Tag: Higher education

Former Northeastern employee charged in campus bomb hoax

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BOSTON — A former Northeastern University employee who said he was injured when a package he was opening on the Boston campus exploded last month was charged Tuesday with fabricating the incident.

Jason Duhaime, formerly the new technology manager and director of the university’s Immersive Media Lab, was charged with “conveying false and misleading information related to an explosive device” and then lying to federal investigators, federal authorities said.

“This alleged conduct is disturbing to say the least,” U.S. Attorney Rachael Rollins said at a news conference. “Our city, more than most, knows all too well that a report or threat of an explosion is a very serious matter and necessitates an immediate and significant law enforcement response, given the potential devastation that can ensue.”

Duhaime told investigators that the hard plastic case exploded when he opened it on Sept. 13, causing “sharp” objects to fly from the case and injure his arms, but his arms only had superficial marks and there was no damage to his shirt, investigators said.

According to an FBI affidavit, “The inside and outside of the case did not bear any marks, dents, cracks, holes, or other signs that it had been exposed to a forceful or explosive discharge of any type or magnitude.”

The case also contained a rambling typed note full of misspellings and exclamation points that railed against virtual reality, referenced Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and threatened to “destroy” the lab.

“It has come to our attention that this VR lab is trying to change us as a world,” the note said.

The letter also said: “We know you are working with Mr. Mark Zuckerberg and the U.S. government.”

It later said: “We know you are working on a secret flying project to scan buildings across the world so Mark can take over google maps,” and “the robots your (sic) building are walking around NEU, MIT and into Harvard yard.”

The FBI affidavit said the letter was “pristine” and “bore no tears, holes, burn marks, or any other indication that it had been near any sort of forceful or explosive discharge.”

Investigators also discovered a word-for-word, electronic copy of the letter stored in a backup folder on a university computer in Duhaime’s office that had been written just hours before he called 911.

Authorities said they could not comment on the specific motive because of the ongoing investigation.

“In this case, we believe Mr. Duhaime wanted to be the victim but instead victimized his entire community by instilling fear at college campuses in Massachusetts and beyond,” Joseph Bonavolonta, Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s Boston office said.

Duhaime, who lives in Texas, was scheduled to make an initial court appearance Tuesday afternoon in San Antonio.

An attorney for Duhaime did not immediately respond to a telephone message and an email seeking comment. Duhaime has previously denied staging the incident, saying in an interview with The Boston Globe that it was “very traumatic.”

“I did not stage this … No way, shape or form … they need to catch the guy that did this,” he told the newspaper.

Northeastern is a private university with about 16,000 students. The school in a statement Tuesday said Duhaime no longer works there.

The reported explosion led to swarms of police including two bomb squads descending on the school, forced the evacuation of several campus buildings, and put the campus on edge even after reassurances from the school that it was safe.

“His alleged actions diverted significant law enforcement resources away from essential public safety matters and caused fear and panic not only on campus, but also in the homes of the families and friends and loved ones of Northeastern students, faculty and staff,” Rollins said.

It marked one of the first big scares in Boston since 2013, when two bombs planted near the finish line of the Boston Marathon killed three spectators and wounded more than 260 others.

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October 4, 2022
Poll: Many pessimistic about improving standard of living

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NEW YORK — More than half of Americans believe it’s unlikely younger people today will have better lives than their parents, according to a new poll from the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

Most of those polled said that raising a family and owning a home are important to them, but more than half said these goals are harder to achieve compared with their parents’ generation. That was particularly true for younger people — about seven in 10 Americans under 30 think homeownership has become harder to achieve.

About half of those polled also said it’s hard for them to improve their own standards of living, with many citing both economic conditions and structural factors.

Josean Cano, 39, a bus operator in Chicago who is Hispanic, said he’s had a harder time economically than his parents. He mentioned inflation, high housing costs, and the recent baby formula shortage as examples.

“Things have doubled and tripled in price, ” he said. “We’re not talking about gym shoes or concert tickets. We’re talking about essentials. Six months ago, you couldn’t find PediaSure. And if you could find it, it would be $20. It used to be $11 at Target.”

Cano also pointed to the fact that the real purchasing power of the minimum wage was higher for previous generations and that rents and the cost of education were more reasonable.

According to the Economic Policy Institute, the federal minimum wage in 2021 was worth 34% less than in 1968, when its purchasing power peaked.

“Many people perceive their options are less than what they had in the past,” said University of Chicago professor Steven Durlauf, who studies inequality and helped construct the study. “A lot of sense of well-being has to do with relative status, not absolute status.”

The study also showed marked partisan disagreements over whether structural factors contribute to social mobility.

Democrats were more likely than Republicans to say that factors such as parents’ wealth, the community one lives in, college education, race and ethnicity, and gender greatly affect one’s social mobility. Black and Hispanic adults were also more likely than white adults to say a college education, race and ethnicity, and gender are very important factors.

Acacia Barraza, 35, who lives in Las Lunas, New Mexico and works as an employee services coordinator, said she was more optimistic about social mobility for Hispanic Americans before the election of former President Donald Trump. Barraza is Hispanic and Native American.

“Before, I would have thought we had made progress,” she said. “That we’d be able to have more and be more. But we’re battling the same battles our parents did. Trump brought it back to the forefront.”

Barraza said that student debt, which she and her husband both have, has made raising a family and working towards buying a house more difficult.

According to Department of Education data, average student loan debt has increased for all generations, reaching record highs. Of adults under 30 who have a bachelor’s degree or higher, 49% have student loan debt. Federal borrowers 24 and younger owe an average of $14,434, those aged 25 to 34 owe an average debt of $33,570, and those aged 35 to 49 owe an average federal debt of $43,208.

Mark Claffey, 52, who is disabled, white, and lives in Logan, Ohio, said that “everything costs more” now than it did for his parents’ generation.

“Back then you could make something on a limited budget,” he said. “You could do more with less. Bread cost less than a dollar.”

Now, Claffey says he and his wife find themselves squeezed at the end of the month on their fixed income budgets. He also thinks the country is more divided and polarized along partisan lines than in previous eras.

Compared with younger people, Americans aged 60 or older are more likely to believe it’s easier for them to achieve a good standard of living compared with their parents, the poll found.

Only 35% of adults over 60 said it is “much or somewhat harder” to achieve a good standard of living, compared with 54% of adults aged 18-29.

The poll also found that Black Americans have a more positive outlook on upward mobility for future generations than white Americans.

Poll respondent Glen McDaniel, 70, who is Black and works as a medical laboratory scientist in Atlanta, said he has “a certain amount of optimism” about the prospect of future generations having a better standard of living because he “knows for a fact it’s possible, not something you read in a book.”

“I’ve seen a lot of history through these eyes,” he said. “There were times when even someone looking like me going to college didn’t seem possible. We would have to think, going on vacation — would people who look like us be safe, or would we be harassed? It’s incredible to think that was during my lifetime.”

McDaniel said his mother started college, but dropped out, and that he went to the University of Toronto. He said seeing technological advances also contributes to his feeling that future generations may make gains.

McDaniel added that his optimism is “a little constrained by the political climate right now.”

“There’s still a climate of people coming out from under rocks motivated by their worst fears,” he said. “It’s not as blatant as when I was a kid. But it’s still part of the American ethos.”

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The poll of 1,014 adults was conducted Aug. 25-29 using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 4.3 percentage points.

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Follow AP’s coverage of financial wellness at https://apnews.com/hub/financial-wellness

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The Associated Press receives support from Charles Schwab Foundation for educational and explanatory reporting to improve financial literacy. The independent foundation is separate from Charles Schwab and Co. Inc. The AP is solely responsible for its journalism.

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October 4, 2022
Instruction about race may be under siege across the US, but this course is empowering students at a Southern high school | CNN

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Washington
CNN
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In the early 2000s, when I was a student at Ridge View High School, in Columbia, South Carolina, I loved to parse the legacies of certain historical figures: W.E.B. Du Bois, in AP US History; Malcolm X, in AP English Language and Composition.

At the same time, I wanted more. Too often, Advanced Placement curricula seemed to give attention to just a handful of Black heavyweights and, as a result, neglect the countless ways Black Americans have shaped US society. Only rarely were Black students like me reflected in lessons. (I remember learning about “A Raisin in the Sun,” Lorraine Hansberry’s jewel of a play about a Black family in south Chicago, from my mom and wondering, Why aren’t we studying this in school?)

But things are beginning to change. Ridge View is one of about 60 high schools across the country piloting AP African American Studies in 2022. The interdisciplinary course will be the newest addition to the College Board’s panoply of AP offerings and delve into the history of the African continent and Black contributions to music, literature, science, politics and mathematics, among other fields. Mere weeks into the pilot course, students and faculty at Ridge View already see AP African American Studies as something of a salve. The course arrives at a moment when instruction about race is under siege: Educational gag orders abound, and “critical race theory” has become a lightning rod for the right.

Given the meager representation I observed as a high school student, I was stunned – and thrilled – to learn that Ridge View, which is majority Black, is piloting AP African American Studies. It would’ve been so welcome, I thought, to see myself in this context, to probe questions of identity and inheritance.

Plus, it’s no small thing to test out the course in South Carolina, which didn’t banish the Confederate battle flag from statehouse grounds until 2015, in the heartrending aftermath of a White supremacist massacre.

The significance of the moment isn’t lost on Ridge View students.

“It really makes me happy to be in this class – to know that I’m a part of history,” Nacala McDaniels, a senior, told CNN.

In August, the Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., one of the architects of the AP African American Studies curriculum, stressed the course’s educational value.

“Nothing is more dramatic than having the College Board launch an AP course in a field – that signifies ultimate acceptance and ultimate academic legitimacy,” he told Time magazine. “It is a mainstream, rigorously vetted, academic approach to a vibrant field of study, one-half a century old in the American academy, and much older, of course, in historically Black colleges and universities.”

Like so many in the Ridge View community, McDaniels wants AP African American Studies to help not only other Black students but all students become well-versed in under-told histories and cultures and incubate meaningful discussions about race.

“I hope that the course will be offered to other people who look like me and to other people who just want to learn about history that’s been covered up and history that’s been ignored,” she said. “And I hope that the course makes room for more conversation. Lots of people are scared to talk about race, but with more conversation comes better understanding.”

