Category: Education

Are there poor kids who attend college against all the odds, take on student debt to finance it, and graduate with terrible job prospects under mountains of debt? The answer of course is yes. But that is not the typical case for students. As I have mentioned before, only 3 percent of students in the… Continue reading More on student issues not being poor people issues

Robert Applebaum, creator of forgivestudentloandebt.com, has positioned himself as an authority of sorts in the student loan debate. I came upon his editorial in The Hill today, and I was frankly surprised by just how misleading and incorrect much of his argument was. Applebaum first identifies what he believes is the culprit of higher tuition:… Continue reading Line-by-line rebuttal of Robert Applebaum’s student debt comments

This is really low-hanging fruit, but since I have now seen it a half dozen times, I thought I would quickly address it. Some are arguing that forgiving student loan would be a good stimulus plan: Forgiving student loan debt would have an immediate stimulating effect on the economy. Responsible people who did nothing other… Continue reading Student debt and stimulus

For one reason or another, poor kids do worse in school than rich kids. Consider for instance this breakdown of SAT scores divided by parental income: This graph tells us two important things. First, poor kids do indeed do worse on the main college admissions exam. Second, differential enrollment rates in college probably have to… Continue reading Why do poor kids do worse in school?

In my previous post, I argued that it was misleading to represent the issues of recent college graduates (e.g. student debt) as the issues of the younger generation. I pieced together some rough data from the Census and the National Center for Education Statistics that tended to show that the majority of youth are not… Continue reading More data on the student debt debate