Ideally, your grandchild or grandchildren will have an RESP. Perhaps your own kids have already opened one for them. If not, you can open an RESP—in fact, anyone can become a “subscriber,” including parents, guardians, grandparents, other relatives, and friends. A child can be the “beneficiary” of multiple RESPs, but here’s the key detail to note: the lifetime RESP contribution limit per child is $50,000. Any excess contributions will be taxed, so it’s important for contributors to coordinate their efforts.
An overview of RESPs
If you’re new to RESPs, here are some common questions (and the answers) about these plans:
What is an RESP? RESPs are registered savings and/or investment accounts, meaning they’re registered with the Canadian government and they offer tax advantages.
What can RESPs be used for? Your grandchild(ren) will be able to use their RESP to pay for tuition plus a wide range of other educational expenses: accommodations, textbooks, school supplies, transportation, and more.
Where can I open an RESP? At a bank or an investment firm, including providers that specialize in RESPs, like Embark. You will need your grandchild’s social insurance number (SIN)—another good reason to coordinate with their parents.
Are RESPs taxed? Money and investments held inside an RESP grow tax-sheltered. The grants and growth—including interest, dividends and capital gains—aren’t taxed until withdrawn, and then they’re taxed at the beneficiary’s (child’s) marginal tax rate. (This will likely be very low since they’re in school.)
Do I get a tax deduction for contributing to an RESP? No. But you also don’t pay tax when you withdraw the money you contributed.
Why else should I open an RESP? The biggest incentive for opening an RESP is free government grants. Through the Canada Education Savings Grant (CESG), the Canadian government will match 20% of your contributions, up to $500, in a given year, up to a lifetime limit of $7,200. In addition to the CESG, families below a certain income threshold may also qualify for additional government grants, called the Additional Canada Education Saving Grant (ACES) and the Canada Learning Bond (CLB). The CLB grant does not require plan subscribers to make any contributions. Families living in certain provinces (Quebec and British Columbia) can also apply for other grants. Read more about government RESP grants.
What if I have multiple grandchildren? You or the children’s parents can open a family RESP. Keep in mind that all children within the RESP must be related by blood or adoption (siblings). This means that as a grandparent, if you have multiple grandchildren (who are not all siblings), each group will need their own RESP. The grants and growth in a family RESP can be shared among beneficiaries—very helpful if one child’s education costs more than another’s.
How long can an RESP stay open? A very long time: 35 years. But it’s important to pay attention to the annual RESP deadline of Dec. 31, if you want to maximize government grants.
What’s the best way to get the maximum RESP grant?
To get the maximum CESG amount of $7,200, it’s a good idea to plan for RESP contributions. This is helpful both for organizing your own finances and for coordinating between contributors, including your grandchildren’s parents. You could even automate your contributions, to make it easier to stick to a consistent schedule.
First, let’s look at how to get the maximum of $500 in CESG in a given year. The government matches 20% on the first $2,500 annually, so a child’s RESP contributors would need to put in $2,500 to get $500 in CESG each year. Collectively, you can contribute more than $2,500 in any year—there’s no limit to annual RESP contributions (not exceeding the $50,000 lifetime limit)—but the maximum CESG per year is $500.
To get the maximum lifetime CESG amount of $7,200 for the child, the RESP contributors will need to put in $2,500 per year for 14 years, and then another $1,000 when the child is age 15. If you don’t contribute $2,500 in a certain year, you can catch up the following year, but note that the maximum CESG in one year is $1,000—meaning you can only catch up one year at a time.
Call in the experts
If you need guidance on planning RESP contributions, maximizing government grants and adjusting RESP investments over time, talk to the Education Savings Specialist at Embark. Right now, Embark has a special offer for MoneySense readers: Start an account using the promo code MONEYSENSE100 and it will contribute $100 to your grandchild’s education when you save $200. Visit Embark* for details.
This is a paid post that is informative but also may feature a client’s product or service. These posts are written, edited and produced by MoneySense with assigned freelancers and approved by the client.
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Andrew Lo is the CEO of Embark, Canada’s education savings and planning company. As a fintech leader for over 30 years, he’s focused on making the best financial services available to Canadians.
First, a quick refresher on these registered accounts: RESPs provide a tax-advantaged way to invest in your children’s or grandchildren’s future education. Contributions to an RESP account and investments held in an RESP are tax-sheltered as long as they remain inside it. And that’s not the only benefit of opening an RESP. The Canadian government also contributes by matching grants to your child’s RESP through the Canada Education Savings Grant (CESG). (More on government grants below.)
Maximizing RESP contributions and understanding withdrawal rules can save you a lot in taxes while you save for your child’s or grandchild’s post-secondary education. Let’s look at common questions in more detail.
Is an RESP tax-deductible?
Unlike with a registered retirement savings plan (RRSP), RESP contributions themselves do not give you a tax deduction. However, this doesn’t make the RESP account less powerful as an education savings vehicle. The RESP has three significant benefits for investors:
Tax-sheltered growth: Money invested in an RESP is tax-sheltered, meaning it continues to grow tax-free as long as it stays within the RESP account.
Withdrawals are taxed in the hands of the beneficiary: Unlike RRSPs, money withdrawn from an RESP and used towards educational expenses is taxed in the hands of the plan’s “beneficiary” (the student), not its “subscriber” (parent or grandparent who opened the account). This is good news, because students are usually in a lower tax bracket than their parents or grandparents and will likely pay little to no income tax.
Government grants: The RESP is made more attractive by the Canada Education Savings Grant (CESG), a 20% boost to your RESP made by the federal government, up to a yearly maximum of $500 and a lifetime maximum of $7,200. If you contribute $2,500 to the RESP in a given year, the government will contribute 20% of that: $500. Some families are eligible for other government grants, too.
Is money earned in an RESP taxable?
Money earned within an RESP could come from interest, dividends or capital gains, along with government contributions mainly through the CESG. As long as these earnings remain within the RESP account, they are not subject to tax, allowing the power of compounding to work its magic. This tax-sheltering of RESP earnings ensures that your investment and government grants can grow unimpeded by taxes, until they’re needed for the beneficiary’s post-secondary education. But, unlike a tax-free savings account (TFSA), RESP withdrawals are not tax-free when withdrawn. The money withdrawn for the beneficiary’s education—whether investment gains or grant money—is categorized as Educational Assistance Payments (EAP) and taxed in the hands of the beneficiary (the student).
How do I report an RESP on tax returns?
Reporting your RESP on tax returns is pretty straightforward. Because RESP gains are tax-sheltered, you don’t need to make any tax declarations until the RESP money is withdrawn as EAPs. Once the money is withdrawn to pay for the beneficiary’s educational expenses, the RESP provider will give the beneficiary a T4 slip specifying the total amount of money received as EAPs in the tax year—including investment income and government grants. The amount from this T4 slip must be entered as “income” on the beneficiary’s tax return.
Are RESP over-contributions taxed?
Although RESPs don’t have a yearly contribution limit, they do come with a lifetime contribution limit of $50,000. And yes, RESP over-contributions are definitely taxable. If contributions exceed the lifetime contribution limit of $50,000, the excess contribution is taxed at 1% per month until it’s withdrawn. This tax on overcontributions must be paid within 90 days after the end of the year in which the overcontribution happened. Overcontributions can be withdrawn and do not need to remain in the RESP.
RESPs serve as a tax-advantaged account for post-secondary educational savings and investments. It beneficially weaves together tax-sheltered investment growth, government grants and favourable withdrawal taxation rules. If you understand RESP contribution and withdrawal rules, the RESP account can be invaluable to your family’s financial toolkit.
If you need more guidance on RESPs and taxes, help is available. The RESP experts at Embark can show you how to maximize your savings and minimize taxes. Currently, Embark has a special offer, exclusive to MoneySense readers: Start an account using the promo code MONEYSENSE100 and Embark will contribute $100 to your child’s education when you save $200. Visit Embark* for details.
UC Berkeley is being sued by Jewish groups claiming that the university has fostered a “longstanding, unchecked spread of anti-Semitism” on campus — an accusation that university officials say paints a distorted and inaccurate picture of the school.
Filed Tuesday by the Brandeis Center and Jewish Americans for Fairness in Education, the complaint alleges Berkeley Law, the university law school, has “failed to confront, much less combat” antisemitism and that policies adopted by some student organizations discriminate against Jewish students. The lawsuit also alleges students have faced violence and harassment since Oct. 7, when Hamas launched an attack in Israel, killing about 1,200 people.
“The University has enabled the normalization of anti-Jewish hatred on campus,” the complaint, filed in federal court in San Francisco, reads. “Jewish students feel compelled to hide their identities.”
But university officials refuted many of the claims, and said the allegations made in the 37-page complaint don’t reflect “the facts of what is actually happening on campus.”
Tensions have been high at the campus following the Oct. 7 attack, sparking ongoing and, at times, opposing protests occurring at the same time. But UC Berkeley officials say they’ve been reaching out to student groups, offering counseling support, and making other arrangements to protect free speech and support students on campus.
A banner calling for a cease-fire hangs from UC Berkeley’s Sather Tower as hundreds of people, mostly students, read the names of Palestinians killed, during a protest at UC Berkeley on Nov. 16.
(Brontë Wittpenn / San Francisco Chronicle via AP)
“UC Berkeley believes the claims made in the lawsuit are not consistent with the First Amendment of the Constitution, or with the facts of what is actually happening on our campus,” Dan Mogulof, spokesperson for the university, said in a statement. “The university has long been committed to confronting antisemitism, and to supporting the needs and interests of its Jewish students, faculty and staff.”
The lawsuit claims that, following the Oct. 7 attack and the ongoing protests on campus, Jewish students have been targets of harassment and physical violence, and that Jewish students have received hate emails calling for their gassing and murder.
“Jewish students have reported being afraid to go to class, which would require them to pass through the pro-Hamas rallies taking place in Berkeley’s main thoroughfares,” the suit reads.
The suit also alleges that several student groups, including those that represent women, Asian and LGBTQ+ law school students, have adopted policies that discriminate and exclude Jewish students, including those that call for divestment and sanctions against the state of Israel or require that speakers repudiate Zionism before being invited to speak. Representatives for some student groups could not be reached for comment.
Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, refuted the claims.
“The complaint filed by the Brandeis Center paints a picture of the Law School that is stunningly inaccurate and that ignores the First Amendment,” Chemerinsky said. “For example, student organizations have the First Amendment right to choose their speakers, including based on their viewpoint. Although there is much that the campus can and does do to create an inclusive environment, it cannot stop speech even if it is offensive.”
Mogulof, spokesperson for the university, said some of the claims made in the complaint “have no basis in fact.” Despite the claims of possible discrimination in the lawsuit, he said the university was not aware of any incident where a student was excluded from a student organization based on their Jewish identity.
He said university officials have found no incidents where students reported getting the kind of emails that were described in the complaint.
“This is the first anyone has heard of an allegation of that sort,” he said. “I can assure you that if we have — or if we do — we will respond strongly and quickly.”
School police have also received one incident of alleged violence that occurred on Oct. 25, he said, involving two people who tried to take an Israeli flag from a student during a rally for Palestine. When they were unable to take the flag, the suspects hit the student in the head with his own metal water bottle.