High schools had been hungry for an AP African American Studies course for years. However, when the College Board asked universities about a decade ago if they’d give credit for a corresponding exam, they said no.

But the uprisings of 2020 caused a long-overdue shift.

“The events surrounding George Floyd and the increased awareness and attention paid toward issues of inequity and unfairness and brutality directed toward African Americans caused me to wonder, ‘Would colleges be more receptive to an AP course in this discipline than they were 10 years ago?’” Trevor Packer, who heads the College Board’s AP program, told Time.

Yes, was the answer.

Maybe the most exciting thing about teaching AP African American Studies is the fact that educators get to talk about people, subjects and slices of history students don’t know much about, according to Daniel Soderstrom, who leads the course at Ridge View.

“Over the past few decades, we, as a society, have done a better job of teaching Black history and African American Studies. But I’d argue that many teachers still fall short,” he told CNN. “What I mean is that our kids hear the same stories every year. And that’s not to diminish the contributions of Rosa Parks or Martin Luther King Jr. But if those are the only people our students are learning about in school, they’re missing a lot of what’s really there.”

The first part of the course examines early African kingdoms and some of their foundational figures, including Queen Nzinga of Ndongo, located in present-day Angola.

“She was a very strong woman – a heroine – and fought on the front lines with her soldiers,” Soderstrom said of Nzinga, celebrated for pushing back against Portuguese colonization and the trade of enslaved people in Central Africa in the 16th and 17th centuries. “But we tend to skip the stories of people from Africa.”

So far, the lessons appear to be resonating with the kids.

“I didn’t even know that there were any queens in Africa in any time period. Like, at all,” Ashton Walker, a junior, told CNN. “We got to learn about Queen Nzinga and Idia. They’re both very interesting because they were powerful women leaders who did amazing things for their kingdoms.”

Walker, who’s White, sees AP African American Studies as a means toward visibility for her Black peers, who get to be participants in their history.

“It matters that we get to learn all these things as a society. We don’t ever really get to hear about any of these figures or what they went through,” she said. “And my (Black) classmates deserve to hear this history. It’s awesome that Ridge View is a majority-Black school and gets to help create this course.”

Her mother, Nicole Walker, who was involved in bringing the pilot course to Ridge View and is the director of the school’s Scholars Academy Magnet for Business and Law (she also was my 9th grade English teacher), echoed some of these sentiments.

“We know that what’s best for kids is for them to see themselves reflected in the curriculum, for them to celebrate their cultures, for them to feel valued,” she told CNN. “We know that a kid who feels safe and valued is going to do better in school.”

Jacynth Tucker, a senior, is intimately familiar with the power of inclusivity. She said that at a previous school, she and other Black students felt invisible.

“I can’t even remember a time when we really explored Africa – talked about the history and the culture,” she told CNN. “Being in a class where that’s more of a focus is very special to me.”

Further, the course gives Black Americans more dimension, per Clementine Jordan, a senior.

“One activity I really liked was when our teacher showed us a collage and asked, ‘What do all these people have in common?’” she told CNN. “Their commonality was that they’re all Black. But the point of that discussion was that, yes, they’re all Black, but there’s so much diversity within the Black community, within my community: diverse religions, gender expressions, sexualities, things like that.”

Crucially, Soderstrom noted that AP African American Studies isn’t a standard-issue history course, though it proceeds in a relatively chronological fashion and will eventually make its way to the US.

“We’re studying Black excellence and African American success through art, through literature, through culture, through dance, through mathematics, through science, through lawyering,” he said. “It’s interesting that one day we’re looking at an art piece, the next day we’re listening to music, the next day we’re reading a poem and then the day after that we’re listening to a mathematician speak.”

In other words, while the course charts struggles – including the mid-century civil rights movement – it also underscores Black excellence in a variety of disciplines.

It’s pretty much impossible to separate the debut of the AP African American Studies pilot course from the Republican-led racial panic looming over many schools.

According to an August analysis by PEN America, a literary and free expression organization, legislators in 36 states have introduced 137 laws this year restricting discussions about race, US history and gender in K-12 schools and higher education. This figure is a 250% increase over 2021.

And last month, the American Library Association predicted that the number of attempts this year to censor books in K-12 schools, universities and public libraries grappling with race, gender and sexuality will exceed 2021’s record count. The ALA tallied 681 attempts between January 1 and August 31; the 2021 total was 729.

These attacks seek to determine what content is and isn’t legitimate in an academic context; they’re part of a much broader counter-mobilization against efforts to topple racial and social hierarchies.

“We’re not seeing different political conflicts. We’re seeing one big political conflict – one big reactionary political project,” as Thomas Zimmer, a visiting professor at Georgetown University, where his research focuses on the history of democracy and its discontents, told CNN in July.

Yet Soderstrom minced no words: AP African American Studies is a vital course, regardless of anyone’s political affiliation.

“Henry Louis Gates Jr. is one of the senior minds when we’re talking about American studies and African American history. He was quoted recently explaining that the course isn’t political,” Soderstrom said. “We’re teaching factual information, and everything is verifiable.”

Lylou, a sophomore, shared this conviction.

“I’m a White person, and I wanted to take this class because I don’t know that much about Black history,” she told CNN. “The course should be in the curriculum. Because why would we want to ignore this history?”

(Lylou’s mother asked that her daughter’s last name not be included, given the intense political climate hovering over lessons about race in the US.)

The pilot course is expected to expand to include additional high schools next year and then be available to all interested schools the following year, per the College Board.

Ridge View kids, for their part, seem eager to see how the rest of the year unfolds.

“The class is a learning opportunity for everybody. I take every interaction I have with anybody as a learning experience,” McDaniels said.

Then, mirroring the same fundamental curiosity I had as a high school student nearly two decades ago, she added, “I’m just excited to see what’s next.”

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October 2, 2022
Ole Miss honors James Meredith 60 years after integration

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JACKSON, Miss. — The University of Mississippi is paying tribute to 89-year-old James Meredith 60 years after white protesters erupted into violence as he became the first Black student to enroll in what was then a bastion of Deep South segregation.

As it has done on other 10-year anniversaries of integration, the university is hosting celebrations and academic events. On Saturday, Meredith is being honored during the Ole Miss-Kentucky game, two days after he attended the Rebels’ practice to speak to players.

“He came and revolutionized our thinking. He came to open our closed society,” Donald Cole, who retired in 2018 as the university’s assistant provost and head of multicultural affairs, said during a celebration Wednesday night.

The enigmatic Meredith, who lives in Jackson, has long resisted the label of civil rights leader, as if civil rights are separate from other human rights. He says his effort to enter Ole Miss was his own battle to conquer white supremacy.

Meredith being honored at the Ole Miss-Kentucky game is an ironic echo of history.

Two days before Meredith enrolled on the Oxford campus in 1962, race-baiting Gov. Ross Barnett worked a white crowd into a frenzy at a stadium in Jackson. Ole Miss fans waved Confederate flags to support their Rebels over the Kentucky Wildcats — and to defy any move toward racial integration.

“I love Mississippi,” Barnett declared. “I love her people! Our customs! I love and I respect our heritage!”

The next evening, Barnett quietly reached an agreement with U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy to let Meredith enter Mississippi’s oldest public university. Meredith already had a federal court order.

White mobs of students and outsiders erupted when he arrived on the leafy campus with the protection of more than 500 federal law enforcement officers. The attorney general’s brother, President John F. Kennedy, deployed National Guard troops to quell the violence, and Meredith enrolled on Oct. 1.

During the event Wednesday at the university, Meredith told an audience: “In my opinion, this is the best day I ever lived. But there’s some more truth. Celebration is good. I don’t think there’s anybody in this house or in the state of Mississippi that think the problem has been solved.”

Meredith has said for the past several years that he’s on a mission from God, to persuade people to abide by the Ten Commandments. He said Wednesday that he sees a special role for Black women to lead the way in restoring moral order to American society.

“There’s nothing in Mississippi that God, Jesus Christ and the Black woman cannot fix,” Meredith said.

Meredith grew up in segregated Mississippi before finishing high school in Florida. He served in the Air Force and attended Jackson State College, a historically Black school in the state capital, before suing to gain admission to Ole Miss.

A resident and a French journalist were killed in the violence as Meredith enrolled. More than 200 officers and soldiers were wounded and 200 people were arrested.

Federal marshals provided Meredith with round-the-clock protection until he graduated with a political science degree in 1963. Meredith said Wednesday that most of his knowledge about what was happening on campus came from the marshals.

“Most of them were scared to death of the Mississippi people with rifles and shotguns,” he said.

U.S. Marshals Service Director Ronald L. Davis named Meredith an honorary deputy marshal during the ceremony Wednesday. Davis, who is Black, said Meredith brought widespread change to American society.

“You chose a path that was not traveled — one with much resistance, one with fear and threats and violence, and you went there anyway,” Davis said.

The University of Mississippi had about 21,850 students on all of its campuses in the 2021 fall semester, with about 12.7% Black enrollment. About 38% of Mississippi residents are Black.

Ethel Scurlock, the first Black dean of the university’s honors college, said during the keynote speech Wednesday that she had not yet been born when Meredith integrated Ole Miss in 1962 or when he was shot soon after setting out on his March Against Fear in 1966.

“But Mr. Meredith, I am here today,” Scurlock said. “I am the unborn baby that you were willing to go to war for.”

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October 1, 2022
Interstride Research Shows International Students Want More Information and Support During the Admissions Process
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Press Release
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Sep 28, 2022
SAN FRANCISCO, September 28, 2022 (Newswire.com)
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Many international students applying to study in the United States want more complete information from colleges and universities on financing, employment opportunities, and career outcomes.

This fact was a key finding from research published by Interstride, a technology platform that helps universities and colleges attract and retain international students at over 150 U.S. higher-ed institutions. The survey received responses from 467 international students from 77 countries.

International applicants face unique challenges during the admissions process, especially when choosing the right institution, financing their education, and navigating the immigration landscape. While applicants largely rely on university websites and rankings for support, many are unsatisfied with the information, which would have influenced their choice of institution.

Most U.S. colleges reported increasing numbers of international student applicants for the coming academic year, recovering from COVID despite the overall decline in international enrollment.

“We know that international students face unique challenges as students and new graduates,” Interstride CEO Nitin Agrawal said. “We wanted to know what international students’ admissions experience is like, what can be improved, and how we can help admissions teams better engage them during this crucial time.”

