Last week, the Biden administration announced that it would unveil a second attempt at issuing blanket student loan forgiveness within the next few months. The announcement comes more than a year after its first attempt was blocked by the Supreme Court.

"The Biden-Harris Administration made a commitment to deliver student debt relief to as many borrowers as possible as quickly as possible," said Education Secretary Miguel Cardona in a statement last Wednesday. "And today, as we near the end of a lengthy rulemaking process, we're one step closer to keeping that promise."

The announcement builds on a release in April of draft rules that aim to enact student loan forgiveness primarily by expanding existing loan forgiveness programs. The Education Department says it has begun notifying borrowers about the coming rules and informing them about a deadline to opt out of forgiveness. 

The proposed rules target specific groups of borrowers, including borrowers who now owe more than they originally took out in loans due to accumulating interest, borrowers who have been in repayment for decades, and those who are eligible but not enrolled in existing forgiveness programs. Borrowers who enrolled in low-value degree programs, such as those that "failed to provide sufficient financial value, or that failed one of the Department's accountability standards for institutions" are also eligible for new forgiveness efforts. 

Last week's announcement also stated that those eligible would most likely receive forgiveness automatically, with no application or additional steps required.

If enacted, the rules could end up affecting even more borrowers than would have been affected by the Biden administration's first forgiveness plan. The Education Department predicts that if the proposed rules go into effect, the Biden administration would have made over 30 million borrowers eligible for forgiveness through its efforts over the last three years. In contrast, Biden's first attempt at blanket student loan forgiveness was predicted to impact just 27 million eligible borrowers.

"If finalized as proposed, these new rules would authorize relief for borrowers across the country who have struggled with the burden of student loan debt," reads last week's statement. "The Biden-Harris Administration has taken historic steps to reduce the burden of student debt and ensure that student loans are not a barrier to educational and economic opportunity for students and families."

The Education Department predicts that the finalized rules will be released sometime in the fall. However, with the election in November looming, it's doubtful whether the department can actually provide forgiveness before the end of Biden's term. And considering that legal challenges are almost certain to follow any attempt to enact large-scale loan forgiveness, it's unclear if there is any realistic chance that the Biden administration can enact this plan. At the moment, these latest efforts might be best thought of as a last-minute political stunt designed to energize young, college-educated voters rather than an earnest policy effort.

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Seven out of 10 college students say that speech can be just as damaging as physical violence, according to a new survey from the Knight Foundation, a journalism and free speech nonprofit. The survey, which polled more than 1,600 college students, also found that since 2016, college students' faith in the security of free speech rights has declined.

"2024 marks a crisis for free speech on college campuses as international conflicts, like the war in Gaza, and domestic strife come to a head, bringing urgent political and personal issues to center stage," the report states. "With campuses cracking down on protests, political leaders casting a questioning eye on the decisions of university administrators, and emerging technology making disinformation easier and faster to produce, the position of higher education as a forum for open discussion has never been more crucial or imperiled."

The Knight Foundation's survey asked students a wide range of questions on campus free speech and the First Amendment in general. The survey also asked students to identify their race, household income, and political affiliation. 

Sixty percent of students agreed with the statement "the climate at my school or on my campus prevents some people from saying things they believe, because others might find it offensive." The figure is up from 54 percent in 2016, but down from a high of 65 percent in 2021. Additionally, more than 1 in 4 agreed that it was more important for schools to "protect students by prohibiting speech they may find offensive or biased," rather than prioritizing allowing students to hear a wide range of viewpoints, including possibly offensive ones. Students were sharply divided by political opinion on this question, with 70 percent of Republicans, 53 percent of Independents, and 45 percent of Democrats supporting allowing offensive speech.

Why do so many students support censorship? It's not exactly clear, but the rest of the survey offers some clues. For example, 70 percent of students, including 82 percent of Democrats and 59 percent of Republicans, agreed that speech can be just as damaging as physical violence. Forty-four percent reported feeling uncomfortable in college because of "something someone said in reference to your race, ethnicity, religion, gender, or sexual orientation—whether or not it was directed at you," up from 25 percent in 2016. It's not clear, however, whether this increase is due to an uptick in genuinely offensive statements or increasing student intolerance towards mild political disagreements. 

On the bright side, increasing numbers of students opposed instituting policies like restrictive speech codes or providing safe spaces. Since 2017, support for speech codes has declined 23 percentage points, and support for safe spaces declined 15 percentage points. Support for disinviting potentially offensive speakers stayed roughly the same since 2017, declining by just three percentage points, to 25 percent after a brief jump to 42 percent in 2019.

"American society continues to be at a crossroads over how to apply First Amendment rights in the 21st century, particularly on college campuses," the report reads. "That is why it is essential that thought leaders, administrators, professors, and the public listen to the voices of college students as they grapple with issues of free speech in America and on campus."

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On Tuesday, Harvard officials announced that the university would adopt a formal stance of ideological neutrality on political events and other controversial issues. The decision comes after months of tumultuous campus protests over the war between Israel and Hamas.

Earlier this month, a faculty-led working group published a report that strongly recommended adopting a neutral stance on topics that do not directly concern the university itself.

