Posted by Maica Pichler on June 17, 2014 at 10:00 AM
As of November 2014, Redeeming America's Promise is now named the Campaign for Free College Tuition. American Promise scholarships are now known as National Promise scholarships.
New Organization Releases Plan to Address Tidal Wave of Student Debt
WASHINGTON, DC – A plan to make public colleges and community colleges tuition free was unveiled today by Redeeming America’s Promise (RAP). RAP is a new nonprofit organization established to educate parents, students, the higher education community, policy makers and taxpayers about efforts needed to reform fundamentally our nation’s broken system for financing the cost of higher education.
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Posted by Maica Pichler on June 12, 2014 at 10:51 AM
As of November 2014, Redeeming America's Promise is now named the Campaign for Free College Tuition. American Promise scholarships are now known as National Promise scholarships.
If you are in the Washington, DC area, please join us for a June 17th briefing announcing the launch of Redeeming America’s Promise (RAP), a new non-profit organization established to educate parents, students, the higher education community, policy makers and taxpayers about efforts needed to fundamentally reform our nation’s system for financing higher education.
Speakers will include: James Blanchard, former Governor of Michigan, Congressman, Ambassador, and Founder of the Michigan Education Trust; and Morley Winograd, Former Senior Policy Advisor to Vice President Al Gore and President of Redeeming America’s Promise.
RAP evolved from discussions that started in 2013 among a group of former elected officials and policy experts who wanted to make one more contribution to America’s future in their retirement years. The discussions grew to include academicians, Millennial organization and business leaders who were interested in finding the best way to address the challenges of college access, affordability, and attainability.
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Posted by Maica Pichler on June 11, 2014 at 12:00 PM
As of November 2014, Redeeming America's Promise is now named the Campaign for Free College Tuition. American Promise scholarships are now known as National Promise scholarships.
Since 1980, the cost of attending college in the United States has risen almost 600% after adjusting for inflation, which rose 160% in the same time period. By comparison, the cost of medical care rose by only 241% in the same three decades.
As intolerable as this increase in the price of post-secondary education is, it is even more indefensible when you realize that incomes barely budged for the average American family during this time. Outside of the top 5% of family incomes, the incredible rise in the cost of college had to be absorbed by families whose income rose by at most 20% over thirty years. No wonder the cost to the country has been an explosion in student debt, which has now topped $1 trillion mark and is the single greatest source of household debt in the entire nation.
Our country is on an unsustainable path when it comes to financing and controlling the cost of higher education. We need to put in place a new policy that simultaneously provide middle and lower income families the money they need to pay for their student’s education as well as begins to bend back the ever rising cost curve of college tuition.
Our plan to create federally funded American Promise Scholarships, convert student loans to an income based repayment process, and reward service to community or country with partial loan write offs is the only credible plan out there to fully address this crisis in higher education in a fiscally responsible manner. Please review and endorse our plan today to put an end to the skyrocketing burden of a college education once and for all.
Posted by Maica Pichler on June 11, 2014 at 11:10 AM
As of November 2014, Redeeming America's Promise is now named the Campaign for Free College Tuition. American Promise scholarships are now known as National Promise scholarships.
The increasing gap between the richest 1% in America and the incomes of everyone else has been a hot topic of conversation in the media and among policy makers. It’s a real problem and the best selling economics book of the last few decades, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century, has ignited a much needed debate over how best to address the problem.
But new research from MIT economist David Autor contends that the failure to get a college degree has actually been a greater source of economic inequality over the last five years than the income gains of the super-rich. Autor points out that from 1980 to 2012, inflation-adjusted, full-time earnings of college-educated males increased anywhere from 20 percent to 56 percent, depending on whether they also acquired graduate degrees. Conversely, real earnings of high school graduates fell 11 percent, and earnings of high school dropouts fell 22 percent. As a result, the earnings gap between the median college-educated two-income family and the median high school-educated two-income family rose by $28,000 between 1979 and 2012. This shift is four times as large as the redistribution that has taken place from the bottom 99 percent to the top 1 percent of households in the same period.
If we are serious about addressing economic inequality, we must make it possible for any academically capable and personally determined student, regardless of their financial circumstances, to be able to afford a college education. That is precisely the goal that everyone at Redeeming America’s Promise is dedicated to achieve. Join our initiative and begin to close the economic inequality gap in the United State by endorsing our plan.
Posted by Maica Pichler on May 21, 2014 at 1:56 PM
As of November 2014, Redeeming America's Promise is now named the Campaign for Free College Tuition. American Promise scholarships are now known as National Promise scholarships.
According to a new Pew Research Center analysis of government data, households headed by young adults owing student debt lag far behind their peers in terms of wealth accumulation. About four-in-ten U.S. households (37%) headed by an adult younger than 40 currently have some student debt—the highest share on record.
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Posted by Maica Pichler on May 18, 2014 at 6:54 PM
As of November 2014, Redeeming America's Promise is now named the Campaign for Free College Tuition. American Promise scholarships are now known as National Promise scholarships.
In the first quarter of 2014, homeownership for Americans 35 and under declined to 36.2 percent, the lowest on record since the census's Housing Vacancy Survey began tabulating homeownership by age in 1982. The home owning decline for young Americans was led by those in the 25-29 age group, only a third of whom owned a house, and those in the 30-34 age group, whose rate was 47.5 percent. Both of those rates were the lowest in the survey’s 32-year history as well.
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Posted by Maica Pichler on May 10, 2014 at 2:30 PM
As of November 2014, Redeeming America's Promise is now named the Campaign for Free College Tuition. American Promise scholarships are now known as National Promise scholarships.
It’s not helping our economy either. Purdue University President and Former Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels announced the results of a March survey of more than 30,000 college graduates that showed “student debt hinders our national economy just as it hinders the individual life prospects of students who borrow too much of it. It is past time for leaders in higher education to go to work on restraining costs and making sure that our doors remain open to all students who meet our standards."
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