Agrawal said that admissions teams must focus on supporting and engaging prospective international students. Recommendations include:
- Understand the challenges international students face and proactively offer guidance throughout the process.
- Leverage students’ reliance on university websites by making them more interactive and informative.
- Better facilitate conversations and connections between students and the university’s international community.
Interstride embarked on the research to learn more about international students’ admissions experience, as it is launching a new portal for admissions teams to support international students. Interstride for Admissions will launch in the fall of 2022, which allows admissions teams to engage prospects by connecting them with existing students, offering personalized content, and showing metrics on student engagement.

Read the research here and learn more about Interstride for Admissions here.

About Interstride

Interstride is one of the fastest-growing higher education technology platforms in the U.S. Interstride helps universities and colleges attract and retain international students. Interstride’s end-to-end admissions and career platform for higher-ed institutions guides and empowers international students in their education, career, and immigration journey.

Source: Interstride
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September 28, 2022
Concept3D Acquires Localist to Deliver Elevated Online Experiences for Universities
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The virtual experience software company expands presence in the higher ed space by adding campus event platform to its suite of solutions

Press Release
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Sep 20, 2022
DENVER, September 20, 2022 (Newswire.com)
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Today, Concept3D, the leader in location-driven virtual experiences, announced the acquisition of Localist, the leading event calendar platform for higher education communities. With the platform integration, universities will have the ability to create an elevated, university-branded experience for student events, interactive mapping, virtual tours, and more within one, centralized platform.

“Localist and Concept3D have a shared belief that events and in-person connections are key to building community, ultimately making a student experience better the first day they step onto campus,” said Gordon Boyes, CEO of Concept3D. “By bringing our solutions together, combining people, community, and location, users can easily connect, driving engagement and fostering togetherness.”

Finding success through long-term partnering, the acquisition is a natural progression for both companies. The combined platforms give university administrators the reassurance of a secure, compliant service, while giving the end user a branded, holistic experience. Currently, Concept3D serves over 70% of the top 100 schools in the nation with nearly 1,000 active customer implementations.

“In our time working together, we developed a close relationship with Concept3D,” said Mykel Nahorniak, CEO of Localist. “Combining forces was a no-brainer – it was a natural fit across the board.”

“As leaders, Mykel and I built companies focused on gold standard solutions, living to our team values, and an obsession with the customer,” adds Boyes. “By combining services, our customers will increase their event capabilities. We are excited to help create deeper communities with our clients and expand the types of customers who benefit from our platform.”

Concept3D’s expanded portfolio of software solutions helps institutions create powerful online experiences with interactive media, virtual reality, events and maps. Concept3D can bring any physical location into an intuitive and navigable digital format. Some of Concept3D’s solutions include:
- Event creation, coordination, registration, ticketing, and promotion
- Interactive Maps & Wayfinding
- 360 Degree Tours & Hotspots
- Robust CMS, Dedicated Client Success & Creative services
As part of this next stage of Concept3D’s growth, the company has partnered with Level Structured Capital, an affiliated fund of Level Equity, a New York private investment firm focused on providing capital to software companies.

“We are excited to partner with Concept3D, Gordon, and Mykal to provide capital for this acquisition as the company enters its next phase of growth,” said Barry Osherow, Partner at Level Equity.

To learn more about Concept3D, visit www.concept3D.com

About Concept3D

Concept3D provides market-leading software solutions for location-driven virtual experiences that engage audiences and centralize events into one fully-branded calendar. Serving the higher education community for over 15 years, Concept3D is used by over 70% of the top 100 universities. Concept3D allows administrators to bring their campus to life with visually stunning experiences that improve campus communications, recruitment, and navigation while engaging current and potential students. Concept3D clients include more than 600 universities and colleges, live events, destinations, and sporting venues. Learn more at https://www.concept3D.com.

Source: Concept3D
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September 20, 2022
What the Student-Loan Debate Overlooks

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A core conservative critique of President Joe Biden’s executive action on student-debt forgiveness is that the plan requires blue-collar Americans to subsidize privileged children idly contemplating gender studies or critical race theory at fancy private colleges.

That idea, articulated by Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, among others, aims to portray the GOP as the party of working Americans and Democrats as the champions of the smug, well-educated elite. But it fundamentally misrepresents who’s attending college now, where they are enrolled, and the reasons so many young people are graduating with unsustainable debt.

Read: A Democratic economist’s case against Biden’s student-loan plan

Many factors have contributed to the explosion in student debt, but one dynamic is almost always overlooked: the erosion of the commitment to affordable public higher education as an engine for upward mobility that benefits the entire community.

Contrary to the stereotype conjured by critics, the number of debtors from public colleges today (about 22 million) exceeds the number from private and for-profit colleges combined (about 21 million), according to federal data. One reason so many of those students from public schools are in debt is that they have graduated in an era when states have shifted more of the burden for funding higher education from taxpayers to students—precisely as more of those students are minorities reared in families on the short side of the nation’s enormous racial wealth gap.

Biden’s plan, despite its imperfections, recognizes that this massive cost shift is crushing too many young people as they enter adulthood. It is also a belated reaffirmation that society benefits from helping more young people obtain degrees that will allow them to reach the middle class.

Public colleges and universities are the principal arena in which the debt and affordability crisis will be won or lost because—again, contrary to popular perception—the majority of postsecondary students (about four in five) attend public, not private, institutions.

When Baby Boomers were in college, few seemed to question whether society benefited from helping more young people earn their diploma at an affordable price. States provided public colleges enough taxpayer dollars to keep tuition to a minimum. In the 1963–64 academic year, around the time the first Boomers stepped onto campuses, the average annual tuition for four-year public colleges was $243, according to federal statistics. Tuition at those public schools was still only about $500 to $600 a year by the time most of the last Baby Boomers had started college, in the mid-1970s. (Adjusting for inflation, prices grew at a modest rate while Boomers matriculated, rising only from about $2,100 in constant 2021 dollars when the first ones started to about $2,600 when the last ones did.) The renowned University of California and City University of New York systems didn’t even charge any tuition until the mid-’70s.

Read: What it takes to get into New York City’s best public colleges

Dowell Myers, a demographer at the University of Southern California, told me that the generous mid-century funding for public higher education drew on the legacy of the GI Bill after World War II and the post-Sputnik investments in education and research, each of which had broad political support. “The attitude was ‘We should invest in young people,’” he said. “It was just an ethic.” Also important, he noted: “The young people they were thinking about were young white kids primarily.”

But for racially diverse Millennials and Generation Z students, the experience has been quite different. By 1999, the year the first Millennials entered campuses, the average annual cost for a four-year public college or university, measured in inflation-adjusted dollars, had doubled since the mid-’70s to more than $5,200. By the time the last Millennials (generally defined as those born between 1981 and 1996) entered college in the 2014 academic year, the cost had soared by another 80 percent to roughly $9,500 a year. So far, the average annual tuition cost has stayed at about that elevated level as the first members of Generation Z (born between 1997 and 2014) have started their studies.

As these numbers show, tuition at four-year public universities increased more than three times as fast while Millennials attended than it did over the span when most Baby Boomers did. The failure of colleges to control their costs explains part of this disparity. But it’s also a political decision at the state level. “The trend of having students and their families pay more for their college today is absolutely linked to the state disinvestment in higher education,” Michele Siqueiros, the president of the California-based Campaign for College Opportunity, told me.

Public colleges and universities relied on tuition and fees for only about one-fifth of their total educational revenue in 1980, the first year for which these figures are available, with state tax dollars providing most of the rest. Today the share funded by tuition has more than doubled, according to analysis by the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association. Even that figure is somewhat misleading, because it includes community colleges, which don’t rely as much on tuition. In four-year public colleges and universities, tuition now provides a 52 percent majority of all educational revenues nationwide. Even with some recent increases in state contributions, 31 states now rely on tuition for a majority of four-year public-college revenues, the executives’ association found.

Even as those costs have increased, Pell Grants, the principal form of federal aid for low-income students, have failed to keep pace. In 2000, Pell Grants covered 99 percent of the average costs of in-state tuition and fees at public colleges, according to research by the College Board. Today, the grants fund only 60 percent of those costs—and only half that much of the total bill when room and board are added on.

This historic shift in funding has occurred as college campuses have grown more racially diverse. As recently as the late 1990s, white kids still constituted 70 percent of all high-school graduates, according to the federal National Center for Education Statistics. But NCES estimates that students of color became a majority of high-school graduates for the first time in the school year that ended this June. Their share of future graduates will rise to nearly three-fifths by the end of this decade, the NCES forecasts. That stream of future high-school grads will further diversify the overall student body in postsecondary institutions—especially in public colleges and universities, where kids of color already constitute a slight majority of those attending, according to figures provided to me by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. (Most private-college students, especially on the campuses considered most elite, are still white.)

The inevitable result of less taxpayer help has been more debt for public-school graduates. Even in the ’90s, only about one-third of public-college graduates finished with debt, federal figures show. But today a daunting 55 percent of public-college graduates leave with debt, not much less than the share of students who finish with debt at private schools (somewhere around 60 percent, depending on the data source). What’s more, the average undergraduate debt held by students from public colleges isn’t much less than that held by those who attended private campuses. In effect, as USC’s Myers noted, because states generally are prohibited from borrowing to fund higher education (or anything else) by their constitutions, “they pushed the borrowing onto the individual families.”

This shift has hurt families of all types, but it’s been especially difficult for the growing number of Black and Latino postsecondary students. Those families have far less wealth than white families to draw on to fund college. That increases pressure on kids of color to borrow—and to support other family members after they graduate, reducing their capacity to pay down their debts. To compound the problem, as the Georgetown Center has repeatedly documented, Black and Latino students are heavily tracked into the least selective two- and four-year public colleges, which have the smallest budgets and produce the weakest outcomes, both in terms of graduation rates and future earnings. White kids, the center calculates, still constitute three-fifths of the total student body at the better-funded, more exclusive “flagship” public universities, with Black and Latino students together representing only one-fifth. “The money is going to where the affluent and preponderantly white students are, and the money is not going to where the minority and less advantaged students are, which exacerbates the dropout crisis,” Anthony Carnevale, the center’s director, told me.

