College-Bound Students To Miss Out on Billions in Financial Aid Due To Pandemic (cnbc.com) 107
This year, students may need extra help to make college a reality. From a report: Amid the coronavirus crisis and sky-high unemployment rates, less than half of families feel confident in their ability to meet the costs of higher education, according to education lender Sallie Mae. About 69% of parents and 55% of students entering college in the fall said Covid-19 has impacted their ability to pay for school, according to a separate poll of 6,500-plus high school seniors and their families by NitroCollege.com, a site that helps students and parents navigate college admissions and financial aid. Already, nearly 40% of parents have tapped their child's college fund to help cover expenses due to economic fallout from the pandemic, according to another report by LendingTree. Yet fewer families have applied for financial aid. Only a few more weeks remain until the June 30 deadline for submitting the Free Application for Federal Student Aid for the upcoming fall semester. The FAFSA form serves as the gateway to all federal money, including loans, work-study and grants, which are the most desirable kind of assistance. With just about a month to go, the number of applications is down 2.8% from last year, with roughly 55,000 fewer high school seniors applying, according to the National College Attainment Network.
Bad summary (Score:3)
The article is about how the economic meltdown has impacted on incomes and savings.
Communist Ms. Mash Peddles White Guilt (Score:1)
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Yes, but that does affect ability to afford college. So not as egregiously incorrect as normal. But there is a reason why RTFA has become a common acronym on slashdot.
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Actually, no. It's a perfect summary. So perfect, that there's barely any additional useful info in the article. Article basically says people have less money, have tapped out their kids college savings for other expenses, but that FAFSA submissions are currently down 40%. So people are in greater need of financial aid, but fewer people have applied. If people miss the deadline, then as the title says, billions will be unclaimed. About the only thing useful in the article thats not in the summary is that i
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Actually, no. It's a perfect summary. So perfect, that there's barely any additional useful info in the article. Article basically says people have less money, have tapped out their kids college savings for other expenses, but that FAFSA submissions are currently down 40%. So people are in greater need of financial aid, but fewer people have applied. If people miss the deadline, then as the title says, billions will be unclaimed. About the only thing useful in the article thats not in the summary is that if you already submitted your FAFSA but your financial situation has now changed, you can amend the application.
They are not "missing out on billions in financial aid due to pandemic". They are missing out because they didn't apply for financial aid, or didn't update their application as their financial circumstances changed. In other words, they aren't getting aid because they didn't ask for it, same as in any other year without a pandemic.
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And yet, this is the only year where application are down by 40%. I wonder what caused that change. Might be the weather, I suppose. Or maybe these damn gen-Z (or whatever you call their generation now) kids are suddenly just too damn lazy to even go to school.
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Damn it. WTF did I just submit. Before you roast me, yes the 40% was totally wrong. I wasn't thinking and messed up the numbers in the article. DELETE DELETE...HOW DO I DELETE.
My point still stands. Why is it suddenly down this year
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Damn it. WTF did I just submit. Before you roast me, yes the 40% was totally wrong. I wasn't thinking and messed up the numbers in the article. DELETE DELETE...HOW DO I DELETE.
My point still stands. Why is it suddenly down this year
Why are college applications down this year? I know some people are deciding to wait things out because they don't want to pay full price for a remote experience. Maybe some people are also impacted by the financial crunch and have postponed their plans.
But what does that have to do with people planning to go who have not filed or updated their financial aid forms? It's not like the schools don't remind you constantly. They WANT you to do it, you are more likely to sign up when it is more affordable.
Skills shortage (Score:1, Offtopic)
This kind of thing is why many western countries have skills shortages. Education becomes too expensive and the rewards marginal, and then employers moan that they can't find the skills that they didn't want to invest in or pay for.
Sometimes this results in migrant workers with skills coming in, which the taxpayers who didn't want to fund education then moan about.
Properly funded education is the fix for a lot of our problems.
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HINT: There's a big reason why the public universities have ballooned their tuition costs over the past few decades.
When the schools have unlimited loans (Score:3)
When the schools have unlimited loans and no bankruptcy. Then they and banks have no pressure to keep costs down.
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When the schools have unlimited loans and no bankruptcy. Then they and banks have no pressure to keep costs down.
Exactly right. College costs right now are a huge scam. There is the "sticker price", and there is the "average price that people pay after financial aid and such". They tell you "private school could cost less than public if you get enough aid". The deliberately blur grants vs loans. It's a miserable process.
On the demand side though, high schools should teach kids financial literacy and about getting the best education they can afford, commensurate with the income potential of the chosen profession.
