The debate highlights the deep problem with referring to grants and loans under the umbrella term “financial aid.” Pell Grants are financial aid. So are scholarships. Both reduce the amount of money that students and parents have to pay for college. Loans are different—you have to pay them back, with interest. Federal loan programs are “aid” only when they reduce interest rates below market rates or give people access to credit that wouldn’t otherwise be available. Even then they don’t cut the price of tuition by a dime. When the Honda dealer offers me easy credit on a new Civic, I understand that he’s not trying to give me “aid.” He’s trying to sell me a car.
Some people say that we can’t afford to help our kids through school by keeping student loan interest rates low. But right now, as I speak, the federal government offers far lower interest rates on loans, every single day–they just don’t do it for everyone. Right now, a big bank can get a loan through the Federal Reserve discount window at a rate of about 0.75%. But this summer a student who is trying to get a loan to go to college will pay almost 7%. In other words, the federal government is going to charge students interest rates that are nine times higher than the rates for the biggest banks–the same banks that destroyed millions of jobs and nearly broke this economy. That isn’t right. And that is why I’m introducing legislation today to give students the same deal that we give to the big banks. Big banks get a great deal when they borrow money from the Fed. In effect, the American taxpayer is investing in those banks. We should make the same kind of investment in our young people who are trying to get an education. Lend them the money and make them to pay it back, but give our kids a break on the interest they pay. Let’s Bank on Students… Unlike the big banks, students don’t have armies of lobbyists and lawyers. They have only their voices. And they call on us to do what is right.
via Public Research Associates.
Koch’s toxic dollars hit higher education, eroding academic freedom.
“Although the Koch Foundation’s objectives are written so as to sound upbeat and cheerful, they amount to code words calling for the dismantling of the welfare state,” [Cary] Nelson [, president of the American Association of University Professors and Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences and professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,] wrote in an e-mail. “ ‘Economic freedom’ sounds like mom and apple pie until you realize it means the government shouldn’t collect taxes, and ‘free voluntary processes’ means buy health care on your own if you can afford it.
“It is wholly inappropriate for an outside foundation to use a university to promote its ideological biases in this way,” he continued. “The Kochs can fund positions to hire faculty members who study these issues, but not control what stand the faculty members hired take on them. That distinction is part of the firewall protecting academic freedom.”
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I have a different way of thinking about Facebook to try out. How about “the hand that burns the cradle rules the world”? I say this because Facebook had its infancy in higher education, which also was its first user base. It’s ironic now to see it spite the very community that gave it its start. Is this the Web 2.0 equivalent of the teen tantrum, only with a teen that has a much larger circle of friends?
It’s interesting to see Jessica Krywosa, director of Web Communications at Suffolk University referring to Facebook as “the Wild, Wild West.” That was a simile we used to describe the Internet in its adolescence, in the late ’90s. We are supposed to have moved away from this, especially with Web 2.0, the “read-write” web.
I understand and am somewhat critical of the concern about “branding” of higher education. On the one hand, good marketing brings students, and we love them. On the other, I argue that too rigid a concern with branding impinges on academic freedom thereby diluting creativity.
That having been said, there is the larger issue of improving the quality of information about organizations by negotiation. This is one thing organizations do. (Can’t we all just get along?) Lastly, we are in part talking about the failure of search algorithms. A visit to the community pages of one of the campuses where I teach turns up a reference to “drunk dialing” from a party. I’m sure that’s not a image of the institution it wants to offer to the public.
Speaking most generally, then, this becomes an issue of the human curation of content. (Might this after all be the web equivalent of peer review?) I’m not convinced that the introduction of artificial intelligence some see as a defining characteristic of Web 3.0 will be the liberating and democratizing moment many see in Web 2.0.
May 12, 2010, 03:45 PM ET
An official Facebook page is like a garden. Colleges have invested effort and money tending their patches of the social-networking site, even bringing in outside vendors to help with the landscaping.
Now they’re fretting that a new Facebook feature—community pages—will undermine their efforts.
Community pages aggregate content about topics by pulling information from Wikipedia and from posts by Facebook users connected to those topics. So, for example, the community page for Clark College displays one post about an upcoming conference and another slamming the institution as a place “run by morally corrupt DB’s.” If you search for Clark, the site doesn’t even turn up its main page in the top eight results, as the blogger Michael Fienen points out in a post entitled “Facebook Hates Your Brand.”
The problem, as Jessica Krywosa sees it, is that nobody has reached out to official sources to hijack their pages and make them the community page, where everyone could get information from one space.
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