Posted by Maica Pichler on February 27, 2015 at 12:00 PM
The Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education recent report, Indicators of Higher Education Equity in the United States, has brought to light the past 45 years of growing inequality in our higher education system. The basics of the report: since the 1980s, parallel to the phenomenon of sky rocketing price of tuition, state and local governments have reduced their spending on higher education, while Federal funding of Pell grants pays for an increasingly smaller share of the cost of attending college. Thus, the financial burden of paying for tuition have been increasingly placed on to American families to compensate for continued state and local government divestment of higher education.
Read more
Posted by Maica Pichler on February 27, 2015 at 7:55 AM
This is an excerpt from a post by Eric Kelderman and The Chronicle of Higher Education. Read the full story here.
Amanda Raven Smith wants to go to college. But she doesn’t want to have the same experience as her father, who spent decades paying off student loans for a degree he couldn’t afford to finish.
"I had been planning on it," she said, "but didn’t have a way to do the funding."
Read more
Posted by Maica Pichler on February 09, 2015 at 11:33 AM
Bob Samuels is president of UC-AFT and a lecturer at UCSB. He is the author of seven books including Why Public Higher Education Should be Free. He writes the blog Changing Universities.
President Obama’s plan to make the first two years of community college free is a great first step in the larger movement to increase college access, affordability, and quality. The president’s initiative will help to decrease the net cost of higher education for millions of students, and even if it does not get the support of Congress, the plan has already changed the public conversation about the future of higher education in the United States.
Read more
Posted by Maica Pichler on February 05, 2015 at 6:07 AM
As student debt continues to climb while higher education becomes increasingly vital, yet less accessible for working families, states and localities are beginning to look for new ways to prioritize college affordability. Over the past decade, several communities have established postsecondary opportunity programs—frequently referred to as “promise programs”—that offer a combination of college funding and support services to their residents.
Read more
Posted by Maica Pichler on January 20, 2015 at 8:45 AM
The single biggest challenge in equalizing economic opportunity in America has been finding a way to bring the educational performance of urban students up to the level of those attending school in the suburbs. The latest research on the Kalamazoo Promise, which inspired our Campaign originally, suggests the key to meeting this challenge is to enact programs such as theirs to provide a guaranteed free college education for everyone in America.
The first-ever comparison of post-secondary outcomes for Kalamazoo-area public high schools compiled by the Kalamazoo Gazette shows graduates from Kalamazoo Public Schools are outperforming many of their peers across the region when it comes to college enrollment AND completion of the first year of college. Michelle Miller-Adams, who has written a book about the Kalamazoo Promise and conducted extensive research on its outcomes for the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, says the results “provide strong evidence that removing the financial barrier to college works in raising post-secondary outcomes.”
Read more
Posted by Maica Pichler on January 08, 2015 at 4:07 PM
WASHINGTON, DC – The Campaign for Free College Tuition (CFCT) applauds President Obama’s initiative to make community colleges tuition free in partnership with state governments.
“The President’s plan would transform the nation’s higher education system, and help countless families make the American Dream a reality for their children. For many, it could cut the cost of a four-year college degree in half. The plan deserves, and should get, bipartisan support,” stated Morley Winograd, the President of the Campaign for Free College Tuition (CFCT).
Read more
Posted by Maica Pichler on December 09, 2014 at 12:08 PM
If anyone needed proof that the escalating price of college tuition will be a topic of great and heated debate in America, the recent showdown between the Governor of California, newly re-elected Jerry Brown, and the new President of the University of California system, Janet Napolitano, should be evidence enough.
Read more
Posted by Maica Pichler on November 25, 2014 at 3:00 PM
Can Yale -- the formidable pillar of American higher education -- provide education to its students free of charge? Yale senior Eric Stern thinks so. Writing in the Yale Herald, Stern profiles Berea College in Kentucky, a school that offers free tuition to its 1,600 undergraduate students. Extrapolating Berea’s tuition model, and applying it to the vast endowment of Yale, Stern argues persuasively that his Ivy League alma mater can implement the same for its student body. Even applying conservative constraints onto Yale’s finances, the verdict remains clear: every Yale student could attend for free.
Read more
Posted by Maica Pichler on November 19, 2014 at 12:29 PM
The Campaign for Free College Tuition will work on the federal, state and community level to make America’s public colleges and universities tuition free.
NEW HAVEN, CT – Today, the Campaign for Free College Tuition (CFCT) --freecollegenow.org -- launched with a mission to make public colleges and universities tuition free in all fifty states. Formerly known as Redeeming America’s Promise, CFCT will support and advance state and community programs, as well as a federal plan, providing a tuition free college education to students across the country.
CFCT’s bipartisan effort to eliminate cost as a barrier to college access will be chronicled on their new website, which has also been designed to highlight a robust collection of federal, state, and local programs seeking to address postsecondary access and affordability. The constantly growing database of efforts across America, will allow CFCT to collaborate and partner with organizations, as well as with elected officials and the business community, towards shared goals.
Read more
Posted by Maica Pichler on November 15, 2014 at 12:00 PM
On Thursday, November 20th, The Campaign for Free College Tuition will participate in PromiseNET 2014. This conference gathers organizations that are committed to offering free college tuition for high school graduates in their communities, which means we’ll be surrounded with people who have the same goals as we do.
Read more