The Republican attacks on Biden’s loan-forgiveness plan are aimed at convincing the GOP base of older white voters, especially those without a college education, that diverse younger Americans constitute a threat to them. Yet compared with the taxpayer investments in the first decades after World War II (in everything from education to housing to roads) that helped so many of those Baby Boomers live better lives than their parents, Biden’s plan represents only a modest effort. Older generations of college students didn’t have as much debt not because they were more individually virtuous but because they benefited from a collective social investment in their education. Many of those arguing against debt forgiveness, Siqueiros told me, seem to be conveniently forgetting all of the ways the government provided “benefits to Baby Boomers.”

The irony is that it’s in Boomers’ self-interest to reduce the debt burden on younger students. As they age into retirement, Boomers are relying on younger generations to bear the payroll taxes that sustain Social Security and Medicare. I’ve called these two giant cohorts the brown and the gray, and though our politics doesn’t often acknowledge it, there is no financial security for the gray without more economic opportunity for the brown.

Derek Thomson: Why the old elite spends so much time at work

The debt-forgiveness program, which White House officials pointedly insisted to me was a “onetime” deal, is only the first of many steps needed to equip those younger generations to succeed. The college-debt crisis will simply repeat itself if Washington and the states don’t pursue other policies to undo the burden shift toward students—such as the free-community-college program, more generous Pell Grants, and crackdown on predatory for-profit colleges that Biden has proposed.

It’s reasonable to question whether Biden’s debt plan could have been targeted more precisely or tweaked in myriad different ways. But the plan got one very big thing right: All Americans will benefit if our society provides today’s diverse younger generations with anything approaching the investments we made in the Baby Boomers more than half a century ago.

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Ronald Brownstein

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September 9, 2022
Biden’s Cancellation of Billions in Debt Won’t Solve the Larger Problem

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For years, American lawmakers have chipped away at the fringes of reforming the student-loan system. They’ve flirted with it in doomed bills that would have reauthorized the Higher Education Act—which is typically renewed every five to 10 years but has not received an update since 2008. Meanwhile, the U.S. government’s student-debt portfolio has steadily grown to more than $1.5 trillion.

Today, calls for relief were answered when President Joe Biden announced that his administration would be canceling up to $10,000 in student loans for those with federal debt, and up to $20,000 for Pell Grant recipients. As long as a borrower makes less than $125,000 a year, or makes less than $250,000 alongside a spouse, they would be eligible for cancellation. The president will also extend the current loan-repayment pause—originally enacted by then-President Donald Trump in March 2020 as a pandemic-relief measure—until December 31.

The debt relief—which by one estimate could cost a total of $300 billion—is a massive benefit for Americans who have struggled to repay loans they accrued attending college, whether they completed a degree or not. But equally as important as addressing the damage that student loans have caused is ensuring that Americans aren’t saddled with overwhelming debt again. And the underlying issue of college affordability can be addressed only if America once again views higher education as a public good. Belatedly canceling some student debt is what a country does when it refuses to support students up front.

According to a White House fact sheet, 90 percent of Biden’s debt relief will go to those who earn less than $75,000 a year—and the administration estimates that 20 million people will have their debt completely canceled. “An entire generation is now saddled with unsustainable debt in exchange for an attempt, at least, for a college degree,” Biden said at a White House event. “The burden is so heavy that even if you graduate, you may not have access to the middle-class life that the college degree once provided.” That Democrats arrived at this point at all, though, is a testament to how grim the student-loan crisis has become. A decade and a half ago, Democrats were advocating for small increases in the federal grant program to help low-income students afford college. Over successive presidential campaigns, Democratic hopefuls, including Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, have called for canceling most, or all, student debt issued by the government—effectively hitting reset on a broken system. And now the party is announcing one of the largest federal investments in higher education in recent memory.

Read: How the Democrats got radical on student debt

When he was running for president in 2007, Biden advocated for a tax credit for college students and a marginal increase in the size of individual Pell Grant awards—tinkering around the edges of solving a brewing mess as America lurched toward a deep recession. From 2006 to 2011, college enrollment grew by 3 million, according to the U.S. Census Bureau; at the same time, states began to cut back on their higher-education spending. On average, by 2018, states were spending 13 percent less per student than they were in 2008.

Historically, when states look to cut their budgets, higher education is one of the first sectors to feel the blade. Polling shows that the majority of Americans agree that a college degree pays off. But college, unlike K–12 schooling, is not universal, and a majority of Republicans believe that investment in higher education benefits graduates more than anyone else. So lawmakers have been willing to make students shoulder a greater share of the burden. But this shift leaves those with the fewest resources to pay for college—and those whose families earn a little too much to qualify for Pell Grants—taking on significant debt.

The shift flies in the face of the Framers’ view of higher education, though. “There is nothing which can better deserve your patronage than the promotion of science and literature,” George Washington, an early proponent of the idea of a national university, said in his first address before Congress, in 1790. “Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.” Washington, James Madison, Benjamin Rush, and others believed that colleges might be a place where Americans could build a national identity—a place where they could, for lack of better words, become good citizens.

In that spirit, the federal government provided massive investments in the nation’s colleges, albeit inequitably—through the Morrill Act, which formed the backbone of state higher-education systems as we know them; the GI Bill; and the Pell Grant program—which directly subsidize students’ expenses. But in the past half century, radical investments in higher-education access have dried up. Now a political divide has opened up: Conservative lawmakers—whose voters are more likely not to have attended college—have grown not only suspicious of but in some cases openly hostile toward the enterprise.

Read: America is divided by education

Meanwhile, 77 percent of Democrats believe that the government should subsidize college education. “We want our young people to realize that they can have a good future,” Senator Chuck Schumer said in April. “One of the best, very best, top-of-the-list ways to do it is by canceling student debt.” He wanted the president to be ambitious and called for giving borrowers $50,000 in relief—“even going higher after that.” A month into his administration, though, Biden shot down the idea of $50,000, to the chagrin of relief advocates. “Canceling just $10,000 of debt is like pouring a bucket of ice water on a forest fire,” the NAACP’s Derrick Johnson and Wisdom Cole argued today. “It hardly achieves anything—only making a mere dent in the problem.”

The administration is coupling its announcement with a redesign of payment plans that allows borrowers to cap their monthly loan payments at 5 percent of their discretionary income. But the basic problem remains: Young Americans of modest means can no longer afford to attend their state university by getting a part-time job and taking out a small loan. For millions of students, borrowing thousands of dollars has become the key to paying for an undergraduate degree. Biden’s plan will give graduates—and those who have taken out loans but not finished school—some relief, but the need to overhaul a system reliant on debt remains as urgent as ever.

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Adam Harris

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August 24, 2022
AVID Products Releases New USB Audio Solution for Higher Learning

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UNIVERSAL AND ACCESSIBLE SOLUTION FOR ALL LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS, EGAMING, PODCASTS AND MORE

Press Release
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Aug 19, 2022

MIDDLETOWN, R.I., August 19, 2022 (Newswire.com)
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AVID Products, the only adaptive learning company that creates and advocates for mindful, innovative, and accessible solutions for learners of all kinds, is officially announcing the release of the AE-79 USB headset as part of their universal 70 Series and suite of audio solutions designed for the lifelong learning journey that also includes the 20, 30 and 50 Series. Recently hosting an edWebinar on the importance of active listening, AVID continually brings award-winning audio devices to students, educators and more, along with for impact programs and partnerships such as their simple and free audio recycle program. Making a difference now and for future generations.

Empowering the audio listening experience

Answering the demand for a reliable and accessible USB headset for high school, college and adult listeners, the AE-79 is built with all the features for enhanced focus, clear communication, and prolonged comfort. It’s ideal for a variety of listening environments and situations such as online learning, testing and assessments, video calls, podcasting, eGaming, voiceover and more.

Noise-reducing earpieces with deluxe comfort padding minimize outside noise and distractions, while a noise-canceling, ultra-flexible boom arm microphone ensures perfect positioning for a clear result when speaking and is perfect for speech-to-text voice recognition software. Ample padding on the adjustable headband lends comfort, as well as the larger ear cups that surround the ear help filter out ambient noise. The larger speaker size housed within the ear cups enhances deep bass tones and highs for a clean, natural sound. The USB connection provides compatibility with a very wide range of devices and comes with in-line volume controls. In addition to the durable and feature-laden design, the AE-79 delivers on safety with California Prop 65, CPSIA SOR, RoHS, TPCH / EU 94/62 compliances and comes with a convenient soft carrying case to keep your investment safe when traveling.

The AE-79 USB headset shines where focus, clear communication and all-day comfort are top priorities. High school and college students, as well as remote workers and gamers, or anyone who needs to hear clearly and speak without interruption, will find the AE-79 meets all their needs and is an ideal tool for empowering the audio experience.

Connect with a team member from AVID Products toll-free at 888.575.AVID or visit avidproducts.com.

Established in 1953, AVID Products is a 100% employee-owned audio company committed to empowering your learning journey through mindful, innovative, and accessible audio solutions. With nearly 70 years of experience in the audio industry, AVID continues to develop award-winning, innovative solutions for learning to tele-health to travel, that keep us moving, growing, and connected.

AVID Sales Contact for Education: Doug Welles, Director of Sales & Business Development, dwelles@avidproducts.com

AVID PR Contact: Emil Belisle, Director of Marketing Communications, ebelisle@avidproducts.com

Source: AVID Products

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August 19, 2022
New Medical and Dental Students Immerse Themselves in El Paso’s Culture While Honing Clinical Spanish Skills

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Press Release
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Aug 16, 2022

EL PASO, Texas, August 16, 2022 (Newswire.com)
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Two hundred first-year Foster School of Medicine and Hunt School of Dental Medicine students experienced a “poverty simulation” as part of an educational workshop at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center El Paso.

The simulation involved several role-playing scenarios, including visiting a pawn shop to sell personal property for grocery money and going to a payday loan provider to survive until the next paycheck. The experience helped students better understand what the 18.8% of El Pasoans living in poverty face nearly every day. As one might expect, poverty is a major obstacle to routine health and dental care.

The simulation is an innovative addition this year to the Society, Community, and the Individual (SCI) course TTUHSC El Paso medical and dental students take in July informally known as “immersion.” Students at the schools begin their academic journey with an immersion in the unique lifestyle, culture and language of the El Paso-Juárez Borderplex community. Nearly 40% of Hunt School of Dental Medicine students and 20% of Foster School of Medicine students hail from El Paso or West Texas counties with cultures similar to the Borderplex.

