Posts Tagged ‘college’

Student Loan #Debt Getting Presidential Treatment

Posted: June 8, 2014 in Excess and Algorithms
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by @anarchyroll
6/8/2014

There is something about the word, and the monetary figure trillion that catches one’s attention. Trillion, as in; the total amount of student loan debt in America is $1 trillion.

A standing rule I have is that anytime the word debt and trillion are together in the same sentence, it is worth keeping an eye and an ear on.

Elizabeth Warren has been attempting to push a student loan debt reform bill through Congress. A bill that would in essence, allow debtors to refinance their student loan debt, something that is not currently allowed to happen.

President Obama has now formally put his support behind the bill.

Student loan debt has real potential to be the next bubble that busts the entire economy akin to the housing and dot-com collapses of the previous two decades.

The other important piece of the legislation is that it lowers the interest rates on the loans themselves. The first benefit of the bill helps those already in debt. The second benefit helps those yet to take out loans. Sounds like a common sense piece of win win legislation. Naturally in Washington it is facing an uphill battle with stark opposition.

Regardless of political affiliation or economic situation, $1 trillion of debt must be formally addressed with public policy of some kind to at least take a small preventive measure against a future recession or depression caused by outstanding debt on a mass scale as currently exists with student loan liabilities.

#MarchMadness Proof Student Athletes Deserve Payday

Posted: April 19, 2014 in Sports Roll
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by @anarchyroll
4/19/2014

Northwestern University’s football team recently won the right to unionize. They feel they are employees of the school and deserve compensation and collective bargaining rights. I wrote an article about this can be found by clicking here.

One of the reasons the term student athlete is a disgrace to anyone with a brain is how much money the NCAA makes off of the labor they don’t have to pay for. Scholarships, food, housing, and travel don’t mean shit when you’re talking about an $11 billion television contract. That is how much the NCAA is pocketing for their March Madness television deal. Who provides the content for the television networks to distribute? That would be the student athletes. Well in the entertainment business if you provide content to be distributed, then you get paid for it. The NCAA is getting paid, the students are literally starving.

Jon Stewart recently had many, many great things to say on this subject on a recent episode of The Daily Show.

All that money and the players still have to pay their own medical bills? It is irresponsible and reprehensible that the NCAA is allowed to make that much money and not pay the players. If the NCAA doesn’t want to pay players, then there is a very easy solution…..donate every penny above operation cost to charities with full transparency. If the status quo remains, that charity will be one that feeds and clothes impoverished division one student athletes.

 

 

#Northwestern Winning Right to Unionize is a Game Changer

Posted: March 28, 2014 in Excess and Algorithms, Sports Roll
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by @anarchyroll
3/28/2014

Whether you know it or not, college athletics changed forever this week.

Northwestern University’s football players were found to be employees of the school, not merely student athletes, by the National Labor Relations Board in Chicago. This means the players now have collective bargaining rights with the school. That means the players now have a say in terms of monetary compensation for their time and effort on the football field beyond an athletic scholarship. Why is this a big deal?

The student athlete paradigm has been crumbling over the past decade. EA Sports no longer puts out it’s NCAA Football or Basketball video game franchises. Why? Because former student athletes filed multiple class action lawsuits and won (one) because they were not being royalties (residual checks) for the use of their likenesses. EA settled but the NCAA is vowing to take the case(s) to the Supreme Court. The NCAA is also saying they will take the NU case to the highest possible court/governing body. Why? Money.

The NCAA is exposing itself for what it is, a money laundering operation. They exist solely to make money off the time, energy, effort, blood, sweat, and tears of 18-21 year old men and women at Division I universities in the United States of America. They care nothing about graduation rates of the players. They care nothing about their health and medical costs. They only care about how much money they can make off of television contracts for the Bowl Championship Series and March Madness.