Police are still pursuing leads in the incident, and school officials have reached out to the student.
“The university is taking this very seriously, and the student has been offered support,” Mogulof said.
For some, the university’s actions have not been enough.
“I don’t want to see students physically assaulted and the university not be willing to investigate it as a hate crime,” said Hannah Schlacter, a student at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.
Schlacter, who said she’s been helping lead the campus’ Jewish student community, is also a member of Jewish Americans for Fairness in Education, one of the plaintiffs in the suit. Although not named, she said she provided testimony for the suit.
She said she was concerned university officials did not refer to the Oct. 25 incident as a hate crime. She said another incident on Oct. 16, where two people wearing masks tried to yank away an Israeli flag from a Jewish student wearing the flag as a cape, was also not being investigated as a hate crime.
“The university happens to not be following the policy in place to respond to these issues,” she said. “The fact of the matter is that the university is not investigating that as a hate crime and that to me is concerning.”
She said Jewish students are also concerned about what she called “indoctrination” by professors, including an incident where a graduate student offered extra credit for students who attended a pro-Palestine demonstration.
After school officials heard concerns, the options for extra credit for the class studying the Middle East were expanded to include any local event that involved the topic, including protests or documentaries.
The lawsuit comes as protests have erupted in universities and city streets across the country following the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas and the ongoing military actions of Israel in Gaza.
Some supporters of Israel have called on university leaders to better police pro-Palestinian rallies, while supporters of Palestine have also accused some campus leaders of issuing statements that condemn violent attacks by Hamas, but don’t criticize Israel’s military actions in Gaza.
In a statement to UC Berkeley students and staff on Nov. 3, Chancellor Carol Christ said she was concerned about an alarming increase of “antisemitic expression” in the country and campus.
“Our university condemns antisemitic expression in its very form, and we are committed to addressing it when it occurs and responding when it is reported,” she wrote.
Palestinian students and supporters have also faced harassment, threats and doxxing, she said, and urged students to report any incident to the Office for Prevention of Harassment and Discrimination.
About 300 UC Berkeley faculty have also signed on to a letter condemning the Oct. 7 attack. Some students on campus had referred to the attacks as “resistance” and part of a “freedom struggle,” which signatories of the letter call “repugnant and indefensible.”
Among those who signed the letter were Christ and Chemerinsky.
Maddy Montiel and Brad Butterfield marveled at the community they found this semester at Cal Poly Humboldt.
Montiel, an environmental science major, and Butterfield, a journalism major, had lived in their vehicles for several years, the only way, they said, that they could afford to attend college. They usually found parking in campus lots or on nearby streets.
But the pair and about 15 others like them — students living in sedans, aging campers, a converted bus, who could afford a $315 annual parking permit but not rent — found one another on campus parking lot G11. They started parking together in a row of spaces and named their community “the line.” They shared resources: propane tanks to heat their living quarters, ovens to cook meals. They helped one another seal leaky roofs and formed an official campus club aiming to secure a mailing address.
They felt safe.
Students Brad Butterfield and Maddie Montiel embrace next to a pair of parking tickets she received from Cal Poly Humboldt police.
(Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)
“None of us have ever had something like that before,” said Montiel, 27. “People who live like this don’t really congregate, and try to stay out of view.”
Then the notices arrived late last month. The university was going to enforce a campus policy, written into parking regulations, that prohibits overnight camping. Remove vehicles by noon on Nov. 12, or they could be towed and students could face disciplinary action, the letter said.
Montiel and Butterfield moved their vehicles to another campus parking lot, hoping the university would back down if they became less visible. They found two spots under redwood trees at the edge of campus. Others from G11 scattered, driven back into hiding.
On the morning of Nov. 13, several students who stayed at G11 and other campus lots awoke to discover parking violations on their windshields, a $53 fine for living overnight in their vehicles, $40 for those whose vehicles were too large for one spot.
The actions by Humboldt — defended by university officials as necessary for health and safety — provide an up-close look at how low-income California State University students determined to earn a college degree struggle to meet their basic needs amid the state’s student affordable housing crisis.
Cal Poly Humbolt student Caleb Chen eats noodles in his van in campus parking lot G11.
(Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)
“We’re putting everything we have into our education in order to be here,” Montiel said. “For them to just keep putting all of this added pressure onto us just seems really unnecessarily cruel.”
The campus-wide email landed at the end of October: The university would soon prohibit students from sleeping in cars.
“Overnight camping in University parking lots creates unsanitary and unsafe conditions for both those encamped and for our campus community at large,” the email said. “The University Police Department and other campus offices have taken calls from concerned members of the campus community expressing fear and frustration about the situation.”
Days later, three administrators visited students parked in G11 to share details about the enforcement, said Butterfield, 26.
“This is a direct response to the public health and safety concerns that have stemmed from overnight activity in University parking lots,” said a letter given to students. The university would provide temporary emergency housing to students through the end of the semester, which ends in December, or would help students identify campsites or other locations where they could park off campus.
Tom Jackson, Cal Poly Humboldt’s president, declined an interview request through spokesperson Aileen Yoo, who said university staff is also available to help students find longer-term housing solutions.
“These aren’t evictions. The University is enforcing a long-standing parking policy,” Yoo said in an email.
Two people walk through the lobby of a building at Cal Poly Humboldt.
(Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)
In response, faculty in the sociology department wrote a letter to university officials, condemning them for upholding a policy that “criminalizes” the students. The message to the campus community “framed our houseless students as a group of people who are feared, clearly intimidating them to get them off campus,” the letter said.
“There are ways that we can address this in a way that best serves our students and community,” said Tony Silvaggio, chair of the sociology department and vice president of the Humboldt chapter of the California Faculty Assn. “And it’s not just kicking them off campus to live on the streets somewhere else.”
The University Senate, a campus governing body, passed a resolution urging the university to suspend its enforcement of the parking policy until the end of the academic year, include students in decision-making and explore “safe parking” options on campus.
The students of G11 started an online petition, pushing back against the characterization that they are unsanitary or create danger. The students said they went out of their way to pick up trash and to maintain a clean environment.
The campus-wide email was “an attempt to shame, humiliate, and isolate the houseless community on campus,” the petition said. “We are living in our vehicles and are legally homeless because, quite simply, we cannot afford rent.”
After the uproar, the university sent a second campus-wide email that said, “The challenges of affordable housing can be particularly acute for students, and the University is invested in supporting them.” But the university did not reverse its decision.
Butterfield and Montiel raced to persuade officials to reconsider, meeting with administrators, including campus police and the dean of students.
They tried to schedule a meeting with Mark Johnson, the university’s chief of staff, and Cris Koczera, director of risk management and safety services. But an email from a campus ombudsman told the students the administrators would not meet with them. The university’s decision and the options it presented were clear, the email said, and “no constructive discussion is to be had.”
For Montiel, Humboldt was a world away from San Bernardino, her hometown. She first visited the university in high school, tagging along on a road trip with a friend.
Students Brad Butterfield and Maddy Montiel, along with their dog Ollie, prepare for class after taking a shower on the campus of Cal Poly Humboldt.
(Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)
Montiel was struck by the abundance of the nearby forest, the beauty of the redwoods that towered over campus. Years later, she learned the college had an environmental science program that offered experiences that aligned with her goals of working in ecological restoration.
“I fell in love with the place and always saw it as a dream — but never attainable because it was so far, and it’d be too expensive,” she said.
She attended Riverside City College for five years, enrolling in classes full time as she juggled multiple jobs. After she earned multiple associate degrees, she told herself, “I’m just going to go for it and figure out living up in Humboldt.”
She is making it work by living in a 1995 Chevy Coachman, purchased with a loan that costs her $600 a month. She has also taken out $25,000 in student loans for tuition and fees and works as a studio tech in the campus metalsmithing studio to pay for other living expenses.
In fall 2022, Montiel purchased a campus parking permit that allows students to park on campus during the academic year and eventually settled into the G11 lot.
A student’s note on the window of his van tells police he is not camping at Cal Poly Humboldt. The university recently told students they could not sleep in their cars overnight.
(Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)
In her aging Coachman, she studies on a tray table and practices yoga on a narrow strip of walkway. She cooks meals on a small propane stove inside. Her bed is lofted over the driver and passenger seats. Every other week, she visits a dump station to empty waste and fill her water tanks.
Over time, more students began to park in G11, a lot situated among dorms and a short walk from a campus market. The location was convenient for shuttling back and forth between classes or to access the campus gym for showers. This semester, the 15 to 20 students found comfort in their community. They celebrated the start of the year with a beach bonfire and eventually formed the Alternative Living Club.
Student Caleb Chen searches for water late at night with a gallon container on the campus of Cal Poly Humboldt.
(Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)
The club began as a way for unhoused students to receive mail, as they needed an address for scholarship and job applications. Montiel, the club’s president, envisioned more. The club could offer a support system for unhoused students, an avenue to propose ideas about how the university could better help them. They talked about pooling funds for a storage facility, formalizing a safe parking program.
Montiel said many cash-strapped students have approached club members and said they are leaning toward moving into vehicles “because it’s their last and only option” to stay in college.
But now Montiel wonders if the club and the growing visibility of homelessness on campus led to the university’s decision to displace them.
“We’re kind of more seen,” she said. “We weren’t just scattered and hidden.”
Carrie White, another student who took up residence in the parking lot, transferred to Humboldt after graduating from community college in Utah. As she calculated her living expenses, the 27-year-old biology major realized she could not afford rent while attending school.
“I can’t afford to pay $1,500, $900 a month and work and then do a STEM degree,” said White, who is from England. “I can’t afford it.”
Student Brad Butterfield prepares to move his camper off the Cal Poly Humboldt campus.
(Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)
So she purchased an old school bus and gradually converted it to her home. At Humboldt, she works up to 20 hours a week, balancing a research assistant job with an internship in 3D facial reconstruction and a fellowship where she volunteers in the community.
As a person who is autistic, White said, she relies on routine and is sensitive to noise and light. Living in her bus, she has some control over her environment.
“I’ve tried to do those things with my budget and with my situation, and then this has happened,” she said. “There’s a lack of thought and consideration.”
This isn’t the first time in recent years that Cal Poly Humboldt has generated anger over its response to student housing shortages.
Last academic year — in anticipation of a large enrollment jump after becoming a polytechnic campus — the university announced it would prioritize limited on-campus housing for first-year students. Many continuing students would have to search for housing in off-campus rentals or at a limited number of motels leased by the university.
Around the same time, officials also weighed a proposal to house students on a floating barge, an idea that attracted national media attention and was mocked in a brief segment by Stephen Colbert. The barge plan has not materialized, and enrollment remained flat this academic year.
Brad Butterfield stores his belongings with his dog Ollie after taking a shower on the campus of Cal Poly Humboldt.
(Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)
But the university’s approach to dealing with housing shortages points to a larger issue in the California State University — the nation’s largest four-year public higher education system, with nearly 460,000 students.
At Cal Poly Humboldt, 2,069 beds were available on campus in 2022, the report said. The campus enrolled nearly 6,000 students.
Humboldt also faces challenges unique to its location as the northernmost Cal State campus. Arcata, a city of about 19,000 people where Cal Poly Humboldt is located, is in the midst of its own housing crisis. Earlier this month, the City Council declared a shelter crisis.