The immersion courses – SCI and Conversational/Clinical Spanish – are the first medical and dental students complete before studying medicine and dentistry in August during “Year One” at TTUHSC El Paso.

Immersion has been part of curriculum since the medical school opened in 2009. The Hunt School of Dental Medicine adopted immersion into its curriculum, and its inaugural class completed the courses in summer 2021.

Salma Elwazeer, B.D.S., M.D.S., M.P.H., assistant professor of public health at the Hunt School of Dental Medicine and director of the dental component of SCI, pushed to integrate poverty simulation into immersion.

“We’re helping students understand the realities of poverty,” Dr. Elwazeer said. “They experience the hardships of low-income families and their day-to-day challenges while interacting with community agencies. Understanding those challenges promotes poverty awareness, transforms students’ perspectives and their unconscious biases toward disadvantaged populations, and inspires their roles as future health care providers to be the local change in the health care field.”

Immersion professors hope students will better understand barriers many underserved patients face in accessing health care, including lack of transportation that causes them to miss appointments, low incomes that prevent early treatment, and language barriers that can be obstacles to communication and self-advocacy.

During immersion, students also hit the road to assess the social, health and infrastructure needs of the community.

They visited area neighborhoods, unincorporated communities (colonias), and regional towns and cities, including Canutillo, Clint, Fabens, Horizon City, Montana Vista, San Elizario, Socorro, and Sunland Park and Chaparral, New Mexico, to speak to residents and community leaders about their community’s health care needs.

First-year medical student Jessica Hoffman from Dallas, Texas, was assigned to visit Chaparral, New Mexico, where she interviewed community health care workers and a health clinic employee.

“It’s the best way to understand how to be a compassionate and culturally aware health care provider,” Hoffman said. “Through this experience, I interacted with a medically underserved local community. It’s important to understand their needs so as health care providers, we can expand access and quality care for these residents.”

Organizers said working on Spanish language skills is the other beneficial aspect of immersion.

Research shows that patients with limited English proficiency greatly benefit from bilingual health care providers and are more likely to understand diagnosis and treatment and adhere to medication and routine care.

TTUHSC El Paso is the only health sciences center on the U.S.- Mexico border and serves 108 counties in West Texas that have been historically underserved. It is the only health sciences center on the U.S.-Mexico border designated as a Title V Hispanic-Serving Institution, preparing the next generation of health care heroes, 48% of whom identify as Hispanic and are often first-generation college students.

Media Contact:

Marty Otero at maotero@ttuhsc.edu or 915-215-6017

Source: Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center El Paso

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August 16, 2022
Free 5-Day Virtual College Prep-A-Thon Featuring Workshops and Mentorship Led by Top-Tier University Admissions, Graduates, and Students

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An Innovative Approach to Empower Underserved Students, Hosted by First Gen Support

Press Release
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Jul 26, 2022

CHICAGO, July 26, 2022 (Newswire.com)
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Higher education is more important to financial stability now more than ever as the bachelor’s degree (BA) now accounts for 56 percent of all good jobs, according to the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. However, students from underserved communities are not being afforded the same college preparation opportunities as their affluent peers as they face systemic barriers to college readiness, including lack of institutional support and adequate resources.

First Gen Support (FGS), a student-led 501(c)(3) nonprofit funded through a grant by Cornell University, is dedicated to empowering first-generation, low-income, and immigrant (FGLI) students to successfully navigate high school and achieve college readiness. Set to launch its first annual College Prep-A-Thon Aug. 2-6, 2022, FGS has made this prep-a-thon unique in its interactive experience by combining elements of past FGS mentorship programs and last year’s college fair. Students will have the chance to learn from speakers and mentors from college prep programs and top universities such as UPenn, Stanford, Harvard, and Cornell. The FGS College Prep-A-Thon seeks to foster a supportive and competitive environment filled with incentives to ensure students finish daily challenges for college readiness. This event is open to all high school students for free. More information can be found here at this link.

Featuring 30+ college mentors, 10+ speakers, and 400+ signups, FGS is looking for 1,000+ student signups, 50+ college students as mentors, and donors/sponsors to sponsor prizes and the future operations of FGS.

As a first-generation immigrant, FGS founder Julia Sun (Cornell ’25) found that college preparation opportunities were not built equal, especially for lower-income and first-generation students. Inspired by the Black Lives Matters movement, she witnessed the socio-economic inequities and realized the staggering challenges that encompass finding college preparation resources, especially for students whose parents did not go to college. Julia gathered passionate changemakers across the nation to empower under-resourced students to know that college is accessible. To learn more about how FGS began, click here.

First Gen Support is a volunteer-run 501(c)(3) organization with multiple advisors from top universities. Are you a rising college student? Do you have experience in higher education as a low-income, first-gen or immigrant student? Are you interested in partnering with First Gen Support to bring resources to underserved students? Or are you simply a student who wants to learn more about applying to colleges? If the answer is yes to any of these questions, learn more at this link.

First Gen Support relies on donations to get the word out, fund programming and connect with more students. Please visit the FGS website for more information.

For more information on First Gen Support or visuals regarding the event, please contact Cyntia Roig at cyntia@firstgensupport.org or 786-295-7246.

Source: First Gen Support

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July 26, 2022
Publication Academy Receives Contract to Provide Publishing Training for Global Good Fund Fellows
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Press Release
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Jul 13, 2022
RESTON, Va., July 13, 2022 (Newswire.com)
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Publication Academy is excited to announce its new contract to provide best-in-class online training for Fellows of the Global Good Fund, a nonprofit social enterprise that identifies high-potential business leaders who stand to achieve greater social impact with executive mentorship, professional coaching, and capital. Global Good Fund Fellows will receive access to their choice of Publication Academy’s over 50 video-based On Demand courses on publishing peer-reviewed research, grant writing, and technical communication. Each Publication Academy course has been carefully designed to meet evidence-based best practices in eLearning, resulting in programs proven to significantly increase scholarly productivity across professions, cultural backgrounds, and business verticals. Fellows will benefit from being taught by world-renowned publishing experts from prominent institutions including Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, UPenn, NASA, the Smithsonian, PBS, and the Discovery Channel.

“We are delighted to partner with Publication Academy because of its ongoing and empirically supported efforts to help entrepreneurs grow their high-impact businesses through increased brand awareness as well as building the scholarly credibility of their products or services,” stated Danielle Kroo, Vice President of Operations for the Global Good Fund. Dr. Jay P. Singh, CEO & Founder of Publication Academy, said, “We are honored to have been selected by the Global Good Fund to upskill its outstanding fellows and support their mission of using entrepreneurship to solve key social issues.”

The benefits of business professionals enrolling in Publication Academy’s programs are supported by the latest market research, which has found:
1. Academic publications increase a company’s market value beyond the effects of R&D or patents alone through enhancing human capital and sending credible signals to the market.
2. Academic publications are one of the largest predictors of receiving grant funding from foundations and government agencies.
3. Academic publications in English-language journals are a signal that a company’s assets are of higher value than assets published in non-English-language journals.
Source: Publication Academy Inc.
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July 13, 2022
Republican-controlled states target college students’ voting power ahead of high-stakes 2024 elections | CNN Politics

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CNN
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Republican-controlled legislatures around the country have moved to erect new barriers to voting for high school and college students in what state lawmakers describe as an effort to clamp down on potential voter fraud. Critics call it a blatant attempt to suppress the youth vote as young people increasingly bolster Democratic candidates and liberal causes at the ballot box.

As turnout among young voters grows, new proposals that change photo ID requirements or impose other limits have emerged.

Laws enacted in Idaho this year, for instance, prohibit the use of student IDs to register to vote or cast ballots. A new law in Ohio, in effect for the first time in Tuesday’s primary elections, requires voters to present government-authorized photo ID at the polls, but student IDs are not included. Identification issued by universities has not traditionally been accepted to vote in the Buckeye State, but the new law eliminates the use of utility bills, bank statements and other documents that students have used before.

A proposal in Texas would eliminate all campus polling places in the state. Meanwhile, officials in Montana – where Democrat Jon Tester is seeking a fourth term in one of 2024’s highest-profile Senate contests – have appealed a court decision striking down additional document requirements for those using student IDs to vote.

And voting rights advocates say a longstanding statute in Georgia, which bars the use of student IDs from private universities, has made it more difficult for students at several schools – including Spelman and Morehouse, storied HBCUs in Atlanta – to participate in Georgia’s competitive US Senate and presidential elections.

“Republican legislatures … are pretty transparently trying to keep left-leaning groups from voting,” said Charlotte Hill, interim director of the Democracy Policy Initiative at UC-Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy. Rather than trying to sway young voters, lawmakers seem willing “to shrink the eligible electorate,” she added.

Proponents say the changes are needed to protect against voter fraud and shore up public confidence in elections – battered by widespread, and false, claims of a stolen presidency in 2020. And they contend that the forms of identification provided by secondary schools and colleges vary too widely to serve as a reliable way to establish a voter’s identity and residency.

“They are issued by colleges, universities, public and private high schools, and some have address and pictures, while some do not,” Idaho state Sen. Scott Herndon, a Republican and one of the sponsors of the new law, said in an email to CNN.

During a legislative hearing earlier this year, Herndon said his goal was straightforward: “Make sure that people who are voting at the polls are who they say they are.”

The efforts to clamp down on student IDs and campus voting come against a backdrop of gains for Democrats among this demographic group. Exit polls analyzed by the Brookings Institution found that people ages 18 to 29 – especially young women – made a pronounced shift toward Democrats in last year’s midterm elections, helping to blunt an expected “red wave” for Republicans.

And voter registration among 18-24 year-olds increased in several states last year over 2018 levels – including Kansas and Michigan, where voters decided on ballot measures on abortion, following the US Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, according to data from Tufts University’s nonpartisan Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, or CIRCLE. CIRCLE conducts research into youth civic engagement.

An analysis by The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel found that voting on college campuses soared in last month’s election for a state Supreme Court seat in Wisconsin. In that contest, the liberal candidate who prevailed, Janet Protasiewicz, had made protecting abortion rights a central feature of her campaign.