By exposing themselves as money hungry pigs, the NCAA is losing it’s battle in the court of public opinion. Rather than evolving and paying the students who are making NCAA and the universities billions of dollars (with a B) each year, they are trying to keep them as scholarship slaves. Scholarships are fine for athletes and universities that aren’t on national television on a daily and/or weekly basis. Scholarships are fine for academics. But NCAA Division I athletics is about money, nothing more, nothing less. If it wasn’t then ESPN and CBS wouldn’t be allowed to make anything more than enough money to cover operational costs to broadcast the sporting events.

But that’s not the way it is. It’s not 1960 anymore. Sports equals business in America. So pay the employees what they earn by destroying their bodies in the primes of their lives for the glory and admiration of their parents and peers. The times they are a changin’. You don’t want to pay students who are on national TV every week? Then;

  • Take the games off national TV.
  • Revoke all contracts outside of local public access.
  • Force all coaches to make the same as the professors.
  • Don’t allow schools to travel out of state to play away games.
  • Disperse all funding equally between all sports played at each school.

Don’t want to do any of those? That list is unrealistic and naive? Yeah, no shit. So pay the players. Don’t give them straight cash homey. Pay them in gift cards so they can buy;

  • food
  • clothes
  • tutors
  • laptops
  • plane tickets to go back home during breaks

If the students can afford these things themselves they won’t be dependent on their parents, boosters, or shady gamblers who get them into point shaving schemes. No one is saying pay the quarterback of Notre Dame $1 million a year. But how about you give the kids some money to have fun on the weekends so you can stop putting schools on probation, stripping wins, taking down banners, and expunging winning records?

Why is NU winning union rights important? It changes the face of college athletics forever. How? Because students will be looked as employees. The tide has turned on this issue. Much like gay rights and marijuana legalization, there is no going back, only forward. It is only a matter of time before all major universities are affected by this. That will affect scheduling, coaches contracts, television contracts, merchandise rights, and tuition costs. The college experience as a whole can and will be changed by this going forward. We have just witnessed the tip of the iceberg.

Student Loan #Debt & The #Education Bubble

Posted: March 6, 2014 in Excess and Algorithms
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by @anarchyroll
3/5/2014

A lot has been written about student loan debt, but apparently not a lot of research has been done into the subject. The Department of Education releases default rates once a year, but that is just about it. Are you surprised at this? So was the New York State Federal Reserve Bank. Two analysts working their essentially had to do a bulk of the research that is now often cited by the media and protest groups.

They found that the percentage of 25-year-old college graduates with student loan debts essentially doubled while the average loan balance increased 91% from 2003 to 2012.

Economists are looking at education borrowing as the next bubble that could burst and drag down the US economy along with it. Much like the housing bubble, there are a lot of government backed loans being given away with a rubber stamp to large amounts of people who are unable to immediately if ever repay. Government officials are openly comparing student borrowing to the mortgage-backed security crisis of 2008. And remember, this article opened with the fact that there has been little study and even less data available on the subject.

Mortgage backed securities, credit default swaps, and derivatives trading are all complicated things. Let’s keep the education bubble concept simple.

Student loan debt in America = $1.2 trillion (with a T) more than any other form of consumer debt.

Much like the series of articles written about quantitative easing (QE), there will be multiple articles written about student loan debt as well as the debate over raising the minimum wage. These are the three economic issues I feel most passionately about and wish to shine light upon. Let those numbers listed above wash over you for a bit. Do you know anyone dealing with student loan debt? How are they doing? What is their quality of life?

It’s not just the loan or the interest, it is the unemployment, underemployment, or complete non-existence of careers in the fields thousands if not millions of students are graduating with each year. It’s not just the monthly payment on the loan(s). It’s the monthly payment on the loan plus rent, utilities, food, transportation, etc.

The Education Bubble and the student loan debt crisis are one and the same. They are intertwined, they are two terms describing essentially the same thing.

How is higher education a bubble akin to the dot-com, real estate bubbles, and other asset bubbles? We’ll cover that in part 2…