Interest on Student Loans May Double Nearly seven and a half million college students nationwide may see interest rates on their student loans double if Congress does not take action to maintain current rates, President Barack Obama said during a conference call with student journalists on Tuesday. Obama said he believes keeping college affordable is a national economic concern. “I’ve always believed that we should be doing everything we can to help put higher education within reach for every single American student,” he said. “In America, higher education can’t be a luxury.” The interest rate for federally subsidized Stafford loans currently sits at 3.4 percent, thanks to a provision passed by Congress in 2007. However, if Congress does not extend the current low rate, it will spike to 6.8 percent on July 1. Students who take out Stafford loans do not pay interest on their loan while in college and then pay below-market rates after graduation. Harvard Kennedy School Professor Joshua S. —Staff writer Elizabeth S.
4 Ways To Improve School Communication Using Social Media In the past three decades, the presence of technology in the school and classroom has gone from practically nonexistent to being a vital part of the learning experience. As computers and other forms of technology filtered into the classroom, the ability to improve school communication via computer also impacted the way school districts kept parents and staff members informed. The rapid growth of social media offers communication opportunities that are not found so easily by visiting a school district website. Many of these websites, though they’re well-intended, require the visitor to click through several screens to get to the information they desire. Facebook Classroom Page Facebook pages are used for small businesses, celebrity fan clubs, authors and many others who wish to have a place where they can connect with others. Twitter for Reminders Show and Tell with Pinterest Pinterest is a social media venue that caters to those who are visually oriented. Blogging in The Classroom
The education bubble will have to burst A modern knowledge economy thrives on highly trained workers. The way to get them, obviously, is through education — from basic reading skills for some, to mastery of algorithms for others. It thus would seem a basic public good to provide that learning at little or no cost to students, which most advanced countries do. But America has turned post-high-school education into a taxpayer-subsidized business — a business not unlike real estate at the height of the housing bubble. Think Americans owe a bundle on their credit card balances? They have $693 billion on their plastic, while they owe more than $1 trillion on student loans, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Think health costs are out of control? There is clearly a disconnect between Americans' stagnating incomes and the rising costs of educating their children. For example, venture capitalists are putting millions into Coursera, a company that provides online college courses for free.
Beyond Facebook: 5 Tips to Using Social Media in the Classroom | Education with an Edge - Beta testing Guest column by Erik Deutsch It’s not enough for instructors to just talk about social media; they need to make it part of the curriculum. While it didn’t even exist when I was a student, social media is now part of everyday modern life. Its impact is profound. Many instructors seem unwilling, uninterested or ill-equipped to take the plunge. So how should university instructors, including those without much hands-on experience, integrate social media into their lesson plan? 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Erik Deutsch teaches public relations and social media best practices at UCLA Extension. Like this: Like Loading...
1-T Day: As U.S. Student Debt Hits $1 Trillion, Occupy Protests Planned for Campuses Nationwide This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form. NERMEEN SHAIKH: Today marks what activists are calling 1T Day, the day U.S. student debt reaches $1 trillion. A coalition of groups from Occupy Wall Street plan to gather on college campuses and communities around the country to protest record-high college costs and call for an extension of low-interest rates on federally subsidized Stafford loans. The rates were reduced to 3.4 percent in 2007 but will double on July 1st for new loans unless Congress intervenes. As Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney moves closer to becoming the official Republican nominee who will challenge Democratic President Barack Obama in November’s general election, both candidates are concentrating on wooing the youth vote—pointing especially to the issue of student debt. PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: We can’t price the middle class out of a college education, not at a time when most new jobs in America will require more than a high school diploma.