Among the voting wards in the city of Eau Claire, for instance, the highest turnout came from the ward that served several University of Wisconsin dorms – with nearly 900 votes cast, up from 150 in a Supreme Court race four years earlier, the paper found. Protasiewicz won 87% of those votes.

Prominent conservatives have spotlighted these voting trends.

“Young voters are the issue,” Scott Walker, Wisconsin’s former Republican governor, wrote in a widely noticed Twitter post following the state Supreme Court election. “It comes from years of radical indoctrination – on campus, in school, with social media, & throughout culture,” said Walker, who is president of Young America’s Foundation, which works to popularize conservative ideas among young people. “We have to counter it or conservatives will never win battleground states again.”

In an interview with CNN this week, Walker said his group is not seeking to change the ground rules for voting among younger Americans. But, he said, conservatives have been “overlooking ways to communicate to young people sooner than a month or two before the election.”

One longtime GOP lawyer has discussed ways to curtail youth voting.

The Washington Post, citing a PowerPoint presentation along with an audio recording of portions of the presentation obtained by liberal journalist Lauren Windsor, reported that GOP lawyer Cleta Mitchell recently urged Republicans to limit campus voting during a private gathering of Republican National Committee donors.

Mitchell, who tried to help former President Donald Trump overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia, did not respond to a CNN interview request through a spokesperson for her current organization.

In Idaho, notably, the number of young people ages 18 and 19 registered to vote soared 81% between the week of the midterm elections in November 2018 and the same time period in November 2022 – the highest gain in the nation – according to data collected by CIRCLE.

One of the new laws in the state, which will take effect in January, drops student IDs from the list of accepted identification to vote. Now only these forms of ID can be used: a driver’s license or ID issued by the state’s transportation department, a US passport or identification with a photo issued by the US government, tribal identification or a permit to carry a concealed weapon.

Student IDs had been accepted for voting for more than a decade in the state.

State Rep. Tina Lambert, who authored the House version of the bill, declined a CNN interview request, citing a busy schedule.

But she said in an email that students should be able to navigate the new law. “Students of voting age are smart and able,” Lambert wrote. “They are able to get the ID needed to vote. Most of them have IDs already, that they use for all the other things that they need legal ID for.”

The law also has the support of Idaho Republican Secretary of State Phil McGrane, who told legislators this year that the change would help “maintain confidence in our elections” – although he said that he doesn’t know of any “instances of students trying to commit voter fraud.”

He also noted that student identification was rarely used. Just 104 of the nearly 600,000 voters who cast ballots in Idaho’s general election last year did so using student ID, McGrane said.

“Even if one person out there can only use a student ID to vote, that still matters. That’s still a vote,” said Saumya Sarin, a freshman at the College of Idaho in Caldwell, Idaho, and a volunteer with Babe Vote, a nonpartisan group that has worked to boost youth voter registration in the state. She testified against the proposal in the state legislature earlier this year.

Sarlin, who turns 19 this week, said she presented a US passport last year when she voted for the first time, but she noted that she had “several friends off the top of my head” who don’t have the forms of identification now required in Idaho.

“I think the direction that the youth are going with their vote scares the people who are currently in power a little bit because it works against them,” she said.

Sarlin said she’s become active on voting issues to take a stand against state policies she opposes, including Idaho’s limits on gender-affirming medical care for transgender youth and abortions. Idaho has a near-total ban on abortions and last month made it a crime to help a pregnant minor obtain an abortion in another state without parental consent.

Babe Vote and the League of Women Voters of Idaho have filed a lawsuit in an effort to block the Idaho voter ID laws. The measures “were not driven by any legitimate or credible concerns about the ‘integrity’ of the state’s elections,” the groups argue in their civil complaint. “Instead, they are part of a broader effort to roll back voting rights, particularly for young voters by weaponizing imaginary threats to election integrity.”

A separate lawsuit, brought by March for Our Lives Idaho and the Idaho Alliance for Retired Americans, in federal court also seeks to block the new laws.

Not all proposals to restrict student voting have been successful to date.

A bill introduced in February by GOP state Rep. Carrie Isaac in Texas to prohibit polling places on college campuses has not yet made it out of committee. Another Isaac bill would ban voting on K-12 campuses.

She told CNN this week that the measures are needed because polling places are sites of raw emotions and high stress, and she doesn’t want that kind of environment in schools.

“I don’t think it’s smart to invite people that would not otherwise have business on campus on our campuses,” Isaac said. “In Texas, we have two weeks of early voting that people are coming in, that would not otherwise be there. And I think we should do anything and everything to make our campuses as safe as possible.”

She said she’s confident that college students can find ways to vote off-campus.

In Georgia, a state that will be a key battleground in the 2024 White House contest, student IDs are accepted as a form of voter identification, but only if they are issued by public colleges in the state. Seven out of the 10 Historically Black Colleges and Universities Georgia are private, making it more difficult for students who attend those universities to cast their ballots, voting rights advocates say.

Former state Sen. Cecil Staton, a Republican who sponsored the 2006 photo ID law, said the government can ensure consistent standards for student IDs at state schools. “We didn’t feel like we had that same ability with private schools,” he said.

Aylon Gipson – a Morehouse student from Alabama and a fellow with the voting rights group Campus Vote Project – said he has a lot of friends who have had problems at the polls as a result of Georgia’s law, especially underclassmen who don’t have a driver’s license.

“I’ve seen specific instances where students will call me and say, ‘Hey, I tried to go in and vote, but I got turned around at this polling station,’ or specifically our on-campus polling station, because they didn’t have an ID or they didn’t have a valid license to be able to vote with,” Gipson said. “I think it’s disenfranchising students who attend these HBCUs simply because of the fact that we’re private.”

And in Ohio, which will see a hotly contested US Senate race next year as Democrat Sherrod Brown seeks reelection in a state where the GOP controls the legislature and governor’s office, Tuesday’s primary election marks the first election with the new photo ID rules in place. Voting rights advocates say the new restrictions could spell problems for students who have moved to Ohio for college and are no longer allowed to provide dormitory, utility bills or other documents to establish their legal residency when voting.

Getting the form of ID now required in Ohio, such as a state driver’s license, will invalidate identification students may possess from their home state.

“It seems as if this specific group – out-of-state college students, who have every right to vote – have been targeted and singled out,” said Collin Marozzi, deputy policy director of the ACLU of Ohio.

Legislators, he said, are sending a “poor signal to these college students: ‘We want your money for our colleges. We want your money for our economy. But we don’t really want you to have a voice in the future of this state.’ “

Students in Ohio still can opt to vote absentee by mail if they don’t want to surrender their identification from the state where they used to live – provided they include the last four digits of their Social Security number on the application. (The law establishing new photo ID requirements also reduces the window to request and return absentee ballots.)

“For that college student, they make a decision: Am I a voter in Ohio or, say, in Pennsylvania?” said Rob Nichols, a spokesman for Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Republican. “If you want to hang on to your Pennsylvania license, you can do so, vote absentee, give the last four digits of your Social, and you are on your merry way.”

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April 12, 2021
Republican governors call for withdrawal of proposed Title IX rule changes around transgender student athletes | CNN Politics

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CNN
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A group of 25 Republican governors called on the Biden administration Friday to withdraw or delay recently proposed rule changes to Title IX that could prevent states from enforcing anti-transgender sports bans.

As several bills that aim to ban transgender students from participating on sports teams consistent with their gender identity make their way through GOP-led state legislatures across the country, the governors argued in a letter sent to Education Secretary Miguel Cardona that such bans ensure fairness.

Led by Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves, the group – including the governors of Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia and Wyoming – slammed the administration’s proposal as “a blatant overreach.”

In April, the Biden administration proposed a new federal rule change for Title IX that would prohibit policies that “categorically” ban transgender students from participating on sports teams consistent with their gender. However, according to a public notice from the department, the proposal would allow schools to enforce some restrictions in “competitive” environments.

“Leaving aside the Department’s utter lack of authority to promulgate such a regulation, neither states nor schools should be subjected to such a fluid and uncertain standard,” the governors said in the letter. “Nor, most importantly, should the historic advancements and achievements of our sisters, mothers, and daughters be erased.”

The governors went on to argue that the proposed changes create confusion for states and schools and claimed that the government was threatening to withhold federal funds to coerce schools to comply with a “completely subjective standard that is based on a highly politicized gender ideology.”

CNN has reached out to the Department of Education for comment.

Seventeen of the states signed onto the letter have enacted such bans with a few facing legal challenges, according to the Movement Advancement Project, a nonprofit think tank that advocates for issues including LGBTQ rights. This week, Missouri lawmakers passed a bill prohibiting students from competing in gendered athletic competitions that do not match their biological sex as listed on a birth certificate or government record, and the governor is expected to sign the measure.

Proponents of such limitations in sports have argued that transgender women have a physical advantage over cisgender women and allowing them to compete would be unfair. However, a 2017 report in the journal Sports Medicine found “no direct or consistent research” on any such advantage.

When the proposed rule changes were announced, advocates celebrated the new protections but called on the administration to eliminate the exemptions.

“Every student deserves to be treated with dignity and respect. This includes transgender girls of all ages and in all sports, without exception,” said Kelley Robinson, president of the Human Rights Campaign, the largest LGBTQ advocacy group.

“The new rule should be clarified to ensure that all transgender students should be presumed eligible to participate in sports consistent with their gender identity,” Robinson added in a statement at the time. “This moment we’re in is truly a crisis for transgender young people – and we’re calling on elected leaders at every level of government to fight harder for our kids.”

Democratic governors of several states whose legislatures have pushed anti-trans sports bans were not listed among the letter’s signers, including from North Carolina, Kansas and Kentucky. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, more than 470 anti-LGBTQ bills have been introduced nationwide this legislative session.

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April 12, 2021
TikTok banned from school-owned devices at all Florida state universities | CNN Business

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New York
CNN
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The State University System of Florida Board of Governors has banned the social media app TikTok, along with some other software, applications, and developers, from use on university-owned devices “due to the continued and increasing landscape of cyber threats.”

In a memo sent to state university system presidents on Wednesday, Chancellor Ray Rodrigues said, “This regulation requires institutions to remove technologies published in the State University System (SUS) Prohibited Technologies List from any university-owned device and to block network traffic associated with these technologies.”

The ban is effective immediately, the memo said.

“Data privacy, particularly concerning student data and faculty research, is a critical priority for the State University System of Florida,” the Board of Governors said in a statement to CNN.

