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Guest Posts

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geg6 Guest Post

by Four Seasons Total Landscaping mistermix|  February 25, 202110:00 am| 148 Comments

This post is in: Guest Posts

I am the financial aid coordinator and VA Certifying Official at a campus of a major public research university in Pennsylvania.  I have held my current position since 1998 and prior to that I worked at the local community college for nine years.  At the community college, I coordinated services, including help with financial aid, for our disabled students and taught GED prep courses.  My entire career in higher education has been spent deep in the world of financial aid.

I read mistermix’s original post on financial aid and found some of it completely fair and some of it really off from my own experiences.  Here is my response to his post.

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A case in point is the absolute god damned mess that unfettered access to student loans has created in this country.  Whether it’s $10K, $50K or some other amount of loan that’s forgiven, somebody’s going to be getting money that someone else thinks is undeserved.  Yet far too little attention will be paid to the forty or so years during which our higher ed system gradually fucked the poor and middle class.

I totally agree with this.  It is a disgrace that we have the student loan debt situation that we have today and a total abdication of responsibility for post-secondary education and training on the state level.  In PA, it’s led to an almost bankrupt state university system, a state-related university system that is not a whole lot less expensive than a private non-profit university and a state grant system that is totally inadequate to make up for the funding cuts and resulting tuition increases made to the state and state-related universities.

My state-related, major four-year research university almost invariably vies each year with Michigan as the most expensive public university in the nation.  About 8-12% of our balance sheet comes from direct state funding.  The rest is paid for by tuition, athletic broadcast revenue and state, federal and private research grants and any profits that may accrue to the university from them.  We have three tuition tiers depending on which campus a student attends.  The highest is at our main campus, which has a population of about 48-50K undergrads (not including any grad figures in any of this as it is a totally different animal and I am not an expert in it).  Then there are four medium campuses scattered throughout the state which have anywhere from 2-5K.  Their tuition rates are several thousand less than the main campus’.  Then there are the smaller campuses, of which there are 14, and they enroll anywhere from 600-2000 students.  I work at a smaller campus.  Our tuition is several thousand less than both the main campus and medium campuses.  With the exception of the main campus, our in-state tuition rates have been frozen for the past five years because of fears we were getting too unaffordable and financially exclusive for a public university.  And even at the main campus, in-state tuition increases were 1% or less over the same time period.  So my own institution has made some significant sacrifices recently in order to keep student costs down and keep this economically important public institution inclusive. We have also significantly increased our endowments for student scholarships exponentially over the last ten years, almost all of it aimed at helping students to complete their degrees and complete them on time, providing more university based funding for financially struggling students and providing those students with opportunities such as study abroad and travel to professional conferences.  We are also providing in-state tuition rates at the smaller campuses to students who live in several border states in order to make it affordable for them, especially if they live within commuting distance from one of our campuses.  My campus is one of those campuses who has students who can easily drive to it from West Virginia or Ohio every day.  

I worked in a small rural state college financial aid office in the late 80’s/early 90’s, so I was there just when loans were getting out of control.  Here are some of the things that we could see happening that just have gotten much, much worse:

  • The Pell Grant program, which was supposed to let poor kids go to school for basically free, was starting to be outstripped by inflation and tuition that rose faster than inflation.  So, kids who had no idea about the kind of commitment they were making were getting thousands of dollars of debt as part of their financial aid package.  Yet, from the point of view of the school, it didn’t matter because loan money and grant money paid tuition.

I also agree that the Pell Grant program is totally inadequate to the challenge of the intent of the grant.  Based on what I know about the tuition rates here in PA at all the public universities, a doubling of the current maximum Pell Grant ($6345 per year) would pay for all or most of a student’s in-state tuition.  Students here in PA who qualify for the Pell also will qualify for the PA State Grant, which fluctuates in value depending on what the state budget is, but is usually around $4K.  Then there is the Federal SEOG Grant, which many Pell eligible students may receive.  Lastly, my institution has numerous institutional grants and scholarships aimed at low income students.  So a student can, if they live close enough to a campus to commute from home, get a four-year degree here without any loans at all if we just adjusted the Pell Grant to be something resembling the reality of higher education costs.  If they qualify for all of these things, without even taking into account any outside scholarships they may receive, and commute from home, tuition will be covered and so will other incidentals such as books and gas for the commute.

