Why Are Colleges Handing Out Financial Aid to Wealthy Students?

By Mary Ellen Flannery It’s simple cause and effect: As state funding for public higher education has dropped over the past decades, student tuition has risen an almost equal amount. But where the equation gets more complicated is inside some college admissions offices, where “merit-based,” not need-based tuition aid, is increasingly directed to the wealthiest [...]

A Small College Strikes a Big Blow For Good-Faith Bargaining

By Mary Ellen Flannery Let’s say you’re bargaining a contract this spring, and it’s not going well. Maybe the other side is coming to the table with regressive proposals. Or maybe they’re not coming to the table at all. You’re feeling frustrated, exhausted, and angry. Believe it or not, the process can work. Take a [...]

How to Improve Obama’s ‘College Scorecard’

By Mary Ellen Flannery The White House’s new “College Scorecards,” touted by President Obama in his State of the Union Address and available online, provide a new layer of transparency for students, parents, and teachers who are seeking more information about the “value” of different colleges. Each scorecard, one for each college or university in [...]

NLRB to Rule on Graduate Students Right to Unionize

By Mary Ellen Flannery To slow the progression of multiple scleroris in her body, Kristi Brownfield, a graduate student at Southern Illinois University Carbondale (SIUC), needs to take $1,700 worth of medication each month. As a low-paid teaching assistant, she can’t afford it. But there’s new hope for Brownfield— and it’s the contract between SIUC [...]

NEA Presses for Adjunct Faculty Rights

By Mary Ellen Flannery Consider a few facts about adjunct faculty in America. They account for 75 percent of all faculty members, according to a 2009 U.S. Department of Education survey. And they likely earn $19,200 a year (with a master’s degree) and a scant $22,400 after earning a doctoral. “Think about what it’s like [...]

Online Classes Should be About Enriching, Not Privatizing, Education

By Mary Ellen Flannery As online courses continue to grow rapidly in number and size, and as some colleges begin to experiment with the use of “academic coaches” or even robots to lead those courses, some educators are wondering whether it’s all a scheme to privatize teaching and rid campuses of tenured faculty. In 2009, [...]

U.S. Competitiveness Undermined By Cuts in Higher Education

By Mary Ellen Flannery When state and federal lawmakers invest in public higher education, it pays off— not just for those college degree-earning students, who will earn much more money over their lifetimes, but also for their country, which will enjoy billions of dollars in additional revenues, concludes a recent report. Unfortunately, the United States [...]

NEA Joins Obama In Call For Lower Student Loan Rates

By Tim Walker On July 1, more than 7.4 million students with federal student loans will see their interest rates double from 3.4 to 6.8 percent unless Congress steps in to keep them low.  For each year Congress allows the rate to double, the average student with these loans will rack up an additional $1,000 [...]

Biden and Duncan Talk College Affordability at Ohio High School

By Mary Ellen Flannery In Ohio, where Vice President Joe Biden visited a high school on Thursday to promote the issue of college affordability, more than two-thirds of college students borrow money to pay for their education. Last year, thanks to rapidly rising tuition costs, each owed an average $27,000-plus upon graduation—a record-setting, dream-shattering level [...]

Duncan Stresses Student Aid, College Graduation in Twitter Town Hall

By Kevin Hart Getting America’s students to college isn’t enough – we need to make sure they complete programs and leave with degrees. That was the message delivered by U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan in a Twitter town hall hosted by veteran journalist John Merrow on November 14. The event (see video here) marked [...]

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