“Therefore, at a March 29 meeting of the Florida Board of Governors, the Board unanimously approved an emergency regulation prohibiting the use of TikTok and other foreign actors identified as an immediate national security risk, across our 12 public university campuses,” according to the Board of Governors.

In addition to TikTok, the prohibited technologies include Kaspersky, VKontakte, Tencent QQ, WeChat and any subsidiary or affiliate.

CNN reached out to them for comment.

TikTok spokesperson Hilary McQuaide said “TikTok has taken unprecedented actions to address national security concerns by securing U.S. user data on U.S. soil. The best way to address concerns about national security is with the transparent, U.S.-based protection of U.S. user data and systems, with robust third-party monitoring, vetting, and verification, which we are already implementing.”

McQuaide added “TikTok is enjoyed by more than 150 million Americans including university and college students and teachers to engage in the classroom.”

Bans and regulations of TikTok in particular, and of social media sites in general, have been increasing in the US and Europe as concerns over privacy, national security and child safety mount.

Late last month, the governor of Utah signed a bill which requires teens to get parental approval to use social media. Earlier this week, the United Kingdom’s Information Commissioner’s Office, which regulates data, fined TikTok for a number of breaches of data protection law. Italy is investigating TikTok for “dangerous content.”

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April 12, 2021
Why there won’t be a backlash against the Supreme Court this time | CNN Politics

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CNN
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The Supreme Court handed down several key rulings this past week that dismayed liberals. Chief among them was the court’s decision to disallow colleges and universities from using race or ethnicity as a specific factor in admissions. The court also found that President Joe Biden’s student debt forgiveness plan was unconstitutional and that a Colorado web designer could refuse to create websites that celebrate same-sex weddings over religious objections.

Unlike last year, when the Supreme Court greatly upset liberals by overturning Roe v. Wade, this year’s big rulings by the justices are unlikely to spark a major backlash from the public at large.

This is well reflected in the public polling. Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that legalized abortion nationwide, had become massively popular.

Right before the decision to overturn Roe leaked in May 2022, a Fox News poll found that 63% of registered voters were opposed to such a move while 27% supported it. An ABC News/Washington Post poll put the split at 54% wanting the court to uphold Roe and 28% wanting the decision overturned.

This majority of Americans who wanted abortion to be legal nationally have maintained their stance since the Supreme Court officially struck down Roe in June 2022. Since that time, abortion supporters have won every related measure placed on the ballot across the country – from deep-blue states like California to ruby-red ones like Kentucky.

California is an important state to note because voters there faced a 2020 ballot measure to consider the use of race, sex or ethnicity in government institutions (such as education). A clear majority, 57%, voted against allowing state and local entities to consider such factors in public education, employment and contracting decisions.

When a state that voted for Biden by nearly 30 points is against affirmative action, it shouldn’t be surprising that the nation as a whole is.

A Pew Research Center poll released last month found that 50% of Americans disapproved of certain colleges and universities taking race and ethnicity into account in admissions decisions to increase diversity. Only 33% approved of the practice.

This Pew poll is no outlier. An ABC News/Ipsos poll conducted after the court decided its case showed that 52% of Americans approved of the decision, while 32% were opposed.

Some polling before the ruling had shown even more opposition: 70% of Americans in a recent CBS News/YouGov survey indicated that the Supreme Court should not allow colleges to consider race and ethnicity in admissions.

But perhaps what’s most interesting isn’t how many people are for or against considering race in college admissions. Rather, it’s how many people simply didn’t care enough to pay close attention to the affirmative action case before the Supreme Court.

When explicitly given the option, a majority (55%) said in a May Marquette University Law School poll that they hadn’t heard enough to form an opinion about the case. (Those who had heard enough were against allowing colleges to use race in admissions.)

This is quite different from March 2022, when just 30% of Americans hadn’t heard enough to form an opinion about the court potentially overturning Roe v. Wade, when asked the same question by Marquette but about the abortion case. (A plurality of those who had heard enough didn’t want the court to overturn Roe.)

It’s hard for an issue to galvanize voters when they aren’t paying attention to it.

The same holds true for Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan that the court blocked. A USA Today/Ipsos poll from April indicated that 52% of Americans were familiar with the case and a mere 16% were very familiar with it. (Those who had student loans were more familiar at 71%, though that’s a fairly low percentage for something that could affect them directly.)

Possibly because of that low familiarity, the percentage of Americans who favor or oppose canceling certain student debt differs greatly depending on how the question is worded. When Marquette didn’t mention Biden or the government specifically in its May poll, a majority (63%) said they favored forgiveness of up to $20,000. It was a much lower 47% in the Ipsos poll.

Surveys that did identify the proposal as Biden’s plan tend to be in the same ballpark, with a split public and a sizable percentage unsure.

The ABC News/Ipsos poll showed that 45% approved of the court striking down Biden’s student debt plan, with 40% disapproving. About a sixth (16%) of the public was undecided.

This jibes with polling before the court’s decision was announced. An NBC News poll from last year showed that 43% said Biden’s plan was a good idea compared with 44%, who said it was a bad idea. Just over 10% had no opinion.

The USA Today/Ipsos survey found that 43% of Americans wanted the Supreme Court to allow the government’s student loan forgiveness plan to move forward, while 40% did not. Another 17% had no opinion.

(I should point out that those with student debt were more likely to want government forgiveness in all these surveys, though about 80% of Americans don’t have student loan debt.)

The public was similarly split about the court ruling in favor of the Colorado web designer who refuses to make wedding websites for same-sex couples over religious objections. According to the ABC News/Ipsos poll, 43% of Americans agreed with the court’s decision, 42% disagreed and 14% were undecided.

There was limited polling on this case before the ruling, though none of it indicated massive opposition. A majority (60%) in a Pew poll that specifically mentioned “wedding websites” and “same-sex marriages” indicated they believed business owners should be allowed to refuse services if it violated their religious or personal beliefs.

The polling on Roe v. Wade didn’t look anything like this last year. There were no close splits in opinion. People were consistently against overturning Roe, and they cared a lot about it. This led to a historically strong performance for the party in the White House during the 2022 midterm elections and a major backlash against the Supreme Court.

The current polling on affirmative action in college admissions, Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan and allowing people to opt out of certain services to married LGBTQ couples if they believe it goes against their religion suggests that court’s opinions on those issues aren’t likely to have a similar impact.

This story has been updated with additional information.

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April 12, 2021
2024 GOP candidates race to meet donor and polling thresholds to make August debate stage | CNN Politics

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CNN
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Donald Trump hasn’t yet committed to the first Republican presidential primary debate in August – but some of the former president’s most vocal critics within the party’s 2024 field are still working to qualify for the stage.

The race to meet the 40,000 unique donors threshold set by the Republican National Committee as a minimum to qualify for the first debate – in addition to polling requirements and a commitment to support the eventual GOP nominee – is unfolding ahead of a showdown that could be the best chance for lower-polling candidates to break out from the pack seeking to stop Trump from winning a third straight presidential nomination.

The threshold, which also requires at least 200 unique contributors from 20 or more states and territories, is a test of candidates’ ability to appeal to grassroots donors across a broad swath of the United States.

Several candidates and their aides say they have already met that donor threshold, including Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, former United Nations ambassador and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy.

Lesser-known candidates are trying zany, rule-bending approaches to up their donation totals. North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum is swapping $20 gift cards for $1 campaign contributions. Miami Mayor Francis Suarez’s super PAC is offering entries to a free college tuition sweepstakes in exchange for contributions to his campaign.

But the biggest question ahead of the August 23 showdown on Fox News is whether some of Trump’s foremost critics – including former Vice President Mike Pence, former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson and former Texas Rep. Will Hurd – will qualify for the stage.

Though they have raised substantial sums before, and Burgum has vast personal wealth to spend on the race, some candidates lack the small-dollar conservative base of donors that candidates like Trump and DeSantis have cultivated. And late entrances by Pence and Burgum further complicate their paths to the debate, which is being held in Milwaukee.

Pence, in a Tuesday interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on “The Source,” indicated that he has not yet met the donor threshold.

“You bet we’ll be on that debate stage. We’re working every day to get to that threshold,” Pence said. “I’m sure we’re going to be there.”

However, the paltry second-quarter fundraising haul of $1.2 million that Pence’s campaign announced Friday underscored just how far the former vice president has to go to catch his top rivals.

Pence – who often jokes on the campaign trail that he has already debated Trump many times in private – said he is hopeful his former ticket mate decides to take the stage.

“I intend to be on that debate stage in late August, and I look forward to squaring off,” Pence said.

Hutchinson said Friday on “CNN This Morning” that he has not yet reached 40,000 donors but believes he will eventually hit that mark.

“It’s just a question of how quickly we can get there, but we want to be on that debate stage,” he said.

The former Arkansas governor has been among the most vocal critics of the RNC’s debate qualification rules, pushing back for weeks against the minimum donor threshold.

Hutchinson said Friday that some of the inventive gambits by his fellow candidates to attract the requisite donors “illustrate how silly this whole concept is. They’re telling campaigns you’ve got to reach these limits to make sure you get 40,000 donors. You can do that by your rhetoric and getting people fired up, you can do that by gimmicks, and so we’re going to have to do what we need to do to get there.”

Hurd does not appear yet to have met the minimum donor threshold. “Will fully intends on meeting the donor and polling thresholds,” a campaign aide said Wednesday.

Burgum, a wealthy former software executive, is offering $20 so-called “Biden economic relief cards” in the form of Visa or Mastercard gift cards to 50,000 donors who give at least $1. One solicitation Tuesday described it as a “better deal than anything you are seeing during Amazon Prime Day.”

Burgum’s campaign on Friday announced an $11.7 million fundraising haul in the second quarter, but $10.2 miliion of that candidate’s own money.

Perry Johnson, the little-known Michigan businessman, was at one point selling “I stand with Tucker” T-shirts backing the fired Fox News opinion host for $1.

A super PAC backing Suarez on Thursday launched what it called “Francis Free College Tuition” – soliciting $1 contributions that would go to the candidate’s campaign to enter a sweepstakes that would offer the winner a year of paid college tuition up to $15,000.

Suarez, unlike many other GOP candidates still racing to meet the donor threshold to qualify for the debate, has backed the RNC’s rules.

