told The Chronicle.

She said that the primary motivator for adults turning to online education over a traditional classroom-based education may be one of convenience. “Time-wise, you have the flexibility of logging online and taking the course whenever you want,” Allen said. With Internet -based courses, “you don’t have to leave your house. If you have a family, that’s going to make things much easier for you.”

Over 20 percent of all U.S. students enrolled in higher education were taking at least one online course in the fall of 2007, according to data from the Sloan Consortium. And, The Chronicle suggests, if the recession were to drive more students to take courses online as expected, the percentage of online education students is likely to rise sharply.

Most of that growth will likely come from the two-year and for- profit colleges that have not yet maximized their potential for online enrollment, Allen predicts, while public institutions likely won’t see “huge growth” in Web-based learning. Of all the colleges surveyed, 58 percent said that online courses were critical to their enrollment strategies, and a full 70 percent reported that competition for the growing number of students pursuing an education online is increasing.

Allen said, “For the first time, [schools] are seeing students choose another college for its online program.”

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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.

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Student Loan Providers May Get Government Help for One More Year

Student Loan Girl — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 00:08:00 GMT

With problems in the credit markets continuing to plague student loan providers, the U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved a year-long extension of the Ensuring Continued Access to Student Loans Act, which allows the secretary of education to buy student loans from cash-strapped lenders.

If approved by the Senate, the measure, which Congress originally passed last spring, would extend the education secretary’s loan purchasing power through July 1, 2010 to help ensure that students have access to federal student loans for the 2009–10 academic year. The bill was set to expire July 1, 2009.

The act gives the Department of Education the authority to buy student loans from third-party private lenders in the Federal Family Education Loan Program who have been unable to sell their loans to investors following fallout from the subprime mortgage crisis.

“Our rough economy is already dealing a huge blow to American families and we can’t allow trouble in the credit markets to further price students out of a college degree,” said Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., chairman of the Committee on Education and Labor (“House Moves to Protect Student Loans,” Associated Press, Sept. 15, 2008).

“With market conditions showing no signs of letting up,” Miller added, “it’s only prudent to make sure that students have every assurance that the federal student loans they need will be there next year.”

The measure would also extend the secretary’s authority to advance federal funds to guarantee agencies so those agencies can make loans, if necessary, as a “lender of last resort” for the nation’s colleges and universities.

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