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"On the demand side though, high schools should teach kids financial literacy and about getting the best education they can afford, commensurate with the income potential of the chosen profession."
While I agree with you in principle, high school can't really teach financial literacy in a way that matters. In my opinion, that job is up to parents. Schools can teach math and how to balance a check book. They can even teach compounding interest. However, a kid doesn't learn any sort of financial responsibility
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People under 18/21 should not be locked into loans like that. They should have bankruptcy or maybe income based with max pay back time.
So you if go that master and are 100K in the hole and only work you find is mc'd at min wage then after X years you bill is 0 with no tax on that.
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People under 18/21 should not be locked into loans like that. They should have bankruptcy or maybe income based with max pay back time.
So you if go that master and are 100K in the hole and only work you find is mc'd at min wage then after X years you bill is 0 with no tax on that.
I think few banks would give an 18 year old a $100k unsecured loan without a pay-back guarantee.
I'm in favor of removing the guarantee.
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But you are crushing little Susie's dreams of becoming an artist that moves to the southwest to do something with turquoise. That requires a liberal arts degree in art history.
Actually I'm not. I'm just saying Susie should get that art history degree at a price she can afford. She can live her dream and be debt free too.
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high schools should teach kids financial literacy
"you may not borrow money for this"
If high schools did teach financial literacy, they'd have had a great reason to contradict you. Seems like you could use some financial literacy education yourself. At 4.5% it is literally stupid NOT to borrow the money because you can make more return on the funds you'd have turned up elsewhere. You're probably someone who also thinks it's "responsible" to pay off those loans early. That kind of traditionalist bourgeois thinking was the worst financial mistake I made or will ever make.
If, in 1997, I had put my $6K early payments into a company I was doing work for- you may have heard of them, Amazon- that'd only be a few million now. Even an index fund would have turned that completely miniscule amount of money into enough to start a business or retire a year earlier.
I never said all debt was bad. Debt is a tool. A good tool can help you get a job done, or take out your eye.
I have a big mortgage at %3.375 that I have no intention of paying back early. It makes no financial sense.
This thread is about people who took out excessive amounts of debt to pay for an education and are having trouble paying it back. Not people who are leveraging debt as an investment strategy.
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When you're looking solely at money, college is a waste of time. For those of us who value education, and can make good use of that education, it's about a break-even proposition:
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Real professionals get paid for their time.
When it comes to making money, programming is a nice hobby, but in case you haven't noticed, programmers today make less than they made 20 years ago. And that's not even adjusting for inflation. With H1B and outsourcing, very few employers actually care about skill and professionalism more than cheap labor.
To put it in perspective - every full time artist I know makes more than the average programmer. A few of them make 4 times the average programmer salary
we need trade schools not just pure class room wit (Score:2)
we need trade schools not just pure class room with skill gaps + big loans.
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Our college is becoming so expensive because we insist so many people go into majors that don’t offer any particular job benefits or career prospects. A sizable percentage will start but never finish and
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It's not hard to imagine, a lot of the Syrian refugees were highly educated and skilled. Many doctors and engineers. People seem to think Syria was some 3rd world country where everyone lived in mud huts but it really wasn't like that, and neither was Iraq. At least not all of it.
I was really talking about skilled migrants who come for work, not refugees and asylum claims though.
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Education has more problems than proper funding.
Problem number one is that employers have managed to almost completely externalize the costs of education, both as vocational training (providing direct skills to complete a task) and as a signaling tool for "employment worthy". Employers gain significant value out of higher education while bearing less and less of the cost.
Problem number two is related, and that's the gross abuse of a higher education degree as a filtering signal for employment without almos
vocational training also needs the drop the degree (Score:2)
vocational training also needs the drop the degree part as well.
Back when a lot of the vocational training got started they did not push the degree part as hard and then they had to add a lot of subpar gen edu stuff to get degrees + in some cases bloat out other stuff to fill the full degree time frame
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Straight vocational education ("how to be a welder") would also benefit from this, as all the added stuff to gain an accredited degree out of some kind of vocational trade certification is just added cost most employers of, say, welders, wouldn't want to pay for.
I can almost imagine that vocational schools have been padding out their curricula to "be like college" because they know all they have to do is ramp up tuition to pay for it and students will just borrow more money to meet the higher tuition.
Other
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SJW,n: Someone who observes what they perceive to be an injustice and then tries to correct it with a larger injustice that affects more people
Thanks for reminding me of my favorite tagline, time to switch back.
If I just graduated (Score:5, Interesting)
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Online education isn't new - the college I worked for offered our first fully online classes the Fall term of 1998.