There are also some tweaks that could be done to the formula for determining EFC that would expand Pell beyond the very, very low income ceiling it currently has, but I know there are some big changes being considered in this area and am reluctant to talk about that until I see what is being contemplated and its chances of being implemented are.

As for schools not caring as long as the bill is paid, that would be only some schools.  Of course we want the bill to be paid, but I have never worked anywhere that gave me this impression.  I hated the community college when I worked there, but they were very compassionate to their students’ financial situations.  

At my current institution, we provide very detailed but easy to read financial aid award notifications, require parents/guardians to attend a parent/guardian session heavily focused on costs, billing and financing during summer freshman orientation and, at my campus, every student who is moving into campus housing and their parent/guardian must meet with me to discuss their aid, their bill and financing options and have a plan in writing before they can move in.  I am sometimes forced to tell a family that it would be to their detriment for their student to attend.  Sometimes those students and their families decide I am right and sometimes they decide they can figure it out.  All I can do is provide every bit of information I can, give them all the options available and allow them to make their own decisions.  I am not ever taken to task when a student decides not to enroll or move in.  We don’t want students to have bad debt any more than they do.  I realize that other schools may not do this, but it is not fair to assume that every school is just all about the Benjamins.

  • The Perkins Loan program, which was essentially a federal loan fund administered by the school, was grossly underfunded after the Guaranteed Student Loan (Stafford Loan) program, administered by banks and passed by Congress after heavy bank lobbying.  But the Perkins Loan program was so much more healthy for the school, because if the school had good collections, they could loan more money.  With Perkins loans, the school had an positive incentive to make good loans.  GSLs (and their follow-ons) had no such positive incentive – the school just had to keep its default rate down.

Can’t disagree with any of this, but, sadly, the Perkins Loan is no more.  We do have an institutional loan that we lend at what the old Perkins rates and terms were, but we have such limited funding for it every year as be able to only offer it to seniors who have exhausted all other options.

  • Single moms from rural towns would use financial aid as an adjunct to all the other programs they were receiving, making barely OK progress towards some kind of degree, but incurring (for them) staggering debt as they did.

I don’t see much of this, but it does happen sometimes.  I am guessing it is a real problem at the community college level.  Most of those students wouldn’t pay a cent in tuition there because they would qualify for all the free aid and community college tuition is so low and accept all of their loan funding to supplement whatever income they have.  And creating a huge amount of debt they didn’t need to accrue.

  • Kids from little towns would come down for a semester or a year, unprepared for college, flunk out, and go home a few thousand dollars poorer.  The debt wasn’t crippling, as it is now, but it sure didn’t help them start out in life.

This is generally not a problem for our in-state students.  But it is a huge problem with our out-of-state students.  We lose an awful lot of them every year simply because they aren’t prepared, whether that is financially, socially, academically or all of the above.  And I foresee more of it as admission requirements continue to be in flux.  There are all kinds of things that are causing issues here that are sometimes the fault of the admissions people trying to increase applications and some of them are beyond our control.  Some issues that are currently creating havoc are self-reported high school records (a final transcript will be required long after admission offers go out), not requiring any standardized tests due to their biases, limited pre-enrollment placement testing and massive secondary school grade inflation.  I’m not an admissions expert, though, so I can’t really explain or come up with any solutions to any of this.

  • We were starting to see a few transfers from private for-profit schools and it was clear those kids were absolutely worked over by those schools.

I cannot agree enough with this.  Totally ripoffs in every way.  Most of their degrees can be achieved at a community college or public university.  Students who transfer to public or non-profit privates often find that very few of their credits actually transfer, so it takes them longer to complete and costs them vastly more to do so.  And they almost all are less than transparent when it comes to financial aid and have some shady practices when it comes to private loans.  I’ve had students come to us with 60 credits and tens of thousands in federal and private loans and only have a few credits transfer in.  It’s infuriating and sad.