The declaration enabled the city to draw on funding to continue operating a safe parking program, which is operated by Arcata House Partnership, an organization that provides support for unhoused people. The program provides a space for residents who live in their cars to safely park and services including charging stations, bathrooms and meals, as they work to find stable housing.
But the program is full, and up to 20 people at a time are on the waitlist, said Darlene Spoor, executive director of Arcata House Partnership. She said she would be “willing to have a conversation with people from the university about whether we could open a safe parking program for students.”
Students Derek Beatty, left, and Caleb Chen hang out late at night in parking lot G11 at Cal Poly Humboldt.
(Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, Spoor said, more people have moved to Humboldt and purchased homes at high prices, pricing some longtime residents out of homebuying and driving up rental costs.
Plans are underway to ease the strain on students. By fall 2025, Cal Poly Humboldt plans to build more on-campus dorms and apartments, increasing the number of available beds by 1,250.
But on-campus options still remain out of reach for some students. A dorm room shared by three people and a required basic meal plan, for example, is expected to cost at least $10,900 per student next academic year. Room and board in a double costs about $13,000; a plan for a single dorm room runs more than $14,500 for the nine-month academic year.
Neither of those options would have worked for Steven Childs. The 47-year-old wildlife major said he would not have attended Humboldt if he could not live out of his cargo van.
He was scrolling YouTube one day when he came across a video that showed Humboldt students living in their cars. He thought to himself, “Oh, man, I think that’s my option. That’s the only way that seems reasonable.”
Childs, who lives in the San Gabriel Valley when school is not in session, gave up work as a private investigator to attend Humboldt. His wife’s salary now supports them both.
“I’m pushing 50, and I don’t want to be saddled with college debt through retirement,” he said. “I could sacrifice and live out of a vehicle.”
Butterfield, the journalism major, could not find housing that worked within his budget range of $650 to $900 a month, plus security deposit and other fees.
He decided to pay for his education with savings from service-industry and other jobs, and does not want student loans.
Brad Butterfield and Maddy Montiel study in a camper parked on the Cal Poly Humboldt campus.
(Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)
He lives in an 1976 GMC Sportscoach that cost $9,500. He spends at least $200 a month on expenses for the RV, including insurance and propane.
“I had a couple hundred dollars left in my bank account to come up here and try to live off of,” he said.
On the night of Nov. 13 — hours after receiving citations for overnight camping — about 10 G11 students gathered inside a small university building. They worried they could face disciplinary action or lose their vehicles. Five unpaid tickets could get them towed.
One student said he had struggled to fall asleep the night before, worried that parking enforcement would ticket him. Another student wondered aloud about what they would do next semester. They brainstormed ways to draw more attention to their fight.
They talked about occupying a building. They discussed how they would appeal the parking violations, and weighed potential legal action. Two students said they planned to sleep overnight in a campus study room so footage from security cameras could prove they did not sleep in their vehicles.
In the end, they agreed to stay in touch over a group chat to prepare for the upcoming weeklong fall break.
Student Brad Butterfield outside his camper at the Cal Poly Humboldt campus.
(Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)
Montiel and Butterfield had decided to move their vehicles again, this time off campus, to a city street next to a university parking lot. They have to move the vehicles by 7 a.m, when the city begins enforcing metered parking restrictions.
“Love you guys,” Montiel told the group before everyone went their separate ways.
A star neuroscientist at USC is facing allegations of misconduct after whistleblowers submitted a report to the National Institutes of Health that accused the professor of manipulating data in dozens of research papers and sounded alarms about an experimental stroke medication his company is developing.
The accusations against Berislav V. Zlokovic, professor and chair of the department of physiology and neuroscience at the Keck School of Medicine of USC, were made by a small group of independent researchers and reported in the journal Science.
The report identifies allegedly doctored images and data in 35 research papers in which Zlokovic is the sole common author. It also raised questions about findings in Phase II clinical trials of a drug called 3K3A-APC, an experimental stroke treatment sponsored by ZZ Biotech, the Houston-based company Zlokovic co-founded.
Preclinical data appeared to have been manipulated, the report authors allege. In addition, the Phase II results appear to contain errors that would skew interpretation of the data in favor of the drug.
An attorney for Zlokovic said the neuroscientist takes the accusations “extremely seriously” and was “committed to fully cooperating” with a USC inquiry into the matter. However, he said his client could not comment on the allegations while the review was pending.
“Professor Zlokovic would normally welcome addressing every question raised, insofar as allegations are based on information and premises Professor Zlokovic knows to be completely incorrect,” attorney Alfredo X. Jarrin wrote in an email. “And other questions address work not performed at his lab or papers where he was not the senior author or contact author and his role was limited.”
The university also issued a statement saying it takes allegations of research integrity seriously. “Consistent with federal regulations and USC policies, the university forwards any such allegations to its Office of Research Integrity for careful review,” the university said in a statement. “Under USC policy, this review is required to be confidential. As a result, we are unable to provide any further information.”
Last year, USC’s Keck School of Medicine received from NIH the first $4 million of a planned $30-million grant to conduct Phase III trials of the experimental stroke treatment on 1,400 people.
Given the serious issues outlined in their report, the whistleblowers say those trials should be stopped immediately.
“It should certainly be paused in my opinion,” said Matthew Schrag, an assistant professor of neurology at Vanderbilt and co-author of the whistleblower report. “There are red flags about the safety of that treatment.”
He said that evidence from the USC-led phase II trial of the drug, which was published in 2018 and called RHAPSODY, raised questions of patient safety. Patients in that trial were more likely to die in the week after treatment, and more likely to be disabled 90 days later than those who were given a placebo.
In addition, Schrag said, some patients given the placebo had to wait longer for the standard stroke treatment of the drug tPA or surgery to dissolve the blood clot.
“The faster you’re able to intervene to either restore blood flow with the drug or restore blood flow by removing the clot, the more brain cells survive,” he said.
He added that he did not believe the delay was intentional but that it had the effect of “skewing the results in favor of the drug.”
Schrag previously raised questions about the integrity of other neurological research, work he said was separate from his employment at Vanderbilt.
Scientists have questioned Zlokovic’s research anonymously for years, Schrag said. Many of these concerns were published on PubPeer, a website on which anonymous contributors can examine scientific papers and highlight potential flaws.
Yet scientists working with Zlokovic did not complain publicly, he said, allowing the studies to continue for years and succeed at attracting tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer funding.
“I think people are concerned about the potential for backlash for harm to their own careers,” Schrag said. “And so I think that motivates people to just go along.”
In its report, the journal Science interviewed four former employees of Zlokovic’s lab who said that Zlokovic routinely pressured them to manipulate data. Two said they were told to discard notebooks with results that didn’t fit preferred conclusions he hoped to reach.
“There were clear examples of him instructing people to manipulate data to fit the hypothesis,” one former employee told the journal.
The severity of the data manipulation charges merits a thorough investigation of Zlokovic’s data, said Elisabeth Bik, a microbiologist and scientific integrity consultant who co-wrote the whistleblower report.
“Appropriate steps would be for USC to ask Zlokovic to give them the lab’s notebooks and data,” Bik said. “For example, for images where it appears that certain parts might have been duplicated or erased, the original images as they came off a scanner or microscope need to be compared to the published figure panels.”
Bik is among a subset of the report’s authors who are considering filing a federal whistleblower lawsuit. Should the NIH deem that any federal grant money was used improperly, a successful suit would entitle the plaintiffs to a portion of the money the government can claw back.
Zlokovic has received roughly $93 million in NIH funding, according to Science. A spokesperson for NIH’s Office of Extramural Research would not comment on the specifics of the case.
“We take concerns related to research integrity very seriously, and this may include allegations of research misconduct,” the office said in a statement.
Over the years, Zlokovic has created several biotech companies aimed at commercializing his scientific work. In 2007, he co-founded ZZ Biotech, which has been working to gain federal approval of 3K3A-APC.
Last year, Kent Pryor, ZZ Biotech’s chief executive, called the drug “a potential game-changer.”
“I believe, based on the positive clinical results to date, our 3K3A-APC will potentially create the first new drug class to treat ischemic stroke since 2003,” Pryor said.
On Tuesday, Pryor declined to comment on the details in the whistleblowers’ report. “I don’t want to get into particular explanations right now because of the ongoing investigations,” he said.
He said the Phase III clinical trial had not yet begun.
Zlokovic is a leading researcher on the blood-brain barrier, with particular interest in its role in stroke and dementia. He received his medical degree and doctorate in physiology at the University of Belgrade and joined the faculty at USC’s Keck School of Medicine after several fellowships in London.
A polyglot and amateur opera singer, Zlokovic left USC and spent 11 years at the University of Rochester before returning in 2011. He was appointed director of USC’s Zilkha Neurogenetic Institute the following year.
“My role will be to enhance an already very strong neuroscience base and try to make USC the No. 1 place in the neurosciences in the country and the world,” Zlokovic said upon rejoining the USC faculty. “It’s a big goal, but I think, with what’s going on right now, it’s actually moving in that direction. I think that could be my greatest contribution.”
Once you’ve opened an RESP for your (grand)child or (grand)children, though, what should you do with it?
How often and how much to contribute to an RESP
Ideally, you should contribute at least $2,500 per year, if possible. An RESP can stay open for up to 35 years, giving you plenty of time to contribute up to the $50,000 maximum. An important date to be aware of when it comes to your contributions is December 31st of each year. The end of December marks the government grants deadline, specifically for the Canada Education Savings Grant (CESG). This grant matches 20% of your first $2,500 in contributions per year, up to $500, to a lifetime maximum of $7,200 per child. (To get the full $7,200, you need to contribute $36,000 strategically.)
The CESG is available until the end of the calendar year that your child turns 17. But take note: you can only catch up on the CESG one year at a time, for a maximum grant of $1,000 in a given year. That’s why it’s best to contribute early, often and to stick to a schedule.
You can deposit and save cash inside an RESP, but its value is unlikely to keep pace with inflation over time. Many families invest in the account so that the money has the potential to grow. An RESP can hold:
These types of assets have varying levels of risk and potential reward. Bonds and GICs have guaranteed rates of return, while mutual funds, ETFs, stocks and options depend on the performance of financial markets. It’s important to choose investments that fit your family’s needs and situation, including your time horizon (how long until your child heads off to college, university or trade school) and risk tolerance (your comfort level with investment volatility). Your child’s RESP shouldn’t be keeping you up at night.
An RESP expert can help you choose investments
Maybe you’re very good at saving but you’re new to investing. You can call upon RESP experts, such as those at Embark, for assistance. Embark’s Student Plan uses a glide path investment strategy that automatically adjusts to build savings when your child is young, before investing more conservatively closer to your withdrawal period so you’ll have as much funding as possible when you need it. Currently, Embark has a special offer, exclusive to MoneySense readers: Start an account using the promo code MONEYSENSE100 and Embark will contribute $100 to your child’s education when you save $200. Visit Embark* for details.
Read more about RESPs:
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Andrew Lo is the CEO of Embark, Canada’s education savings and planning company. As a fintech leader for over 30 years, he’s focused on making the best financial services available to Canadians.
An Arab Muslim student at Stanford University was struck by a driver in a hit-and-run collision that the California Highway Patrol is investigating as a hate crime, according to the university.