What has been bad about the online education since the Covid stuff started is that *everyone* had to move online, prepared or not, technologically competent or not, trained in using a LMS (learning management system) or not, and in many cases (K-12 especially) without the resources and help needed to help the teachers do their jobs.
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Kids should skip a year anyway. Spend a year fucking off and gaining some maturity and their freshman year will generally be more productive.
Re: If I just graduated (Score:2)
I normally would agree, and spent a year off myself before college teaching kids in the Himalayas, and would recommend it for everyone...
But, what kind of worthwhile gap year can anyone have under lockdown?
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A company may ask in a job interview how you've managed the pandemic just to find out how you handle yourself in a crisis. So before someone decides to skip or bail out altogether should they put this into their considerations, too. One can take advantage of a crisis. So don't immediately run away from it, but check if this isn't something where you can show your strength.
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I'd seriously consider skipping a year.
And do what? Unemployment is at an all time high and without a degree or experience you're directly competing with most of the unemployed. If you can afford college it doesn't make any sense to set your life back a year simply because you feel like you're not getting the education you paid for.
Ultimately much of college has little to do with the quality of education anyway. I'm sure they'll teach you for free if you don't expect to get the degree you paid for in the end, and to be clear that is what you're
Shameful (Score:2, Insightful)
What we really needed to do was to forgive all student loan debts and make University free for all who wish to attend. No one should go broke trying to get educated. Student loan forgiveness would have instantly boosted our economy. Instead we gave all our money to the rich and the Walmarts of the world. We need new leadership and ideas.
Re: Shameful (Score:1)
Sounds socialist.
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Call it what you want, it is more practical. Too many young people are overburdened with student debt and are unable to start their lives due to it, especially people of color. We already have Corporate socialism. Who do you think got most of the stimulus money?
Re: Shameful (Score:1)
Oh I meant it as a compliment.
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Call it what you want, it is more practical. Too many young people are overburdened with student debt
By choice. The average cost of public, 4 year universities [usnews.com] is around $10K per year. If you borrowed ALL of it - that's $40K in debt. Not much more than the average new car. Of course, it assumes you actually work part-time too, to afford living expenses. And perhaps have a few roommates. Like most people.
When I went to college - back in the 1980s - I went to a private school in Seattle, paid for it myself, and it averaged $7600 per year. That would be equivalent to $16,000 per year, now. I applied f
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Call it what you want, it is more practical. Too many young people are overburdened with student debt
By choice. The average cost of public, 4 year universities [usnews.com] is around $10K per year. If you borrowed ALL of it - that's $40K in debt. Not much more than the average new car. Of course, it assumes you actually work part-time too, to afford living expenses. And perhaps have a few roommates. Like most people.
When I went to college - back in the 1980s - I went to a private school in Seattle, paid for it myself, and it averaged $7600 per year. That would be equivalent to $16,000 per year, now. I applied for every grant/scholarship I could get, I worked 20-30 hours per week during school (and full time during summer), rented a 2 bedroom house with 5 other guys, and graduated with zero debt.
Did I have the "collegiate experience" of living in the dorms, taking a quarter abroad, lots of social time each week? Nope. But then, I also bought my first house just 2 years after graduating, traveled when and where I wanted with 3 weeks paid vacation, and never was a slave to debt, other than a mortgage.
Similar experience. I was a commuter student at public colleges, sometimes day, sometimes night, fitting school around my jobs. And "commuting" meant taking a train, a bus, and walking to get to the campus. No student debt for me.
Re: Shameful (Score:1)
If only telling students to studies in the 80s was helpful.
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If you look at the numbers - costs today are less than what many of us paid in the 1980s (adjusted for inflation). Considering the average 4 year in-State university tuition, books, and fees comes to around $10K per year, you can DEFINITELY graduate without debt if you work part-time during school - and full time on breaks - to cover your expenses.
Easier to just say "screw it" and get Someone Else to pay for it, though, eh? It's not like learning the life skill called prioritizing (which paying for colleg
Re: Shameful (Score:1)
No idea who you are arguing with, but it isn't with what I said...
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roommates??
Some schools have forced dorm living with them at an higher cost then RENTING ON YOUR OWN!
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What we really needed to do was to forgive all student loan debts and make University free for all who wish to attend. No one should go broke trying to get educated. Student loan forgiveness would have instantly boosted our economy. Instead we gave all our money to the rich and the Walmarts of the world. We need new leadership and ideas.
OK, then
We also need to reimburse everyone who paid their loans back and those who gave years of their life to the military in exchange for an education.
We should also cap the cost of education so that no school costs more than $10K/year. Otherwise you are writing a blank check.
We have to eliminate competitive admission and legacy admission because it benefits the rich.