The government has an obvious interest in a higher ed system that is somewhat efficient, that allows students to fail without ruining them, and where four-year and community colleges stay in their lanes.  The rocket fuel of financial aid, from what I saw, fucks with each of those goals.  Colleges had “free money” that made them less efficient. Student failure led to burden, and there was duplication of effort between two-year and four-year schools.  Private for-profit schools probably shouldn’t be allowed access to federal financial aid — it’s just too much of an incentive for them to screw kids.

I agree with your first and last sentence, but everything in the middle is up for a lot of debate.

So, this whole fucking mess needs to be unfucked.  The first step is to try to address the inequity of giving kids massive loans.  It is fundamentally unjust to allow kids who can’t even drink legally to commit themselves to a lifetime of debt.  Free community college is a good next step.  But the real answer is affordable public higher education, just like the least-great generation, the boomers, had.  Unfortunately, around the mid-90s, we just decided that couldn’t happen.  Now, Democrats are stuck with yet another unfuck that will make a lot of people unhappy.

To be fair here, it is mostly parents at my institution who are taking the most risk and debt on in my experience.  Students can only receive enough federal loan funding as allowed by the federal loan system.  The maximum a dependent student can borrow in the Direct Loan program (used to be called the Stafford Loan) over his/her college career is about $31K.  Anything over and above that would be paid either by the parent through a Federal Direct Parent PLUS Loan or a private educational loan.  The PLUS is purely parent debt and cannot be put off on the student at a future date.  Private loans cannot be obtained by the student unless he/she has a credit worthy co-signer.  One thing I would love to see is in regard to private educational loans and it should be a fairly simple fix.  Currently, they are treated exactly the same as federal loan debt if a borrower files for bankruptcy in that they cannot be discharged like other consumer debts.  They are forever.  Stop that and it will make many people’s lives better.  It’s small step that will give relief to a lot of people.

I am perfectly willing to answer questions (hopefully, I can answer them!) or discuss anything above or any other topic regarding financial aid, such as FAFSA questions.  Also, if anyone has questions or wonders about what the VA educational benefit programs are these days, I’m happy to answer those questions, too.

 

geg6 Guest PostPost + Comments (148)

Medium Cool with BGinCHI – Cancel Culture

by WaterGirl|  February 21, 20216:00 pm| 254 Comments

This post is in: Guest Posts, Medium Cool with BGinCHI, Popular Culture, Culture as a Hedge Against This Soul-Sucking Political Miasma We're Living In

In case you’re new to Medium Cool, BGinCHI is here once a week to offer a thread on culture, mainly film & books, with some TV thrown in.

Medium Cool with BGinCHI – Cancel Culture

Each week, WaterGirl and I sift through the hundreds of cards & letters we get from people all over the world. In this week’s mailbag we were fortunate to spot citizen dave’s suggestion that we do a post on so-called cancel culture that coincides with the premier of the HBO documentary “Allen vs. Farrow“.

As citizen dave points out, the definition of cancel culture is: “Cancel culture (or call-out culture) is a modern form of ostracism in which someone is thrust out of social or professional circles – either online on social media, in the real world, or both.”

Dave suggests that in this week’s Medium Cool, we (paraphrasing him) discuss how a revelation about an artist caused you to reassess or stop enjoying their work. Feel free also to critique “cancel culture” as an idea.

Medium Cool with BGinCHI – Cancel CulturePost + Comments (254)

Guest Post: Albatrossity – From the Heart(land)

by WaterGirl|  February 19, 20218:00 pm| 51 Comments

This post is in: Guest Posts, Open Threads

A thoughtful essay from Albatrossity.

It’s sometimes hard to process our relationships with the natural world, and I was reminded of that, brutally, this week. The midsection of the continent has endured an intrusion of Arctic temperatures when the polar vortex weakened and then herniated. Here in my part of Flyover Country we had a week and a half of intermittent snow showers, steadily dropping temperatures, and cloud cover that eliminated our normal solar daytime heating cycle. We watched the thermometer as if it were an oracle, and it emitted increasingly ominous pronouncements.