The student was walking on campus about 2 p.m. Friday when the driver made eye contact before accelerating and striking the student, according to a news release from the university’s Department of Public Safety. The driver shouted, “F— you people,” as he sped away, the release said. The student’s injuries are not life-threatening.
Stanford’s president, Richard Saller, sent a message to the community condemning the violence.
“We are profoundly disturbed to hear this report of potentially hate-based physical violence on our campus. Violence on our campus is unacceptable,” he said. “Hate-based violence is morally reprehensible, and we condemn it in the strongest terms.”
The driver remains at large, authorities said. The victim described him as “a white male in his mid-20s, with short dirty-blond hair and a short beard, wearing a gray shirt and round framed eyeglasses.”
The vehicle was described as a black Toyota 4Runner, model 2015 or newer, with a tire mounted on the back with a Toyota logo in the center of the wheel. The victim said it had a white California license plate with the letters M and J, with M possibly the first letter and J in the middle.
Campuses across the country have been pushed to confront anti-Arab racism, Islamophobia and antisemitism in the wake of Hamas’ Oct. 7 surprise attack on Israel, in which militants killed 1,400 Israelis and took about 220 people hostage.
Relentless attacks by Israel in the Gaza Strip in the weeks since have killed more than 9,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry.
Earlier this month, Stanford Provost Jenny Martinez spoke to the university’s faculty senate, detailing concerns from Palestinian American and Muslim community members who fear for their safety and who have described “troubling incidents and interactions rooted in Islamophobia.” She also relayed that Jewish and Israeli students have reported feeling fearful on campus, “feeling that they are targets of hate because of their identity.”
The Arab American Anti-Discrimination Committee has said it has heard from students across the country, including California, who have faced threats on campuses since the start of the war between Israel and Hamas.
Abed Ayoub, the group’s national executive director, said his staff has also heard from students who are facing expulsion or losing job opportunities for expressing their beliefs. Others are having their social media posts monitored and are threatened with violence.
Cannabis is the average co-ed’s drug of choice. While a lot of people encounter cannabis when they’re younger, it’s not until college the stoner persona solidifies. New college students are entering a stage where they’re able to smoke to their heart’s content without worrying about their parents or the smell of their rooms. It’s natural for them to want to smoke all the time. But is cannabis a study air, especially around finals?
Like most things marijuana, it is complicated and there isn’t a significant amount of data to support it is a big benefit. School performance while under the influence depends on a variety of factors, mainly whether or not the student actually studies while high, and the ways in which their body responds to the drug, which is affected by method, dosage and personal experience.
Photo by tortugadatacorp via Pixabay
Like enegery drinks, it is a mixed bag of results and has to do with factors like late night studying, stress, and the amount consumed. There is an assumption marijuana helps with the creativity process, which for projects could be helpful.
Depending on the dosage and strain being consumed, marijuana could help users narrow their focus of the topic they’re studying or provide new ideas students. It might make the topic at hand more engaging and entertaining, putting people in a better mood when starting to study. If the user tends to feel anxiety when studying, marijuana might help curb those impulses.
When it comes to group study sessions, marijuana might facilitate deeper conversations and more engagement from the group, it works if the user enjoys learning alongside others and talking out problems and topics.
Photo by Caio via Pexels
The way in which cannabis is consumed plays a pivotal role as well. While edibles are discreet and powerful, they might be too strong for a relaxed study session; vaping and smoking flower might be the safest options to try out at first. Microdosing might be an option to test the waters, producing results which are not distracting and don’t derail from the user’s original purpose.
Still, since there’s not a lot of scientific data out there, it’s important to go slow. Users should monitor their dosage and pick the right occasion to consume. For instance, a school topic they enjoy will work better than one they don’t, and a low stakes situation, like a quiz or a group activity, will definitely be more manageable than a midterm.
Attending a class while super stoned doesn’t sound like the most pleasing experience, but a little toke won’t hurt anyone, especially if the class is large or if there are friends around that could provide some support and peace of mind.
As always, for better recommendations, it helps to visit a dispensary and to talk with an expert, who might recommend a product that’s manageable and suitable for creating a focused mentality. Most importantly, the biggest piece of advice would be to be careful. While marijuana can be creatively stimulating, it can also make people’s brain feel hazy and paranoid. Studying with weed might not be for everyone, and it’s up to the user to figure out if they can manage the side effects.
Limited research has shown that marijuana’s negative effects on attention, memory, and learning can last for days or weeks which could have a rough impact on test results.
The President of Alcatraz U has introduced an all-new “Crimecentric Degree Program” to advance the careers of its inmates.
“Anyone can learn to be a criminal,” stated Dr. #427895, President of Alcatraz University.
Home of scenic Alcatraz U. Photo by Don Ramey Logan, CC BY-SA 3.0.
“In the near future, the well-educated criminal will rule the world. To that end, Alcatraz University is proud to announce that enrollment is now open for our Crimecentric Degree Program. In 18 months, anyone can earn a Master of Criminal Activity Degree,” said the university president.
Dr. #427895 said the the program contains all the basics of criminal activity. Courses include:
How to Steal Anything
Criminal Activity for Kids Under 12
Basic Stickup Techniques
The ABC’s of B&E
Carjacking 101
The Lost Art of Picking Pockets and Purse Snatching
The Art of Shoplifting
How to Recruit, Organize and Manage a Smash and Grab Posse
Mexican Border Coyote People Smuggling Techniques
Drug Cartel Management
Basics of Phone Scamming
Basics of Online Scamming
Shoot anybody, Anytime, Anywhere
Fentanyl for Fun and Profit
Meth Lab Maintenance
Hedge Fund Embezzlement
Build Your Own Ponzi Scheme
Kidnap Taylor Swift, the Pope, the LA Lakers, etc.
The Magic of Criminal Artificial Intelligence
Dr. #427895 said that enrollment is open to anyone between the ages of 2 to 120. “New inmates welcome… looking at you, Donald Trump!” he said with a wink, adding, “All tuition must be paid in stolen or embezzled funds.”
Breaking News
UBSI (Universal Bull Shit Institute) presents Donald Trump with Lifetime Achievement Award
SNN Words to Live By
“He who turns the other cheek will get hit with the other fist.” — Comedian Nipsey Russell.
“Get yourself naked and dig the music.” — Wolfman Jack.
“When women go wrong, men go right after them.” — Actress Mae West.
Ted holland attended college for four years. The year that he bothered to go to class he studied history. He majored in throwing quarters in the jukebox in the Student Union canteen and minored in a girl named Marsha. His books include This Day In African American Musicand B Western Actors Encyclopedia.
This image of a flyer promoting “liquid weed” is captured from an online community of Hongik University. Yonhap
Another flyer advertising suspected marijuana sales was found at Konkuk University in Seoul on Monday, prompting the police to search for the distributor.
According to officials at the university, a business card-sized flyer promoting “liquid weed” was found tucked into the window of a car parked in the basement parking lot at the schools’ Arts & Design Building earlier in the day.
“Do you need inspiration? We prepared a innovative product for you ‘liquid weed,’” the card reads, claiming the substance is “totally legal.”
“Contact me while it’s still legal!” it says, bearing a QR code on its backside.
Konkuk University issued an emergency notification warning students not to access the QR code if they find the flyer, while the Gwangjin Police Station in the district launched an investigation to track down the distributor through CCTVs.
The incident came after the same flyer was found recently at the art school’s building at Hongik University in Seoul, prompting the school to urge its students to be cautious and notify the police.
Under the drug control act, exporting, importing, producing, selling or advertising marijuana is illegal unless specifically authorized by the chief of the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety. (Yonhap)
In my day, applying to college meant thumbing through a big paperback encyclopedia of college listings and then pulling out the typewriter and filling in applications. Thirty-some years later as my kid prepares to apply, I need a spreadsheet and access to reams of data that I’m not sure how to process.
I’ve tried doing it the old-fashioned way, by searching through the websites of all the schools my high-school senior is interested in applying to. For each school, you need to find the common data set, a multipage PDF that lists seemingly unrelated stats. Then you need to run the net-price calculator, which attempts to give you a price tag based on the financial information you input. Then you put everything together to try to get some sense of your kid’s chances of getting in and what it might cost you so you can compare the schools to each other.
Of course, there’s an app for that. Well, not so much one app, but several different programs that purport to sort college data in a useful way — some of them free, some by subscription and some through the school. All of it is still confusing and overwhelming for the average family.
Big J Education Consulting is attempting to make it easier with interactive charts, available on its website for free, that allow you to easily sort through data from the common data sets of hundreds of schools, plus some of the company’s own fact-checked and reported updates. Co-owners Jennie Kent and Jeff Levy have been making these charts for years for their own business, and they went high-tech with a new format this year that makes sorting and crunching the data easy enough for a layperson to do.
“People think about that common data set as a snapshot, but it’s really more of a collage,” says Kent. “Admissions fills out part, financial aid fills out part. Sometimes numbers are off, and we reach out to institutions. The best that any of us can do with this is to use the common data set.”
Take, for instance, the sometimes outrageous cost-of-attendance number, a sticker price that includes tuition, room and board, books and fees for one year. At the top of their list is Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., at a whopping $89,394. Levy and Kent say they are hearing from a number of schools that the price for the upcoming year will be over $90,000, at least for international students.
Need-based and merit aid for the class of 2026, sorted by total cost of attendance for out-of-state students.
Credit: Jennie Kent, Jeff Levy, and Big J Educational Consulting, 2023
You can learn a lot from looking at a chart like this and playing with it according to the choices pertinent to your family. For instance, one thing to note is that if you sort by price, you don’t see prices below $80,000 until you get four pages in. Those are the most expensive 78 out of 427 schools.
To get to the least expensive schools, you have to sort by in-state prices, because most of these will be public institutions that offer special pricing to state residents.
Need-based and merit aid for the class of 2026, sorted by total cost of attendance for in-state students.
Credit: Jennie Kent, Jeff Levy, and Big J Educational Consulting, 2023
Of course, a school’s list price does not tell you how much it will cost your family to send a student there. The price you pay will depend on your own family’s financial situation, and that’s where all the strategizing comes in — and why families sometimes turn to professionals to crunch this data for them.
To get any kind of handle on that, you have to look at the other columns detailed on the chart below that analyze how much need-based aid a school gives and how much it gives out in so-called merit aid, which college finance experts have taken to calling “tuition discounting,” because it really just represents a coupon value off the sticker price.
If your family falls under the threshold of “need,” which varies by school, you can get a decent picture of what your price may be from the net-price calculator. But if you fall outside of those parameters, you’ll want to know how generous a school is with that tuition discounting. You really have to look at two numbers to figure this out, because the average amount of merit aid can be inflated by the small number of students it goes to.
Need-based and merit aid for the class of 2026, average merit aid awarded to non-need undergrads.
Credit: Jennie Kent, Jeff Levy, and Big J Educational Consulting, 2023
For instance, according to common-data-set data compiled by Big J, Duke meets all needs of undergraduates and gives out an average of $74,057 in merit awards to non-need undergrads, but it only gives that out to 4% of its full-pay applicants. Whereas Beloit College meets 96% of need but gives out an average of $40,142 in merit awards to 94% of non-need undergrads. Which sounds like the better chance of getting a discount?