And since we are paying the bill we should filter out all the bullshit programs and expect some form of public service payback.
Or we can ex
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> Given the current cost of education and the rate of pay, what would that be exactly?
A good start would be no public funding, whatsoever, for degrees that amount to nothing more than learning how to run your mouth incessantly. So, none of these should ever get a cent of funding:
* Art
* Journalism
* Law
* Women's Studies
* (Minority) Studies
* Social Studies
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I think you seriously misunderstand many of the subjects on that list.
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No, I assure you, I do not misunderstand them. I just refuse to worship them because, having examined them carefully, I clearly see they are bullshit that serves no purpose other than to give those who are otherwise unable or unwilling to feed themselves to leech off a those who actually do something productive.
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Nope, not really. Most of those topics are subjects you take to become a teacher of said subject. Outside of that, most of those educational job paths offer very little positive benefit to society and we would be better off without them.
Art, history, women/minority/social studies and journalism are definitely bullshit degrees. Those are all hobbies, minus journalism which can be done by any English major. Management is sort of useful but it should really just be a two years degree that you take along with r
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Some of the best courses I took in college were the so-called l
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Journalism
Yeah, we should just unquestioningly accept everything in corporate and government press releases. Why do we need useless people to waste important people's time with stupid questions?
Law
Nope, nobody with a law degree has ever gotten a high-salary job.
History
"Those who forget history and doomed to repeat it."
Psychology
Yeah, people with mental health issues should just tough it out like Real Men (TM).
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> Yeah, we should just unquestioningly accept everything in corporate and government press releases
And exactly how do journalists keep you from unquestioningly accepting everything? How does lack of them make you unable to question? If you need a journalist to tell you what to think, you're not questioning anything.
> Nope, nobody with a law degree has ever gotten a high-salary job.
There should be no lawyers. Laws should be written as to be unambiguous and understandable by the average person. We only
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Your mama wears combat boots. Up your nose with a rubber hose.
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OK, then
We also need to reimburse everyone who paid their loans back and those who gave years of their life to the military in exchange for an education.
Because when we find a cure for a lethal disease, we cannot give it to people unless we also bring back to life those that died from it.
Or we can expect people to be adults and make good financial decisions, and live with the consequences
Given the current cost of education and the rate of pay, what would that be exactly?
The "disease" analogy is stupid.
Like everything else, education costs vary widely. There is an education available at a cost you can afford if you look for it and make choices. Sure, it wont be as fun as living on some nice private school campus at $65k/year. That's life, best you get used to living within your means right from the start.
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The "disease" analogy is stupid.
Yes, it's also stupid to say that we can't have free University without retroactively reimbursing people who already paid.
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The "disease" analogy is stupid.
Yes, it's also stupid to say that we can't have free University without retroactively reimbursing people who already paid.
There is no such thing as "free university". It's just a question of who pays.
How do you feel about reimbursing student loans?
Actually, how do you feel about reimbursing all personal loans? Why should I have to pay back my $200k mortgage when you don't have to pay your $200k student loan? We both freely chose to take those loans to buy something we wanted. What makes your loan worthy of special forgiveness?
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Because you can rent a place, but a college degree is practically essential in order to get any sort of job to maintain your existence.
You can also choose to get a much less expensive education.
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Where in the article does it say it's only about the priciest of schools?
Nowhere, because the article isn't about college financing. This thread, however, is.
It starts with "We need to forgive all student loan debt".
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All those things also sound like good ideas to me. I think we are on the same page.
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Yeah...because people more highly value stuff they get for free, relative to stuff they pay for.
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What we really needed to do was to forgive all student loan debts and make University free
What might even be better would be for people to have some rational dialogue and maybe think up some new alternatives.
Maybe have students loans but the loans are forgivable. Contribute to society and pay your taxes and the loan will be automatically taken care of over time, but until then it's a real loan on the books. Maybe separate tuition and administration fees and put some controls on administrative costs. If there's two options and people are unhappy with both then maybe it's time to come up with o
*Big Whiff* (Score:2)
Ahhhh.... I can just smell the next "fresh" round of suckers dumping their hard earned money into the scam of "higher education".
And to think things have gotten so bad that the people that successfully avoid this scam are the ones being called stupid...
You heard me... only smart people walk into this bullshit... they will all tell you that too. It does not matter that I make 6 figures and warn the idiots... I am the idiot! Let that stupidity sink in... and people wonder why we get morons like Trump, Hilla
Re: *Big Whiff* (Score:1)
Sure no one is surprised that you take an anti education stance.
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https://www.khanacademy.org/ [khanacademy.org]
Highly recommended! and.... wait for it... NOT A SCAM!