All through the week the overnight lows crept ever lower, and the daytime highs never really lived up to that name. The birds in the neighborhood responded, as they usually do, by ramping up their feeding and foraging activities all week long. Seed-eating birds were happy to find the feeders, stocked with sunflower seeds and dried berries. Our five winter-resident woodpeckers gobbled down the suet. And the acres of buckbrush, cedar, and honeysuckle behind the house set the table for the frugivorous waxwings and thrushes.

We have a heated bird bath on the back deck that hosted ever-increasing flocks of robins and waxwings, as well as the occasional Hermit Thrush and Eastern Bluebird. Their honeysuckle-heavy diet was glaringly obvious, as piles of orange poo accumulated in rings around the water tub. We added a second water bowl; it immediately attracted customers and its own ring of poo.

Guest Post: Albatrossity – from the Heart(land)
Cedar Wawings (and one American Robin) mobbing the birdbath

For all the winters that we have lived in this house, we have had Hermit Thrushes as fellow travelers. We see them early in the morning at the bird bath, sporadically through the day, and at night occasionally spot one heading down below the deck, where we suspected it might be roosting in that relatively warmer microclimate. This year we had at least three, one with very dark breast spots and two with lighter spots. All three were frequent visitors at the bird bath, even scrapping with the much bigger robins for a space at the trough, as the week went on and the temperatures became more frightful. We hoped that they were getting enough to eat; we could provide water, but they were skeptical about the raisins and other dried fruit bits we put out for them. So the food they found on their own was the food they depended on.

Guest Post: Albatrossity – from the Heart(land) 1
Hermit thrush defending its space in the bird bath

The night of February 14-15 was the killer. On the deck our thermometer registered -14 F; the official temperature at the local airport about 4 miles away was -21 F. Dawn came, and I saw a couple of robins and one of the light-spotted Hermit Thrushes already at the bird bath, not drinking but simply warming up in that micro-space that was not -20. I was hopeful that they had made it through, and the forecast said that warmer temperatures were on the way.

But the day went on, and the numbers of robins dropped to 2 or 3 at a time (compared to 20 or 30 the day before), and no more Hermit Thrushes were to be seen. Same for the next day. They might have moved on (but to where?), and that is the story I kept telling myself.

Today, with outside temps in the mid-20s (double digits above zero!), Elizabeth investigated under the deck. The worst fears proved true. Huddled in dry leaves, against the side of the house, was a Hermit Thrush. It was the dark-spotted one, who had arrived in mid-November and cheered us nearly daily. Cold, stiff, and nearly weightless; it was feathers, skin, and bone but not much else.

Guest Post: Albatrossity – from the Heart(land) 2
Hermit Thrush, three days before the killing cold.

This killing weather doubtless took many birds, and this was just one. But it was personal, and I felt it more keenly because of that. But I also understood, at a level slightly removed from the gut-wrenching sight of that pitiful carcass, that our fellow travelers on this planet are paying a very high price because of us. Our usurpation of spaces and resources makes it ever more difficult for other species to find space and resources. Despite all we tried to do to help this creature, and others like it, we (all of us) killed it.

Most of us have precious few tangible, emotional connections to the world around us these days, even though we depend on that world. The planet that provides food, water, shelter, and space to our fellow travelers does the same for us, but we’d rather not think about it too much. We’d prefer to think that we are special. Moments like this, where that dependence is intellectually and emotionally in-your-face obvious, are increasingly rare, and perhaps that makes them increasingly painful. This hurt.

One bird. What difference does that make?

A world of difference.

 

Guest Post: Albatrossity – From the Heart(land)Post + Comments (51)

Medium Cool with BGinCHI – The Sense of an Ending

by WaterGirl|  February 14, 20216:00 pm| 172 Comments

This post is in: Guest Posts, Medium Cool with BGinCHI, Open Threads, Popular Culture, Culture as a Hedge Against This Soul-Sucking Political Miasma We're Living In

In case you’re new to Medium Cool, BGinCHI is here once a week to offer a thread on culture, mainly film & books, with some TV thrown in.