You can input your own selection of colleges into this list and do a comparison that way. I input the top colleges on my child’s list and was able to see how they stacked up against each other in terms of merit aid and tuition price. I found that useful for weeding some out.
Playing the early game
None of the price modeling matters if your child doesn’t get into a school in the first place. That’s where strategizing over what type of application to submit matters. A little data visualization on early admission might help you if you want to play that game. And if you pair it with the financial data, you can get a sense of whether it matters at a particular school to apply early, and what it might cost you — since the decision is supposed to be binding.
The choice of whether to apply for early decision is complicated this year because the federal financial-aid form, FAFSA, is not opening until December, and schools cannot typically finalize their aid packages without it. Plus, more colleges across the spectrum are filling their classes with early admits because it maximizes their yield statistics — that is, the number of students who accept their offers. So competition is fierce.
Early-decision and regular-decision acceptance rates for the class of 2026, sorted by early admits as percent of freshman class.
Credit: Jennie Kent, Jeff Levy, and Big J Educational Consulting, 2023
On the Big J chart for early-decision and regular-decision acceptance rates, the schools making the most of this are filling more two-thirds of their classes with early admits. They are also typically accepting students at a far greater rate from the early-decision pool than they are from the regular-decision pool. At Tulane, for instance, the early-decision acceptance rate is 8.6 times greater than that for regular decisions.
Looking at that data might make you feel a little pressure, but remember, at the end of the day, the only school your child should pick for early decision is one that you can afford and that is a good fit for them.
The NCAA started allowing college athletes to make money from their name, image and likeness in 2021, after decades of student-athletes saying it wasn’t fair that they didn’t receive any money while the games they played in generated millions of dollars — especially football and basketball contests. And today, many of these athletes are not just making some extra cash on the side — they’re making millions.
These NIL deals are negotiated by college athletes and their representation, and typically involve leveraging an athlete’s brand and influence through promotional means. For example, a car dealership near a university campus may ask the college’s high-profile quarterback to do a commercial for them in exchange for a monetary payment or a car. Similarly, an athlete can make money from social media, depending on how big their following is.
Football players are among the college athletes who make the most money from NIL deals, followed by men’s basketball, women’s volleyball and women’s basketball. That’s because college football and basketball have multibillion-dollar TV contracts to broadcast games, while most other sports generally have lower visibility.
With that in mind, here are the college athletes who make the most money from NIL deals according to On3’s proprietary NIL algorithm, which is based on NIL-deal data, performance, influence and exposure
10. J.J. McCarthy, $1.3 million
J.J. McCarthy of the Michigan Wolverines in action against the Georgia Bulldogs.
Getty Images
As the junior quarterback for the Michigan Wolverines football team, McCarthy is one of the six college football QBs in the top 10 of NIL earners.
McCarthy sports 276,000 followers across his social-media platforms, and has deals with Alo, Bose and Bowman.
Tie-8. Bo Nix, $1.4 million
Bo Nix of the Oregon Ducks throws a pass against the Stanford Cardinals.
Getty Images
The senior QB for the Oregon Ducks has led his team to a perfect 5-0 start this season.
Nix has 219,000 followers on social media and NIL deals with 7-Eleven, Bojangles and Celsius. Nix is considered one of the top players in the nation and has the third-best betting odds to win college football’s Heisman Trophy on DraftKings DKNG, -2.52%
sportsbook.
Tie-8. Spencer Rattler, $1.4 million
Spencer Rattler of the South Carolina Gamecocks warms up before a game against the Tennessee Volunteers.
Getty Images
The South Carolina Gamecocks senior QB has one of the more robust NIL profiles in the nation. He has deals with Mercedes-Benz MBG, -1.23%,
Leaf trading cards and Raising Canes.
Rattler also has 578,000 followers across TikTok, Instagram META, -0.71%
and X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.
7. Angel Reese, $1.7 million
Angel Reese of the LSU Lady Tigers during the 2023 NCAA Women’s Basketball Tournament championship game.
Getty Images
Reese was one of the breakout stars of the women’s March Madness basketball tournament this year. The Louisiana State University hooper led her team to the 2023 title and famously flashed a “you can’t see me” gesture in the title game.
Reese has brand deals with Airbnb, PlayStation and Intuit TurboTax INTU, -0.50%
and has appeared in ads for Amazon AMZN, +0.01%
and Pepsi Co.’s PEP, +0.59%
Starry. She also has 5.2 million followers across her social-media platforms.
During LSU’s magical title run last season, Reese set an NCAA single-season record with her 34th double-double against the Iowa Hawkeyes and was named the most outstanding player of the Final Four.
Reese is one of just two female athletes inside the top 10 in On3’s NIL valuation tracker, and the top college basketball player on the list.
6. Travis Hunter, $2.3 million
Travis Hunter of the Colorado Buffaloes signals first down after a catch against the TCU Horned Frogs.
Getty Images
Hunter was one of the college football players who transferred to the University of Colorado from Jackson State last season to follow coach Deion Sanders.
Hunter, a five-star sophomore prospect, plays on both offense and defense — as a wide receiver and a cornerback — a rarity in a high-level college program. He has 1.9 million followers on social media, a successful YouTube GOOG, -0.08%
channel, and endorsements with Celsius Energy Drink and 7-Eleven.
Hunter entered the 2023 college season as the most highly touted NFL prospect at Colorado, and Deion Sanders contends rival schools have attempted to poach him via lucrative NIL deals.
“People offered Travis Hunter a bag — about $1.5 million to try to lure him and buy him out of the transfer portal,” coach Sanders told 247Sports over the summer. “But Travis is not the kind of guy that can be bought. He isn’t built like that. Travis is a relational young man that is built on relationships and stability. And that’s what he wanted and desired. That is why he decided to ride and stay with us.”
If and when Hunter decides to declare for the NFL draft, he will likely have a multimillion-dollar contract as a rookie that could dwarf his collegiate NIL earnings.
5. Caleb Williams, $2.7 million
Caleb Williams of the USC Trojans warms up before a game against the Arizona State Sun Devils.
Getty Images
The University of Southern California QB is seen as a generational NFL prospect and the presumptive No. 1 overall pick in the 2024 NFL draft, but he isn’t the top NIL earner.
Williams has 347,000 followers on social media, and brand deals with United Airlines UAL, -1.24%,
Alo and Beats by Dre.
Once the USC junior QB declares for the draft, his rookie contract will likely be set above $37 million, per Spotrac’s estimates.
4. Arch Manning, $2.8 million
Arch Manning of the Texas Longhorns warms up prior to a game against the Alabama Crimson Tide.
Getty Images
The Texas Longhorns freshman QB is one of several top NIL earners whose family plays a role in their fame. Arch Manning is the nephew of Super Bowl champion QBs Peyton and Eli Manning, and the grandson of former NFL QB Archie Manning.
Despite being a backup quarterback with no recorded statistics, the younger Manning has 277,000 followers on social media and has a brand deal with Panini. That deal involved him autographing an extremely rare one-of-one Prizm Black card that was auctioned off for $102,500, which was later donated to charity.
Manning was a standout high school recruit, ranked No. 5 in the nation in the 2023 class, and could have an NFL future.
3. Livvy Dunne, $3.2 million
Olivia Dunne of LSU looks on during a PAC-12 meet against Utah.
Getty Images
Dunne is the only college athlete in the top 10 of NIL earners who doesn’t play basketball or football. The junior LSU gymnast is the top female NIL earner in the nation and has brand deals with Vuori clothing, Body Armor KO, +0.62%
and American Eagle Outfitters.
Dunne is the second most-followed college athlete on social media with 12.1 million followers on Instagram, TikTok and X combined.
For many years Dunne was seen as the poster child for NIL deals, and she said earlier this year that she could make as much as $500,000 from a single post.
“What I love with certain brands is getting long-term brand deals,” Dunne said on the Full Send podcast in June. “Those are probably the best because you build a relationship with the brand and they want you year after year.”
2. Shedeur Sanders, $4.8 million
Shedeur Sanders of the Colorado Buffaloes celebrates as he walks off the field following an NCAAF game against the Arizona State Sun Devils.
Getty Images
University of Colorado’s Shedeur Sanders has become a phenomenon in the sports world. The 21-year-old junior made headlines after throwing for 510 yards and four touchdowns in Colorado’s season-opening shocker against No. 17–ranked Texas Christian.
Colorado has become the center of the football world since Shedeur’s father Deion took over as coach. Coach Prime’s team is currently 4-2 — the team was 1-11 last season, good for last place in its conference.
The quarterback has more than 2.3 million followers on social media, and has already inked several deals with big brands, including with yogurt producer Oikos 0KFX, -1.13%,
Gatorade and Mercedes-Benz. He has shown fans some of his new Mercedes cars on social media, too.
Overall, Shedeur Sanders’s NIL value currently sits at $4.8 million, according to On3, up from $1.5 million at the beginning of the year — that’s the highest value in all of college football. For context, that’s nearly twice the average NFL player’s salary.
1. Bronny James, $5.9 million
Bronny James playing at his high school, Sierra Canyon.
Getty Images
James has perhaps the most famous family member of any person on this list. He is the son of NBA legend LeBron James, and is currently set to begin his freshman basketball season at USC.
The younger James has yet to play a game at his new school, but will immediately be one of the most well-known players in college athletics. James has 13.5 million social media followers, the most of any college athlete, and has brand deals with Nike NKE, +1.10%
and Beats by Dre AAPL, -0.06%,
two brands his dad is also repped by.
Bronny James suffered cardiac arrest in July during a basketball practice and had to be taken to the hospital. But he’s on the road to recovery, and hopes to play basketball this season.
“Bronny is doing extremely well,” the older James said last week. “He has begun his rehab process to get back on the floor this season with his teammates at USC. (With) the successful surgery that he had, he’s on the up-and-up. It’s definitely a whirlwind, a lot of emotions for our family this summer. But the best thing we have is each other.”
Roughly 125,000 borrowers will have $9 billion in student debt cancelled, the Biden administration announced Wednesday.
The cohort receiving the relief includes three groups of borrowers who have been eligible to have their debt forgiven for years but struggled to access that benefit. They are public servants who have been working for the government or certain nonprofits for more than 10 years and paying on their student loans during that time; borrowers who have been in repayment on their loans for more than 20 years; and borrowers who are severely disabled.
The announcement comes as payments are resuming this month for 28 million student-loan borrowers for the first time in three years, now that the pandemic-era payment pause has ended. Some have reported challenges enrolling in repayment plans and getting correct information from their servicers about their payment amounts.
Student-loan borrower advocates had called on the Biden administration to wipe debt off the books for borrowers who are already eligible for cancellation under the law before resuming repayment. They’ve said that would help alleviate some of the strain the return to repayment is putting on the student-loan system. It wasn’t immediately clear whether borrowers who are part of Wednesday’s announcement will have their debt cancelled right away or need to wait for a period for the discharge to be processed.
Wednesday’s announcement is distinct from the broad-based debt cancellation that’s grabbed headlines in recent months. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court struck down the Biden administration’s plan to cancel up to $20,000 in debt for borrowers earning less than $125,000.