“I do think there should a minimum criteria because time is valuable,” Suarez said Wednesday on “CNN This Morning.” “I think the Republican Party has tried to set a relatively low bar, and they’ve tried to create a diverse candidate pool so that people have options.”

Ramaswamy’s campaign has said he already met the donor threshold – but his campaign recently launched a program to pay grassroots fundraisers 10% of the money they raise.

Whether Christie would meet the donor threshold was a major question but one he seemed to settle on Wednesday night.

“I am glad to be able to tell people tonight, Anderson, that last night we went past 40,000 unique donors in just 35 days,” Christie told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on “AC360.”

Scott’s campaign on Wednesday also announced it had surpassed the 40,000 donor threshold, along with a $6.1 million second quarter fundraising haul. Scott, a prolific fundraiser as a Senate candidate, was widely considered a virtual lock to reach that minimum donor threshold.

Another key benchmark to qualify for the debate stage is polling. Candidates must reach at least 1% in three national polls, or at least two national polls and two polls from separate early-voting states – Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina or Nevada.

The RNC set criteria to determine which polls meet its standards to qualify toward the debate. The first poll to meet those RNC standards, a national survey by Morning Consult, found that Trump, DeSantis, Scott, Haley, Ramaswamy, Pence, Christie and Hutchinson had all reached the 1% minimum to count toward making the debate stage.

Others still have zero qualifying polls toward the minimum qualifications for the first debate.

Larry Elder, the conservative talk radio host and failed California gubernatorial nominee who is seeking the GOP’s 2024 presidential nomination, complained in an opinion piece published Wednesday by The Hill that the RNC “has rigged the rules of the game by instituting a set of criteria that is so onerous and poorly designed that only establishment-backed and billionaire candidates are guaranteed to be on stage.”

“That’s not what our party is about: We are the party of free speech, debate and the exchange of ideas. With 16 months until the general election, Republicans should have as many voices as the stage will accommodate. Anything short of that is elitism,” Elder said.

The third requirement to make the August debate is a pledge to support the eventual Republican nominee in the 2024 general election.

Some candidates, including Christie, have grumbled about the pledge but indicated they will agree to it because failing to do so would leave them no real path to the sort of attention needed to win the GOP nomination.

Trump has privately discussed skipping either one or both of the first two Republican presidential primary debates, CNN reported in May. Since then he has not publicly said he would participate in the debate.

DeSantis on Wednesday criticized Trump in an interview with Iowa conservative radio host Howie Carr over his refusal to commit to the debate.

“Nobody is entitled to this nomination. You have got to earn the nomination,” DeSantis said, adding that debates are “important parts of the process.”

“I will be in Milwaukee for the first debate, and I’ll be at all the debates because the American people deserve to hear from us directly about our vision for the country, and about how we’re going to be able to defeat Joe Biden,” he said.

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April 12, 2021
College Promise Campaign Executive Vice President Addresses the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Forum in Cali, Colombia

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Press Release
–

updated: Sep 16, 2019

CALI, Colombia, September 16, 2019 (Newswire.com)
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The College Promise Campaign took the stage last week at the UNESCO “International Forum on Inclusion and Equity in Education – Every Learner Matters,” organized in cooperation with the Ministry of National Education of Colombia and the Town Hall of Cali.

The Forum, designed to assist countries in increasing educational and inclusion outcomes, brought experts in education and government officials from around the world to share innovative ideas, policies and programs to advance inclusion and equity in education, and to achieve the Sustainable Development Goal 4, which calls “to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.”

Rosye Cloud, Executive Vice President of the College Promise Campaign, who was part of four experts’ panel from Latin America and the US, “Strengthening Educational Pathways for Inclusion and Equity,” addressed the evolution of the “free” college movement in the United States, in addition to rapidly changing demands of employers as artificial intelligence (AI) transforms the workforce. The momentum has increased over the years, largely due to strong support from governors seeking to bolster American economic competitiveness and prosperity.

During the panel, and in speaking about College Promise Campaign’s work since its launch, Cloud stated that “what began as a small idea, is getting ready to celebrate over 315 local programs and 25 statewide programs.” “This movement respects the unique value every student brings to our society. They are key to sustaining an innovation economy, ” Cloud added.

“The College Promise Campaign recognizes the importance of global cooperation and the benefits from leaders working together to advance equity and inclusion in higher education. The success of this movement in America is built on the bold collaboration of entities that have historically worked in silos. Many of the countries attending this forum have been implementing free public higher education for many years. We want to learn from each of you, and appreciate the opportunity to collaborate with UNESCO in advancing global education, inclusion and equality.”

For More Information: www.CollegePromise.org

Follow Us: on Facebook @CollegePromise and on Twitter and Instagram @College_Promise

MEDIA CONTACT:
Sascha Foertsch
sfoertsch@collegepromise.org
202-569-3000

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September 16, 2019
MeasureOne’s Private Student Loan Report Shows That Positive Trends Continue in the Private Student Loan Market: 98% of Students and Families Successfully Managing Payments
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Delinquency and Defaults Remain at or Near Historic Lows, According to 12th Edition of MeasureOne Report

Press Release
–

updated: Jun 18, 2019
SAN FRANCISCO, June 18, 2019 (Newswire.com)
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MeasureOne, a leading provider of data and analytics serving the $1.59 trillion-dollar student loan market, today released the 12th edition of its Private Student Loan Report. The latest report again affirms that students and families continue to responsibly use private student loans to cover college costs. In fact, 98% of families are successfully managing payments and less than 2% default, annually.

Private student loans, which are fully underwritten to assess creditworthiness and ability to repay, make up approximately 7.7% of total student loans outstanding as of Q1 2019. The remaining 92.3% of the $1.59 trillion in student loans are federal loans owned and managed by the Department of Education.

The MeasureOne Private Student Loan Report reflects data as of end-Q1 2019 for private student loans and does not include federal student loan data. As of the end of Q1 2019, the report found:
- Private student loan originations in AYTD 2018/19 (Q3 2018 to Q1 2019 only) was $8.35 billion, up 11.96% year-over-year.
- Early-stage delinquency (30 to 89 days past due) rate was 2.48% of loan balances in repayment; the late-stage delinquency (90+ days past due) rate was 1.50%.
- Annualized defaults were 1.84% of loan balances in repayment. Loans in forbearance were 2.18%.
- The total outstanding balance for private student loans represented in the MeasureOne Report was $66.07 billion (including in-school loans but excluding consolidation, refinance and parent loans).
- Undergraduate loans accounted for 89.45% and graduate loans 10.55% of loans originated in AYTD 2018/19.
“Our bi-annual report shows that students and families continue to use private student loans responsibly to cover the costs of college,” said Dan Feshbach, CEO for MeasureOne. “That’s particularly encouraging given recent media interest in the student debt issue. What’s often lost in the headlines is that private student loans are being managed successfully. In fact, private student loan portfolios are near historic lows for delinquencies and defaults.”

This bi-annual report includes continuous contributions from the MeasureOne Private Student Loan Consortium, a data cooperative of the six largest student loan lenders and holders: Citizens Bank, N.A., Discover Bank, Navient, PNC Bank, N.A., Sallie Mae Bank and Wells Fargo Bank, N.A.

In addition to the original six largest student lenders, the Q1 2019 report includes the following thirteen contributors: College Ave Student Loans, Navy Federal Credit Union and 11 members from the Education Finance Council. In total, these 19 data contributors represent 63.35% of the private student loans outstanding in the U.S.

The full MeasureOne Private Student Loan Report is available for download at https://www.measureone.com (see Research Section)

About MeasureOne

MeasureOne, founded in San Francisco with offices in Dallas, TX, specializes in data and analytics serving the $1.59 trillion-dollar student loan market, the second largest form of consumer credit in the U.S. The company developed the first and only Private Student Loan Consortium, a data cooperative of the nation’s largest lenders and holders of private student loans. MeasureOne evaluates academic and loan performance data to increase understanding of consumer lending, academic success, and employment opportunities. For more information about MeasureOne, visit www.measureone.com.

News Media Contact:

Samantha Gomes
949.533.4559
newsmedia@measureone.com

Source: MeasureOne
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June 18, 2019
June 6 is National Higher Education Day

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LearningRx Brain Training Company Reviews 5 Tips to Prepare Your High Schooler for College

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo., June 6, 2019 (Newswire.com)
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June 6 is National Higher Education Day and LearningRx, the world’s largest personal brain training company, is sharing tips with parents to help them prepare their high school student for college. They include:

1.      Take challenging courses. Most admissions officials say they prefer to see a student attempting more difficult classes then breezing through the required courses. As a general rule, if your teen thinks she can get at least a B, have her take the AP or honors classes.

2.      Enroll in brain training. Unlike tutoring, which focuses on subject matter, one-on-one brain training strengthens the core cognitive skills to help you memorize, learn, process and recall any information faster, more effectively and more efficiently. Sometimes referred to as cognitive skills training, personal brain training uses customized brain exercises to target memory, processing speed, logic & reasoning, visual and auditory processing and attention. The results are measurable and can make the transition to college much easier.

3.      Take a pre-college course. Many colleges offer these over the summer to give high school students a taste of campus life. Courses vary in topic, location, duration and cost, but almost all will be impressive on your teen’s college applications.

4.      Consider dual-enrollment. Just as some high schools offer college-level courses, some colleges allow high school students to enroll in one or more classes—many of which even offer college credits if your grades are high enough. This can save your teen time (and you money!) when they’re ready to attend college full time.

5.      Take required courses. Most colleges have admissions that include things like four years of English, four years of math, three to four years of a lab science, two to four years of a foreign language and at least two years of social sciences.

About LearningRx

LearningRx, headquartered in Colorado Springs, Colorado, is the largest one-on-one brain training organization in the world. With 80 Centers in the U.S., and locations in 45 countries around the globe, LearningRx has helped more than 100,000 individuals and families sharpen their cognitive skills to help them think faster, learn easier, and perform better. Their on-site programs partner every client with a personal brain trainer to keep clients engaged, accountable, and on-task—a key advantage over online-only brain exercises. Their pioneering methods have been used in clinical settings for over 35 years and have been verified as beneficial in peer-reviewed research papers and journals. To learn more about LearningRx research results, programs, and their 9.6 out of 10 client referral rating visit http://www.learningrx.com.

Source: LearningRx

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June 6, 2019