Wednesday, September 28, 2016

New York Review of Books features Solving the Student Loan Crisis

While I was headed home from a blissful wedding in Rhode Island, a place I consider home, and haven't visited in a decade, I learned that my book, Solving the Student Loan Crisis, would be appearing in an article in the New York Review of Books in October.

The article is titled, "How the Financing of College May Lead to Disaster!," and was written by Rana Foroohar. Here's s snippet:

When the financial industry—banks, hedge funds, loan companies, private equity—gets too involved in any particular activity of the economy or society, it’s usually time to worry. The financial sector, which represents a mere 4 percent of jobs in this country but takes a quarter of all private sector profits, is like the proverbial Las Vegas casino—it always wins, and usually leaves a trail of losers behind. So perhaps alarms should have been raised among both financial regulators and educational leaders when, two decades ago, for-profit colleges began going public on the NASDAQ and cutting deals by which private equity firms would buy them out. Apollo Group, the parent company of the University of Phoenix, was one of the first, becoming a publicly traded corporation in 1994, at a time when the university had a mere 25,000 students. By 2007 the university had expanded to 125,000 students at 116 locations. This was growth pushed by investors who viewed students as federally subsidized 'annuities'  that, via their Pell Grants and student loans, would produce a fat and stable return in the form of tuition fees.
Foroohar discusses six other books, along with mine, in this piece. You can read the rest of it here

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