Last week, officials provided more detail on President Joe Biden’s plan to take another stab at mass debt forgiveness. The process to determine the contours of that relief continues, with a set of meetings next week, and likely won’t be resolved for several months.
Part of groups already eligible for relief under the law
The borrowers covered by Wednesday’s announcement are part of groups that were already entitled to debt cancellation under the law, but for years have struggled to access it due to paperwork and technicalities. Officials have faced pressure from advocates for years to smooth the path to relief for these borrowers.
The group includes 53,000 borrowers who are receiving $5.2 billion in cancellations under the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program. That initiative allows borrowers who work for the government and certain nonprofits to have their student debt forgiven after at least 10 years of payments.
But it was notoriously challenging to access. Roughly 1% of borrowers who applied for relief in the first years of the program actually had their debt cancelled. The Biden administration has taken steps to make it easier for borrowers who meet the spirit of the law to overcome technicalities that in the past had stymied their path to forgiveness.
In addition, the Department of Education has approved debt discharges totaling $2.8 billion for nearly 51,000 borrowers who made more than 20 years of payments on their loans, officials announced Wednesday.
For decades, the government has offered federal student-loan borrowers the ability to pay their debt as a percentage of their income and have the remainder cancelled after at least 20 years. The idea was to provide an alternative to borrowers who couldn’t afford to pay off their debt in 10 years through a mortgage-style plan.
But in the first years, borrowers would have been eligible to have their debt forgiven under these income-driven repayment plans, more than 2 million borrowers who were in repayment for more than 20 years were still paying.
Consumer advocates and regulators said that was largely because servicers were steering borrowers towards forbearance — a status that pauses payments, but where the debt still accrues interest and borrowers don’t build credit toward forgiveness — instead of helping them sign up for these plans.
Last year, the Department of Education said it would review borrowers’ payment history to see whether there were periods when they should have been building credit toward forgiveness, but those months weren’t accurately counted. The agency said it would adjust their payment history accordingly. The 51,000 borrowers are part of this group. Already the Biden administration has cancelled the debt of more than 800,000 borrowers through this initiative.
Finally, officials said that nearly 22,000 borrowers who have a total or permanent disability will have about $1.2 billion in student loans cancelled. Borrowers with a disability that is so severe they’ll never work again qualify to have their federal student loans wiped out. But for years, many eligible borrowers found the application process, which historically required them to provide proof of their disability, challenging to navigate.
In 2021, the Biden administration announced it would match borrowers’ data with data at the Social Security Administration, which through its work administering disability benefits has the information that would indicate whether a borrower is eligible for a total and permanent disability discharge. The roughly 22,000 had their debt discharged approved through this data match, the agency said.
“For years, millions of eligible borrowers were unable to access the student-debt relief they qualified for, but that’s all changed thanks to President Biden and this administration’s relentless efforts to fix the broken student-loan system,” Miguel Cardona, the secretary of education, said in a statement announcing the relief.
“Today’s announcement builds on everything our administration has already done to protect students from unaffordable debt, make repayment more affordable and ensure that investments in higher education pay off for students and working families,” he added.
With his confidence and his aphorisms, to say nothing of his coaching skills, Deion Sanders has led the University of Colorado football program to a 3-0 record and a top 20 ranking.
Just weeks into his first season at the helm in Boulder, Sanders, known as “Prime Time” when he played in the NFL — and MLB — and now called “Coach Prime,” has already made his Buffaloes the most talked-about team in college football.
Colorado was 1-11 last season, good for last place in its conference.
Last weekend’s game in Boulder, against in-state rival Colorado State, drew 9.3 million viewers, making it the most-watched late-night college football game ever on ESPN DIS, -1.55%.
It also attracted star power to Boulder, with rappers Lil Wayne and Offset, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, and NBA players Kyle Lowry and Kawhi Leonard on hand.
The success and the publicity are making many people in Sanders’s orbit wealthy.
Colorado’s top three NIL — or name, image and likeness — earners this season are coach Sanders’s sons Shedeur and Shilo, and Travis Hunter. All three players transferred to Colorado from Jackson State last season, an HBCU.
His top players have cashed in on newfound fame with NIL deals to the tune of millions of dollars.
Perhaps most notable among them is his son, junior quarterback Shedeur Sanders. The 21-year old made headlines after throwing for 510 yards and four touchdowns in Colorado’s season-opening shocker against No. 17–ranked Texas Christian. Since then, he’s thrown six more touchdown passes in two further victories.
The quarterback has more than 2 million followers on social media and has already inked several deals with big brands, including with yogurt producer Oikos DANOY, -0.84%,
Gatorade PEP, +0.21%
and Mercedes-Benz MBG, -0.15%
Through his stellar play, Shedeur attracted the attention of another noted quarterback, Tom Brady, who inked the dynamic collegian to an endorsement deal with his clothing company, Brandy Brand, last October.
“I think he needs to get his a— in the film room and spend as much time in there as possible,” Brady joked with the young quarterback during a recent recording of his podcast, “Let’s Go.”
Overall, Shedeur Sanders has an NIL value of approximately $5.1 million, according to On3’s proprietary NIL algorithm, up from $1.5 million at the beginning of the year — that’s the highest value in all of college football. On3’s algorithm considers NIL-deal data, performance, influence and exposure.
While Shedeur Sanders is the headliner at Colorado, he’s not alone in mining the NIL vein. Travis Hunter, a five-star sophomore prospect, has an On3 NIL valuation of $2.2 million, the fourth highest among all college football players. Hunter’s NIL value was $1.7 million at the beginning of the year.
Hunter plays wide receiver on offense and cornerback on defense, a rarity in a high-level college program. He has 1.8 million followers on social media, a successful YouTube GOOG, +0.23%
GOOGL, +0.18%
channel, and endorsements with Celsius Energy Drink and 7-Eleven.
Hunter entered this season as the most highly touted NFL prospect at Colorado, and Deion Sanders contends rival schools have attempted to poach him via lucrative NIL deals.
“People offered Travis Hunter a bag — about $1.5 million to try to lure him and buy him out of the transfer portal,” coach Sanders told 247Sports over the summer. “But Travis is not the kind of guy that can be bought. He isn’t built like that. Travis is a relational young man that is built on relationships and stability. And that’s what he wanted and desired. That is why he decided to ride and stay with us.”
Sanders’s other son on the team, Shilo, is also a top NIL earner. A senior defensive back who took an interception 80 yards and into the end zone during the Buffaloes’ win over Colorado State, Shilo’s NIL value, per On3, sits at $719,000. He has NIL deals with Porsche DRPRY, +0.10%
The NCAA started allowing college athletes to profit from their names, images and likenesses in 2021, ending a years-long crusade by student athletes. Football has been the college sport attracting the most NIL deals, followed by men’s basketball, women’s volleyball and women’s basketball, according to NIL platform Opendorse.
“NIL money, that’s a real part of college football now,” former University of Colorado and NFL football player Tyler Polumbus told CBS shortly after Sanders took the coaching job at Colorado. “I never thought that Colorado would be able to live in that world and compete in that world, but with Deion Sanders it becomes a whole new land of opportunity.”
Sanders, the coach, is getting paid, too, of course.
In addition to the $33.5 million he made while playing in the NFL (to say nothing of the nine big-league baseball seasons in which he was an active player), coach Sanders is on a five-year contract with the University of Colorado worth $29.5 million, as reported by the Mississippi Clarion Ledger, with various escalators tied to performance.
If Sanders continues to have success at Colorado, he’s likely to field even richer offers from bigger-time football schools. At Jackson State, his salary reportedly was just $300,000.
The wealth coming to Sanders and his top players, including his own offspring, is also accruing to the school and brands attached to “Coach Prime.”
The university has sold out all home games on the current schedule — a first in program history — and he’s selling tens of thousands of $67 “Prime 21” sunglasses, which won’t ship until December. He’s also helping sell merchandise at Colorado’s bookstore — it’s up 819% this fall vs. 2022 — and several varieties of Colorado-themed Prime gear are sold out at Nike’s NKE, -0.86%
online store.
Also on Sanders’s radar: trademarks. The six-time NFL All-Pro, two-time Super Bowl champion and Hall of Famer has filed for trademarks on “Coach Prime,” “Prime Effect,” “Daddy Buck” and “It’s Personal,” according to attorney Josh Gerben of Gerben Intellectual Property.
Colorado plays at the University of Oregon on Saturday afternoon. The Ducks are ranked No. 10, while Sanders’s Buffaloes, unranked in the preseason, have climbed to No. 19.
Oregon is a 21-point favorite, according to DraftKings oddsmakers, but 81% of all bets have been placed on Colorado.
Deciding to go to a local community college after graduating high school in the Bay Area in 2004 was one of the best, most transformative choices Cecilia Caballera ever made.
When she made the decision, though, it felt like her only choice.
“In high school, I felt an immense amount of anxiety and fear about college and my future,” Caballera, a poet and adjunct professor in the California State University system, told HuffPost.
“My family was very poor, and I felt pressured to continue living at home and work various jobs to help pay the household bills,” she said. “I didn’t even apply to any four-year universities. I truly believed that moving away and attending a ‘real’ college was something that was only available to more privileged people.”
In spite of chatter at her high school about how community college was a second-rate experience, Caballera pressed on and applied to Los Medanos Community College in Pittsburg, California.
“Hearing that contributed to my sense of shame and doubt about not attending a ‘real’ college but I was determined to continue my education in any way, shape or form,” she said. “I knew that community college was the gateway to my future.”
Pushing through those doubts paid off. Thanks to her community college experience and an incredibly supportive counselor at the school, Caballera transferred to UC Berkeley and graduated with honors. After that, she entered a fully-funded PhD program, and in 2022, graduated with a doctoral degree in philosophy from the University of Southern California.
Courtesy of Cecilia Caballero
Cecilia Caballero, a community college grad, believes community colleges “are essential for advancing equity and justice in our public education system.”
“I would not be where I am today without my community college or [connecting with a] Latina community college counselor who understood my challenges and lived experiences, which ultimately changed the entire trajectory of my life,” Caballera said.
She believes that community colleges are invaluable sites of “transformation, empowerment, and social justice” in our communities, especially for working-class, first-generation, BIPOC students.
“Community colleges are essential for advancing equity and justice in our public education system,” Caballera said. “That’s even more true for marginalized student populations: students of color, re-entry students, student parents, system impacted students, and many more.”
Mautra Staley Jones, the president of Oklahoma City Community College (OCCC) ― the fourth-largest institution of higher education in Oklahoma ― agrees.
“Education is not one-size-fits-all, and community colleges are prepared to meet this challenge by providing an array of programs and services for students regardless of age, background or academic goals,” Staley Jones told HuffPost.
Oklahoma City Community College
“Education is not one-size-fits-all, and community colleges are prepared to meet this challenge by providing an array of programs and services for students regardless of age, background or academic goals,” said Mautra Staley Jones, the president of Oklahoma City Community College, pictured here.
Since the pandemic, news about community college hasn’t been entirely rosy. Transfer rates between community colleges and four-year institutions continued to drop last year ― an ongoing trend since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a March 2023 report from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. (On the brighter side, completion rates rose for transfer students.)
For many students, the transfer process is so hard to navigate, it can derail their college plans.