For this week’s Medium Cool, it’s Valentine’s Day, so let’s talk about endings.

This past week I taught Otto Preminger’s “Anatomy of a Murder” in my undergrad film class. One thing that has always struck me about this film is its ending. We’ve had a nice courtroom drama, met an interesting ensemble of characters, likely rooted for Jimmy Stewart’s character (Paul Biegler, defense attorney) to succeed in getting his client out of a murder rap, and then in the end, Biegler and his friend discover that the defendant and his wife have run out on them.

As the credits roll, we might well wonder whether we have misjudged the proceedings, putting our hopes on something the film has seduced us into. We’re forced by the end to reconsider the film from start to finish.

What other works (film, TV, books) can you think of that do this, and how do they do it?

Medium Cool with BGinCHI – The Sense of an EndingPost + Comments (172)

Medium Cool with BGinCHI – Aliens

by WaterGirl|  February 7, 20216:00 pm| 161 Comments

This post is in: Guest Posts, Medium Cool with BGinCHI, Popular Culture, Culture as a Hedge Against This Soul-Sucking Political Miasma We're Living In

In case you’re new to Medium Cool, BGinCHI is here once a week to offer a thread on culture, mainly film & books, with some TV thrown in.

Auto Draft 40

In this week’s Medium Cool, it’s time we talked about aliens.

I’m reading Avi Loeb’s terrific book about ‘Oumuamua, and it has me thinking about how aliens are imagined in films, books, and other art forms. Films probably have the most purchase on our imaginations, as they give us visual representations of what aliens might look like (copiously in Star Wars, Star Trek, and the Marvel Universe films, and specifically in ET and Arrival, for example).

Aliens can be good, bad, and horrific (in the Alien films, for ex.). What are some of the most memorable alien encounters in films, books, and TV, and why?

Medium Cool with BGinCHI – AliensPost + Comments (161)

Medium Cool with BGinCHI – Non-Fiction

by WaterGirl|  January 31, 20216:00 pm| 175 Comments

This post is in: Books, Guest Posts, Medium Cool with BGinCHI, Popular Culture, Culture as a Hedge Against This Soul-Sucking Political Miasma We're Living In

In case you’re new to Medium Cool, BGinCHI is here once a week to offer a thread on culture, mainly film & books, with some TV thrown in.

Medium Cool with BGinCHI – Non-Fiction

In this week’s MC, let’s talk non-fiction books.

Reading our own Tom Levenson’s terrific book on the South Sea Bubble got me thinking about good non-fiction books. I don’t read too many non-fic books that aren’t work-related, but I did just order this:

Avi Loeb’s Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth

Read an excerpt and was riveted, so can’t wait to dive in.

What non-fiction are you reading or would recommend?

Medium Cool with BGinCHI – Non-FictionPost + Comments (175)

Medium Cool with BGinCHI – Optimism

by WaterGirl|  January 24, 20216:00 pm| 116 Comments

This post is in: Guest Posts, Medium Cool with BGinCHI, Popular Culture, Culture as a Hedge Against This Soul-Sucking Political Miasma We're Living In

In case you’re new to Medium Cool, BGinCHI is here once a week to offer a thread on culture, mainly film & books, with some TV thrown in.

Tonight’s Topic: Optimism

In this week’s Medium Cool, let’s talk about optimism.

We watched a lot of good movies and TV in 2020, but one show that has stayed with me, far exceeding my expectations, is the series “Ted Lasso.” Its premise, and opening episode, seems to promise just another comedy, with a quirky set-up and lightning-fast humor. But as it develops, it’s much more. It’s about basic kindness, treating people as you’d like to be treated, following your desire, and becoming a better human being. Amongst all the TV about violence, crime, and serial killers, it gave me hope for the value of humanity.

With the new administration, despite the pandemic and other woes, it’s possible to look forward hopefully for a change. Beyond the political, what piece of art or entertainment makes you optimistic?

*Ted Lasso is on AppleTV+

 

Medium Cool with BGinCHI – OptimismPost + Comments (116)

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