In and Out of the Classroom: Using Social Media in Ways that Matter Because so many students use social media tools – and because so many faculty use the same tools in their personal or professional lives – it can be tempting to bring social media into the classroom almost by default, on the assumption either that social media technologies are needed to engage students or that they will boost student engagement simply by their use. But social media technologies aren’t silver bullets – they are tools that can support efforts to address common pedagogical challenges. Here’s an example. Perennial challenges in traditional (non-immersive) foreign language courses include a) how to best encourage student practice outside the classroom, where students have limited access to conversation in the new language, and b) how to aid students in moving beyond language “exercises” toward conversational fluency while within a classroom environment. In her paper on the subject, Antenos-Conforti documented the results of this pedagogical innovation: In This Issue
Wall Street-Inflated Student Debt Bubble Hits $1 Trillion; Debtors Rally for Relief Photo Credit: Sarah Jaffe April 24, 2012 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. You could call it a bubble, but it's more like a ball and chain. The collective weight of American student debt is now over $1 trillion, and that weight is a drag not just on those paying the debt, but on our entire economy. Around the country, activists are marking the date with actions; in New York, a rally and march will be the centerpiece of what the Occupy Student Debt Campaign has dubbed 1-T day; the day the amount of debt we're carrying to pay for our education officially got too big to bear silently. “I think that we in America have become so separated from one another, partially due to this debt,” Pam Brown, an organizer with the Occupy Student Debt Campaign, told AlterNet. How did we get here, with more student debt than credit card debt, with student loans rising twice as fast as mortgage debt at the height of the housing bubble?
How teachers use social media in the classroom to beef up instruction While plenty of their parents might see using social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and blogs as a leisure time activity, students today know better: These days, those web portals can be some of the best places to find information on the subjects they’re covering in school. In fact, professors have been integrating these tools into their curriculum with positive results. Elizabeth Hilts, an adjunct professor at Fairfield University, is a fan of using a class blog for her freshman and advanced English classes. “I set up class blogs ... these are designed to help students develop their 'writer’s voice' while providing them with an additional outlet for developing their opinions about complex topics in conversation with others,” Hilts says. Dr. Even Pinterest, the photo-sharing creative site, can be a boon for teachers. “Social networking has all the same risks as the traditional online safety risks. Related 21st-century classroom stories on MNN:
V-cs urged to fork out tax savings for fair access The National Union of Students has called on university heads to donate their tax savings to its new programme for student-led outreach. Liam Burns, president of the NUS, said that vice-chancellors should donate the money they are likely to save with the scrapping of the 50p tax rate, announced in last month’s budget by the chancellor, George Osborne. His comments came at the opening of the union's annual national conference, which is being held over the next three days in Sheffield. Mr Burns, who is seeking a second term as NUS president, added that he would also be lobbying big businesses to donate to the scheme, which is aimed at supporting fair access to higher education. “The government has increased fees and cut taxes, so that from next April, the average undergraduate will face thousands more every year in fees, while the average vice chancellor will be paying £3,000 less every year in tax,” Mr Burns said in his opening speech. sarah.cunnane@tsleducation.com
Social Networks For Teachers On The Rise As Popular Social Media Raise Concerns Within the wide expanse of social networking, educators appear to be gravitating to more protected and exclusive spaces. While teachers often use such popular mainstream social networks as Facebook, they are more likely to seek out and return to less-established networks that offer the privacy, peer-to-peer connections, and resource sharing that meets their specific professional needs, according to a recent survey and interviews with educators. "A lot of teachers are on Facebook as general-population consumers," said Jessie Arora, the founder of Teacher Square, an organization that helps teachers share information around educational technology. Educators' use of popular networks like Facebook and Twitter has increased overall, but those sites are often blocked in schools and fraught with ethical concerns because so many students use them. On the surface, educators' social-network membership mirrors that of the general population, the survey shows. 'They Feel Safer' Balancing Act Ms.
Europe privatizes public debt through student loans 25 april 2012 - Replacing government subsidies with student loans is an “effort to transform public debt into private debt,” Greek HE expert Vangelis Tsiligiris argues. Policymakers needed to find macroeconomic answers to respond to massification in higher education and graduate unemployment. The Dutch government is set to switch from publicly financed higher education towards a student loan system. Vangelis Tsiligiris, cross-border expert and Greek College Principal, put this development into a European perspective following up on his recent essay describing how the crisis triggered a new wave of neoliberal HE policies. From debt crisis to identity crisis With the turmoil created by the Eurocrisis, it is becoming ever more evident that higher education is closely associatedwith macroeconomic policymaking which has been severely affected by the on-going global recession. Selective monetarism legitimizes harsh austerity measures Graduate unemployment and degree massification
TodaysMeet