More often than not, what stalls students’ plans is credit loss: The Government Accountability Office estimated that, among students who transfer, about 43% of their college credits don’t end up counting toward a new degree — including private and public schools, as well as two- and four-year schools.
As a result, transfer students take longer to finish their degrees and end up spending more in tuition.
Experts say that both community college and universities can do a better job at communicating what courses students need or don’t need to transfer and get their bachelor’s degree.
Meeting with a transfer advisor early and often can make a huge difference in student success rates, said Staley Jones.
“Community colleges are in the business of promoting student success, whatever the academic end goal might be, which is why we have student success advisors,” she said. “We want to facilitate an easy transfer process for our students.”
Like many community colleges, Staley Jones’ school also has transfer agreements, also known as articulation agreements or 2+2 agreements, in place with many four-year institutions.
“Many schools have relationships in place with businesses and four-year institutions to facilitate students’ career dreams becoming reality,” Staley Jones said.
Despite some of the concerns above, former community college students we spoke to said attending a junior college is still one of the best investments you can make in yourself.
Below, they highlight seven reasons you should consider attending a local community college.
1. They’re affordable.
Let’s start with the obvious: Given the ever-rising cost of tuition elsewhere, you can’t beat the price of an education at a junior college.
“Choosing to attend community college was one of the best financial decisions I ever made due to the affordable tuition,” said Allen Tran, a software engineer in the Bay Area who transferred and graduated debt-free with a bachelor’s degree at San Jose State University.
Tran took advantage of the financial aid program his community college offered, which made it tuition-free and offered a $500 stipend for him to use toward books and school supplies. (He estimates that his tuition without the program would have been around $1,500.)
“I was able to save the money I would have spent my first two years had I gone to a university right off the bat, and use it to pay for the tuition at my university after I transferred,” he told HuffPost. “That completely changed the trajectory of my finances at an early stage in my life. I have that financial freedom.”
Allen Tran, a software engineer who lives in the Bay Area, thinks the affordability factor is the best perk of going to a community college.
Before transferring to the University of California, Los Angeles, Odin Contreras, a film student, attended San Bernardino Valley College, where he got an education at a fraction of the cost. Contreras, a Texas native, was paying out-of-state student costs for tuition at first, but once he became a resident of California, he only had to pay $45 a semester. Free of considerable financial stress, he could focus on extracurricular activities, which helped him get into UCLA.
“While I was at SBVC, I had time to join clubs and organizations that assisted me with building an elaborate resume, from being the president of the Dreamers Club to receiving a $20,000 grant to create my own short film on 35mm film,” he said. “I wouldn’t have had the opportunities I had if I had jumped straight into a university.”
2. Community colleges give you access to prestigious universities that might not be an option otherwise.
Tran wasn’t accepted to the schools he’d been dreaming of going to when he applied straight out of high school. His track record at community college opened doors those doors for him, though.
“For instance, I applied to San Jose State University’s CS Program in high school, was rejected, then attended community college, and was finally admitted into SJSU’s transfer class,” he said.
Many community colleges have programs that guarantee university admissions to certain schools based on course requirements. Enrolling in such a program early on was how Tran got into his dream school.
Caballera said she took advantage of a similar program called the Transfer Alliance Program (TAP). It’s a partnership between participating California community colleges and the University of California to give priority consideration to transfer applicants.
“Before meeting with a college counselor, I didn’t even know that the TAP program existed,” Caballera said.
“Moreover, the counselor also encouraged me to apply to UC Berkeley, her alma mater. At the time, I had assumed that I would never be admitted into a prestigious university like UC Berkeley, and I had no intention of even attempting to apply,” she said. “But meeting a fellow Latina who graduated from Cal absolutely blew my mind. If she could do it, I could too.”
3. Community college offers greater flexibility when it comes to schedules and class formats.
Have a weird schedule or need to prioritize work alongside your education? Community colleges are skilled in accommodating a range of needs when it comes to class scheduling and format, Staley Jones said.
“For example, our community college offers online and in-person classes that meet for the length of a traditional semester, and we also offer shorter-term class options that are completed within a few weeks over the summer or throughout the year,” she said.
That flexibility was a major benefit to Caballera when she was attending her two-year school.
“I was able to commute to my local community campus and complete my degree while living at home and working various jobs,” she said. “This flexibility was absolutely critical for me because I was able to arrange my work schedule around the two or three days a week that I was on campus for classes,” she said.
supersizer via Getty Images
Community college offers greater flexibility when it comes to schedules and class formats.
4. You can consider different majors and take different courses without feeling bad about “wasting” money.
Considering being an engineering major but not sure if you’re cut out for the course work long-term? Take a class and see. Because units are cheaper, community college gives you an opportunity to play around with different potential majors and minors, said Diocelina Arellano, a community college grad, and a social media specialist in the transportation and logistics industry.
“I was not sure what I wanted to major in so I was buying myself time to figure it out before I transferred over to a four-year university,” she said. “Besides that, everyone is taking prerequisites for the first two years of college anyway, so you can get that done at community college.”
5. Contrary to what you might think, community colleges offer a sense of community.
Arellano’s other piece of advice? Don’t wait until you transfer to find student-run-clubs or to make friends with like-minded people. Stay active on campus, she said, you don’t have to navigate community college alone. “Join the student government association and clubs at your community college,” she said. “You can still have a student life and sometimes even a better experience since it’s less crowded.”
Valerie de la Rosa, an educator in Los Angeles, California, agreed; the sense of actual community at a community college is an underrated perk.
“If I am being honest, one of the best perks I received from community college is the ability to speak on a variety of topics which has led to making many important connections,” she told HuffPost.
“I grew up in a low-income area and could not afford extracurricular activities,” she explained. “Community college offered me a chance to learn about things I had no exposure to, like art, philosophy and business.”
By the time she transferred to UC Berkeley, she could speak on a variety of topics, which made making friends in high places a whole lot easier.
“I don’t think we talk about it very much but connections and networking are one of the biggest takeaways from major universities,” she said.
xavierarnau via Getty Images
Don’t wait until you transfer to get involved in student groups or make strong connections.
6. The generational diversity is a major perk.
Nolvia Delgado is the executive director of the Kaplan Educational Foundation, a nonprofit public charity that helps underserved, underrepresented community college students transfer to top four-year colleges and universities. She’s also a Dominican-born first-generation college student and a graduate of Borough of Manhattan Community College and Smith College.
Reflecting on her own community college experience, the perk that stands out the most is the diversity of thought in the classroom.
“For example, I vividly remember that in one of my political science classes, one of my classmates worked at city hall, another was a mother of two who was finally close to graduating after multiple attempts, and then there was me ― a ‘traditional’ 19-year-old college student,” she told HuffPost.
That wide range of personal and professional lived experiences fueled the course discussions and broadened our perspectives.
Community college also seems to attract a diverse range of professors.
“Like the students, they also have diverse experiences,” Delgado said. “One of my favorite classes was an Italian class taught by an older Italian woman. In addition to teaching us basic Italian, she exposed us to the cultural differences, similarities to other Romance languages, and common mistakes. Every lesson transported us to Italy.”
FG Trade via Getty Images
There’s students of all ages and experiences at community college, which makes classroom discussion all the more enriching.
7. Because the colleges are smaller, everyone is really rooting for your success.
Whenever Caballera talks to incoming or potential community college students, she reminds them that community college is real college. (That “high school 2.0” stigma still pervades to some degree, unfortunately.)
She also highly encourages students, especially first-generation, working class, students of color, to continually seek help and support from faculty, staff and campus resources, and other students.
“Over time, you will build relationships and community, which means that you don’t have to navigate community college alone,” she said. “If you’re a first-generation, working class student of color, I realize that it can be hard to ask for help. However, just know that there is an abundance of people and programs on campus to help you achieve your educational goals and dreams. They believe in you.”
WASHINGTON ― Democrats want to eliminate the practice of legacy admissions at universities and colleges in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling overturning affirmative action, arguing that it unfairly benefits wealthy and often white families at the expense of lower-class applicants of color.
The idea is being well met by a surprising number of Republican lawmakers who cheered the high court’s decision last month, but they stopped short of endorsing federal legislation that would actually ban institutions of higher education from giving preference to students with legacy or donor status.
“I think legacy admissions, particularly at the super-elite universities, demonstrate even for them a large amount of hypocrisy, but I’m just not convinced we have the authority to tell them not to do it,” Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) said Wednesday.
Legacy-based admissions occur when a college or university gives a preference to applicants based on whether a family member graduated from that institution or is related to a donor or a faculty member. Being a legacy can provide a huge boost to one’s odds of acceptance. The admission rate for legacy applicants at Harvard, for example, is over five times that of non-legacies.
Legislation offered Wednesday by Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Oreg.) and Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.), which is called the Fair College Admissions for Students Act, would prohibit colleges and universities that participate in federal student aid programs from engaging in the practice. It would also give the Secretary of Education the ability to give certain exemptions to Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs).
“In the wake of the Supreme Court’s shameful decision to end race-conscious admissions policies, we’re about to see colleges across the country get even richer and whiter than they already are,” Bowman said in a statement. “It’s now more urgent than ever that we take action to create and support diverse learning environments, including by passing our bill to ban legacy admissions and continuing the fight to bring back affirmative action.”
The bill has lots of Democratic support but no GOP co-sponsors. However, some Republicans echoed the critiques of legacy admissions.
“It’s a little bit interesting that the elite universities which have done so much virtue signaling with regard to addressing disparities have this by which to cultivate loyalty among its students,” Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), the top Republican on the Senate Health and Education Committee, told HuffPost.
“Without taking a position, I can’t help but note that irony. If it turns out that that is a major contributor to inequality to our nation, I would expect them to voluntarily end it if they truly mean all those things for which they signal virtue,” he added of colleges and universities.
Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), a Yale Law graduate, agreed and called for “fundamental reform.” He said that admissions decisions should be “based on merit, not on who you knew, who your parents were, and what your race is.”
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who graduated from Harvard Law, said that the idea of eliminating legacy admissions would be “certainly a reasonable policy to consider.” He added, “There’s no doubt that in the wake of the affirmative action decision… there are many ways to ensure diversity in university admissions short of discriminating based on race.”
Tim Scott, the only Black Republican in the Senate and a 2024 GOP presidential candidate, also supports eliminating legacy programs at colleges, urging Harvard University to do so immediately after the Supreme Court ruling striking down affirmative action last month.
Bowman urged Scott to support his legacy admissions bill in a chance encounter at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, but the senator was noncommittal, saying only he would “look” at the proposal.
One argument that has been made against eliminating legacy admissions at top schools like Harvard is that they can also benefit minorities whose parents or grandparents are alumni.
A Harvard class of 2023 graduate who identified himself only as Wonuola told HuffPost that many of his classmates would be reluctant to give up the practice.
“As a member of the Black community at Harvard, I’ve talked to a lot of students who also would not want to see legacy admissions removed for their future children, and a lot of Black students from wealthy areas are legacy students,” he said at a Wednesday reception hosted by the Harvard Institute of Politics in downtown Washington, D.C.
He added: “Students who are admitted through legacy admissions are also qualified to be at Harvard. I think a lot of them would be admitted even if they weren’t legacies.”
But Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), another proponent of the bill, said that data shows that legacy admissions “overwhelmingly” disadvantage people of color.