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They don't actually want free education. They want everything just provided on a silver platter. Equal outcome for all, regardless of merit or ambition.
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That is the problem with folks like you... so poor educated that you confuse my message about a SCAM as also being "anti-education".
Please allow me to educate you... I am Pro Education! Obtaining an education is a wonderful and very worthy pursuit... but when it has been entangled with a SCAM as it has been now... well... the first thing to be done is to stop feeding the beast with fresh bodies.
If everyone calls the scam out... it will stop and yes the businesses that are hiring will respond appropriatel
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No, he is taking an anti-bullshit stance. Your "Education", if you can't pay for your student loans and support yourself, is only worth the value of taking your degree, crumbling and uncrumbling it multiple times until the paper softens so that your have a piece of toilet paper to wipe your ass with.
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Fuck off Anonymous Child Molester. Stop raping children.
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There was nothing "anti-education" about the post; it was anti-schooling.
The fact that the differences eludes you says more than enough.
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differences eludes
Note to my myriad detractors: only real men have problems typing on small keyboards. ;)
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The students aren't to blame when every single adult in their life is telling them that they have to must a college degree to be a real adult, or when curriculum they should have been taught in middle school is deferred to college. The educational industrial complex, together with widespread classism, has duped these kids before they even have a chance to figure it out for themselves. Heck, we often force them to plan out their own future financial destruction before they even have their first part-time job
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No reason we can't just ban student loans now and work on the debt later. After all, people still agreed to these loan terms. I didn't force them, so why should I have to pay for it? Their debt isn't my problem any more then my debt is theirs.
Re:*Big Whiff* (Score:4, Insightful)
You misunderstand and misuse the word "scam". Higher education may be overpriced but it is not a scam.
Let's say you received a venomous bite and would surely die without receiving a timely antidote. An antidote is available, but its rarity and distance causes treatment cost to be prohibitive, say $1M. You receive the antidote, survive the incident but are saddled with debt.
Was the antidote a scam? No. It did what it was supposed to do. Was the charge BS? Maybe, but the unfairness of the bills does not make the antidote a scam.
A child can understand this, why can't you?
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When we, as educated people, make a comment about making six figures, we are talking about the number of digits to the left of the decimal point, not all of the digits.
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It has been filled with so much fucking incorrect facts and information that people don't know basic things about life
You're confusing universities with Fox News again.
title should read 'be saved from' (Score:1)
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Title should read 'be saved from $Billions in debt.' not 'miss out on Billion in loans'. First lesson here is that 'financial aid' is a loan by a bank to a young kid - it is debt, no different than a used car loan, not help. The best life that half of college degrees can get you is a Barista job at the Mall. If you want to make real money without great programmer or engineering skills then run a lawn cutting or HVAC company. Sweat pays !
Financial aid also includes grants
Problem solved (Score:1)
Make student loans illegal.
Then require universities to accept as payment a percentage of anticipated future income from students. This includes ALL students, including ones that could pay cash up front. Base the percentage on major and number of years attended. Let universities compete on their rate cards, among other things.
For example, an English major may have the following rate card:
First year: 5% of lifetime income
Second year: 8% of lifetime income
Third Year: 12% of lifetime income
Fourth Year: 15% of
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A skilled workforce benefits everyone. It should be possible to get a degree in a broad range of subjects tuition free, funded by state taxes of one sort or another (as non-regressive as possible).
That's not cost free, students still need to eat and will likely forego other income while they study, but there should be no tuition charge if you want to learn to be a master plumber, electrician, or gain a first bachelor's degree in a reasonable range of subjects including humanities, science and engineering so
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"lifetime income" will need an min level say local min wage + X% (can not count SSDI, va disability, etc) and maybe an MAX payback as well.
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Not sure I follow... (Score:2)
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It's a bad summary and even a bad article headline. The initial takeaway is that "people are missing out on financial aid", but that's not the story. People, as you mention, don't refrain from submitting their FAFSA because their family has fallen on hard times. Quite the opposite; a bad year is GOOD for increasing one's financial aid award.
What this article demonstrates is that, even with financial aid, families are predicting that they won't be able to cover the gap ("expected family contribution") betwee
How much do they contribute to the economy? (Score:2)
I remember getting money from the government every year I went to school as a student. The students are already getting money and not doing much except for learning and the occasional student that has a job.
Sacrifice (Score:2)
It's a sacrifice. That's what we're told to expect; we must sacrifice to manage the pandemic.
Not sure why the echo chamber is citing this group of people for special attention, or why I should care especially. They're just suffering the necessary sacrifice, right?