Category: Education

Evan Soltas has a good piece in Bloomberg on the popular misconception that college costs are soaring. The problem he addresses is that the headline number for the price of college is not actually what students pay. Colleges use price discrimination which means that they charge students from wealthier families more than those from poorer… Continue reading What is the actual cost of attending college?

I come down hard some time on student issue activism. I find it very uninteresting, generally misguided, and I worry that it consumes way too much activist time and energy. Don’t get me wrong: I like student activism, just not inward-focused student activism. Students are uniquely situated to do a great deal of organizing work… Continue reading Class and college

From Sarah Jaffe’s new website: And Elizabeth Warren knows a few things about class war too—she knows that it’s bailouts and bankruptcy law, foreclosures and student loans. If student loans are class war, who is losing? The highest-earning 10 percent of households have the highest mean student debt, followed by the next highest-earning 30 percent… Continue reading One of these things still not like the others

Regular readers will be well-acquainted with my interest in the college wage premium. The fact that college graduates make significantly more than those with lower levels of educational attainment is relevant, I argue, to debates about how best to finance higher education. Well, the Census is out with new wage premium numbers, and their estimates… Continue reading New college wage premium numbers from Census

So apparently Rahm Emanuel is suing to enjoin the Chicago Teachers Union strike. The court injunction is a long-standing enemy of organized labor; so who knows what will actually come of it. Dylan Matthews took a stab at figuring out whether Rahm had a case. Matthews quotes from the IL state statute governing educational employees:… Continue reading Another serious problem with Rahm’s lawsuit