Van Hollen also argued that Congress is well within its rights to legislate on the issue because of the billions of dollars it provides to colleges and universities, including students attending them. Although Harvard is a private institution, for example, nearly 20 percent of Harvard students receive federal Pell Grants.
“It’s interesting that Republicans who claim they want a fair process, equal admissions process, would be ducking with those kinds of excuses,” Van Hollen said. “I think it’s very clear that the current system is stacked against all students who are not part of that heredity privilege ― but the numbers show it’s especially stacked against students of color.”
Texas is home to the largest number of borrowers who will benefit from the reform — and debt cancellation, data from the Education Department released Tuesday morning revealed.
The three states with the largest number of borrowers who will see their student debt erased under the fix to the program, known as Income-Driven Repayment, are Texas, California and Florida, according to data from Education Department.
Nearly 64,000 Texans are expected to see around $3.1 billion in student loans canceled as a result of having paid their outstanding balance through the IDR program over the past two decades.
“Republican lawmakers — who had no problem with the government forgiving millions of dollars of their own business loans — have tried everything they can to stop me from providing relief to hardworking Americans,” President Joe Biden said Friday, announcing the plan. “Some are even objecting to the actions we announced today, which follows through on relief borrowers were promised, but never given, even when they had been making payments for decades.”
“The hypocrisy is stunning,” Biden added, “and the disregard for working- and middle-class families is outrageous.”
State
Borrower Count
Debt Eligible for Discharge (in millions)
Texas
63,730
$3,091.80
California
61,890
$2,958.80
Florida
56,930
$3,036.80
New York
42,070
$1,924.10
Georgia
38,590
$2,130.40
At the lower end, loan forgiveness through the IDR fix is least likely to help borrowers in Alaska, Wyoming and Hawaii. In Alaska, only 970 student debtors will see their debt erased through the IDR fix, the federal data revealed.
Last year, the Biden administration and Education Department announced that they would be reviewing borrowers’ accounts to make sure all student-loan borrowers’ monthly payments toward their debt have been accurately counted.
The count is an important part of the Income Driven Repayment program, which allows debtors to pay 20 or 25 years of debt as a percentage of their income and have the remainder forgiven.
Until the fix was announced, few had received loan forgiveness in exchange for paying their debt for 20 to 25 years.
The forgiveness comes as a result of a government program that promised loan forgiveness in exchange for debtors paying back their debt over two decades.
Student-loan payments are poised to resume this fall without smaller balances now that the U.S. Supreme Court has blocked President Joe Biden’s loan cancellation plan.
The Biden administration’s loan forgiveness initiative would have canceled up to $10,000 of debt for eligible borrowers, and in some cases up to $20,000.
But the Supreme Court’s conservative majority ruled on Friday that the executive branch overstepped its authority by trying to wipe out billions in student loan debt on its own.
“Six States sued, arguing that the HEROES Act does not authorize the loan cancellation plan. We agree,” Chief Judge John Roberts said, writing for the 6-3 majority.
Now it’s time for more than 40 million borrowers with federal student loans to figure out their next move. They are staring at more than $1.6 trillion in student loan debt. Add on private student loans, and the number climbs to $1.7 trillion.
Federal student loan payments have been on hold since March 2020.
On Friday, the Department of Education filed notice saying it would embark on a regulatory process that would seek an alternative pathway to student-debt relief. Activists have focused on a provision in the Higher Education Act, allowing the Department of Education to “compromise, waive, or release,” any right to collect on student loans.
Approximately 26 million people had either applied for loan forgiveness or were already eligible for the relief as of late last year, the White House said.
Here’s what to know.
When do student-loan payments restart?
In October, according to the Department of Education. Expect more specifics soon on those payments. “We will notify borrowers well before payments restart,” the department said.
While payments start coming in October, interest starts accumulating on the loans in September. Loan balances have not been accumulating interest since the payment pause started in March 2020, during the pandemic’s early days.
“We will also be in direct touch with borrowers and ramping up our communications with servicers well before repayment resumes to ensure borrowers and their families are receiving accurate and timely information about the return to repayment,” an Education Department spokesperson said.
There’s a range of estimates on how much student-loan borrowers typically pay each month on their loans.
According to Bank of America data, $180 was the median monthly student-loan payment as of January 2020. Federal Reserve research before the pause said the average monthly payment was $393, while the median payment was $222.
Can I lower my payments?
Possibly yes, with a range of income-driven repayment plans through the Education Department. These plans are supposed to make repaying loans more affordable by letting borrowers modify their monthly payments based on their income.
While these plans already exist, the department is reworking them. As a result, more monthly income will be shielded from the calculations on what a person could repay for student loans each month, meaning payments will become more affordable. While the revised plans are not in effect yet, the existing plans are up and running.
Many people will likely struggle to fit a student-loan bill back into their budget — the question is how far that financial hardship will go. Student-loan payments would be hitting at a time when car loan and credit-card delinquencies are already rising from their pandemic lows, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
Part of the Biden administration’s Supreme Court arguments pointed to the possible economic consequences of resuming student-loan payments without canceling some of the debt.
Without cancellation, there will be a “surge” of loan defaults and delinquencies once payments resume, Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar told the justices during oral arguments earlier this year.
When deciding which debts have to get paid first, a student-loan bill might fall behind other monthly debts like a mortgage or a credit-card bill.
Anywhere from roughly one-third to three-quarters of borrowers could miss their first student-loan bill when payments resume, according to projections from the credit score company VantageScore.
A missed first payment — in theory — could eventually lead to an average 49- to 82-point reduction in a credit score ranging from 350 to 850, VantageScore researchers said.
However, President Biden on Friday announced a temporary “ramp-up” — a 12-month grace period for borrowers who miss student-loan payments. If borrowers miss payments during this time, they won’t be reported to any of three main credit bureaus — Equifax EFX, +0.37%,
TransUnion TRU, +1.06%
and Experian EXPGF, +0.80%
— and they won’t go into default.
The ramp-up will run from Oct. 1, 2023 through Sept. 30, 2024.
“This is not the same as the student-loan pause, but during this period — if you miss payments — this ‘on ramp’ will temporarily remove the threat of default or having your credit harmed,” Biden wrote in a tweet Friday.
Prior to the payment pause and Biden’s ramp-up announcement, loan servicers waited for a borrower to miss three straight payments before they reported it to the credit reporting bureaus, according to Scott Buchanan, executive director of the Student Loan Servicing Alliance.
In the meantime, brace for potentially long call hold times, curtailed hours and loan servicer glitches, borrower advocates say. It stems back to Congressional cuts on the funding for vendor contracts that handle the day-to-day details of student-loan repayments.
The Supreme Court knocked down the Biden administration’s plan to cancel up to $20,000 in student debt for a wide swath of borrowers, the court announced Friday.
The decision means that the White House won’t move forward with the plan for now, though it’s possible officials could try to launch a new version of the debt-forgiveness initiative using a different legal authority. Roughly 26 million borrowers applied for or were automatically eligible for debt relief under the Biden administration’s plan, which canceled up to $10,000 in student debt for borrowers earning less than $125,000 and up to $20,000 in federal loans for borrowers who met that criteria and also used a Pell grant in college.
Americans owe $1.7 trillion of student loans and the White House had estimated that more than 40 million borrowers would benefit from the initiative. But almost as soon as the Biden administration announced the debt-forgiveness plan last year, opponents looked for ways to challenge it legally. Ultimately, two cases made it to the high court.
In one case, two student-loan borrowers sued over the debt-relief plan in part because the Department of Education didn’t submit it for public comment. That, they said, resulted in an initiative that arbitrarily left out or limited the amount of relief available to some student loan borrowers, like themselves. The suit filed by the borrowers was backed by the Job Creators Network, a conservative advocacy organization co-founded by Bernard Marcus, the co-founder of Home Depot, who also supported former President Donald Trump.
Six Republican-led states brought the other case on the basis that canceling debt could harm their state coffers.
The court considered two issues in these cases. The first is whether the plaintiffs had standing, or the ability to bring a lawsuit because they’ve been directly harmed by the policy. The second is whether the Biden administration overstepped in its executive authority when issuing the policy. In order for the justices to reach the second issue, or the merits of the case, they had to find that the plaintiffs had standing to sue.
Legal experts, including some who believed the Biden administration didn’t have the authority to authorize the debt-relief plan, were skeptical of the notion that the parties bringing the cases had standing to sue. During oral arguments in February, the court’s three liberal justices also questioned whether the parties who challenged debt forgiveness were actually injured by the policy.
In addition, one of the members of the court’s conservative wing, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, asked pointed questions about the six states’ argument that they had standing to sue in part because the debt-relief plan would injure the state of Missouri. That claim surrounded the Missouri Higher Education Loan Authority, or MOHELA, a state-affiliated organization that services federal student loans. The states had argued if MOHELA lost accounts due to the debt-relief plan, its revenue would decline and that loss would hurt Missouri because of MOHELA’s ties to the state.
Despite these questions, Barrett agreed with the court’s five other conservative judges and found that the states have standing to sue. The three liberal justices dissented.
“MOHELA is, by law and function, an instrumentality of Missouri,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority opinion. “It was created by the State, is supervised by the State, and serves a public function. The harm to MOHELA in the performance of its public function is necessarily a direct injury to Missouri itself.”
The court’s decision in the states’ suit allowed the justices to get to the merits of the case. The parties challenging the debt-relief plan argued that the Department of Education went beyond the authority Congress delegated it in discharging student debt. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar argued to the justices that in canceling student debt, the Secretary of Education acted “within the heartland” of the authority Congress provided to him under the HEROES Act, a 2003 law that aims to ensure student-loan borrowers aren’t left worse off by a national emergency.
The court’s conservative majority sided with the states, with a 6-3 decision, striking down the debt-relief plan in its current form.
“The HEROES Act allows the Secretary to ‘waive or modify’ existing statutory or regulatory provisions applicable to financial assistance programs under the Education Act, but does not allow the Secretary to rewrite that statute to the extent of canceling $430 billion of student loan principal,” Roberts wrote.
In the months leading up to the court’s decision, White House officials said there was no backup plan for if the Supreme Court knocked down the debt-forgiveness initiative. Advocates and activists have said that student-loan repayments shouldn’t resume until the Biden administration fulfills its promise to cancel some student debt.
The bill President Joe Biden signed in June to raise the nation’s debt limit requires that the Department of Education end the pause on federal student loan, interest payments and collections 60 days after June 30, 2023. Interest on federal student loans will resume starting September 1 and payments will start to come due in October, according to the Department’s website.
Advocates and activists have said for years that the Higher Education Act provides the Secretary of Education with the authority to discharge student loans. In ruling that the HEROES Act didn’t authorize the Biden administration’s debt-relief plan, the court left the option open for the Biden administration to create a loan-forgiveness program authorized under the HEA.
The court’s decision marks the latest development in a more-than-decade-long push to get the government to cancel student debt en masse. The idea, which has its origins in the Occupy Wall Street movement, made it to the presidential campaign stage during the 2020 cycle and was adopted by the White House last year.
Proponents of student debt cancellation and the Biden administration, have expressed concern that without some kind of relief a large swath of borrowers could slip into delinquency and default with the return of student loan payments later this year.
