Student Loan Crisis On WI Front Burner
Here's are updates on the student loan crisis and its growing significance in the Wisconsin gubernatorial race from Scot Ross, Executive Director, One Wisconsin Now.
From OWN's website:
In Wisconsin the response to the crisis from Gov. Walker has been silence and indifference interspersed between the largest cuts to public education in state history and hiking UW System tuition to the tune of $200 million plus for students attending over his four-year term.
Meanwhile the Republican controlled legislature gave borrowers the opportunity to offer their support during public hearings on the Higher Ed, Lower Debt Act (Senate Bill 376 and Assembly Bill 498). But when it came time to count the votes, Republicans voted along party lines to keep the full legislature from having the opportunity to debate and vote on the bill.
The good news is there appears to be new hope on the horizon. Gubernatorial candidate Mary Burke has included some of the common sense solutions from the Higher Ed, Lower Debt Act in her newly released "Invest for Success" jobs plan.
From Scot Ross, Executive Director:
(Disclosure: I am on the OWN C-3 board.)
Ruth Conniff, editor of the Progressive Magazine posted this story yesterday citing the most recent public polling in the Mary Burke-Scott Walker race (46-46 among registered voters) and declaring: "The student loan debt issue could decide the 2014 election." (http://www.thedailypage.com/isthmus/article.php?article=42784&sid=ab36d644248dca56c6f0c3eb1db18e38)
Later, Ruth was on "The Ed Show" and talked about our work and made the same point, echoed by Ed in a segment devoted to student loan debt's impact on the race. (http://www.msnbc.com/the-ed-show/watch/wisconsin-youth-sees-through-walkers-agenda-263689283623)I'd add that it's more than a bit ironic that while Walker and his budget are looking at more red ink, so I guess debt management and austerity are just for little people.
(Disclosure: I am on the OWN C-3 board.)
3 comments:
I wonder how much of that undergraduate debt is owed to actual teachers and how much to administrators.
From what I've read about the role of undercompensated adjunct professors, the amount to the former might be shockingly small and the amount to the latter might be shockingly large.
Student debt is the direct result of a flawed k-12 system. Many UW students are going to earn less money than students graduating from a vocational school. Why blame k-12? Simple. It's all about the stats for each district to show how smart their public education grads are. We eliminated or significantly reduced the vocational and tech ed classes and counselors tell students what a failure the'll be if they don't go to a 4 year school. Now, school collect trophies. Here's a few; most students taking the ACT, greatest percentage of students going on to a 4 year college, greatest amount of scholarship dollars for the graduating class. Clearly, this is a professional feather in the cap of any superintendent of a school district. The truly sad part is, there are no more college grads that 25 years ago, but a whole lot more have a very bleak financial future
". . . . Gov. Walker has been silence and indifference interspersed between the largest cuts to public education in state history and hiking UW System tuition to the tune of $200 million plus for students attending over his four-year term."
except that when it came time for his own sons to attend the U of Wis, he froze tuition and blamed the tuition hikes on the University.
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