"The university has a responsibility to speak out to protect and promote its core function. Its leaders must communicate the value of the university's central activities. They must defend the university's autonomy and academic freedom when threatened," the report stated. "The university and its leaders should not, however, issue official statements about public matters that do not directly affect the university's core function."

The report hinted at what is likely the prevailing reason behind Harvard's push toward neutrality—the immense pressure faced by school officials to weigh in on Hamas' October 7 attack against Israel, and the ongoing war in Gaza. The report noted how, if officials make statements about one topic unrelated to the university's core function, the school opens itself up to demands it comment on every other controversy.

"If the university and its leaders become accustomed to issuing official statements about matters beyond the core function of the university, they will inevitably come under intense pressure to do so from multiple, competing sides on nearly every imaginable issue of the day," said the report. "This is the reality of contemporary public life in an era of social media and political polarization."

Survey results released last week by The Harvard Crimson indicate widespread faculty support for neutrality. The survey found that more than 70 percent of Arts and Sciences faculty supported a shift to formal neutrality and more than half reported feeling "somewhat negatively" or "negatively" about "the current state of academic freedom at Harvard"

The announcement was met with widespread praise from free expression advocates.

"For better or worse, what Harvard does, others follow," Angel Eduardo, senior writer and editor at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, wrote on Tuesday. "The principles outlined in the Institutional Voice Working Group's report don't just bode well for Harvard's future on free speech and academic freedom—they may also signal a significant sea change in colleges across the country."

On Wednesday, Syracuse University also announced that it would adopt the recommendations of a similar working group and take an official neutral stance.

"We embrace the guiding principle that the remedy for speech that some may find hurtful, offensive, or even hateful is not the disruption, obstruction, or suppression of the free speech of others, but rather more speech," a statement from the university reads. "Except under the most extraordinary circumstances and with the sole purpose of protecting its mission of discovery, improvement, and dissemination of knowledge, the University does not make institutional statements or pronouncements on current controversies."

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Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projections provide valuable insights into how a big chunk of your income is being spent and reveal the long-term consequences of our government's current fiscal policies—you may endure them, and your children most certainly will. Yet, like most other projections looking into our future, these numbers should be taken with a grain of salt. So should claims that CBO projections validate anyone's fiscal track record.

So much can and likely will happen to make projections moot and our fiscal outlook much grimmer. Unforeseen events, economic changes, and policy decisions render them less accurate over time. The CBO knows this and recently released alternative scenarios based on different sets of assumptions, and it doesn't look good. It remains a wonder that more politicians, now given a more realistic range of possibilities, aren't behaving like it.

First, let's recap what the situation looks like under the usual rosy growth, inflation, and interest rate assumptions. Due to continued overspending, this year's deficit will be at least $1.6 trillion, rising to $2.6 trillion by 2034. Debt held by the public equals roughly 99 percent of our economy—measured by gross domestic product (GDP)—annually, heading to 116 percent in 2034.

The only reason these numbers won't be as high as projected last year is that a few House Republicans fought hard to impose some spending caps during the debt ceiling debate. The long-term outlook is even scarier, with public debt reaching 166 percent of GDP in 30 years and all federal debt reaching 180 percent.

No one should be surprised. To be sure, the COVID-19 pandemic and the Great Recession made things worse, but we've been on this path for decades.

Unfortunately, if any of the assumptions underlying these projections change again, things will get a lot worse. That's where the CBO's alternative paths help. Policymakers and the public can better see the potential risks and opportunities associated with various fiscal policy choices, enabling them to make more informed decisions.

For instance, the CBO highlights that if the labor force grows annually by just 0.1 fewer percentage points than originally projected—even if the unemployment rate stays the same—slower economic growth will lead to a deficit $142 billion larger than baseline projections between 2025 and 2034. A similarly small slowdown in the productivity rate would lead to an added deficit of $304 billion over that period.

Back in 2020, the prevalent theory among those who claimed we shouldn't worry about debt was that interest rates were remarkably low and would stay low forever. As if. These guys have since learned what many of us have known for years: that interest rates can and will go up when the situation gets bad enough. So, what happens if rates continue to rise above and beyond those CBO used in its projections? Even a minuscule 0.1-point rise above the baseline would produce an additional $324 billion on the deficit over the 2025-2034 period.

The same is true with inflation, which, as every shopper can see, has yet to be defeated. If inflation, as I fear, doesn't go away as fast as predicted by CBO—largely because debt accumulation is continuing unabated—it will slow growth, increase interest rates, and massively expand the deficit. To be precise, an increase in overall prices of just 0.1 points over the CBO baseline would result in higher interest rates and a deficit of $263 billion more than projected.

Now, imagine all these variations from the current projections happening simultaneously. It's a real possibility. The deficit hike would be enormous, which could then trigger even more inflation and higher interest rates. The question that remains is: Why aren't politicians on both sides more worried than they seem to be?

What needs to happen before they finally decide to treat our fiscal situation as a real threat? President Joe Biden doesn't want to tackle the debt issue. In fact, he's actively adding to the debt with student loan forgiveness, subsidies to big businesses, and other nonsense. Meanwhile, some Republicans pay lip service to our financial crisis, but few are willing to tackle the real problem of entitlement spending.

The time for political posturing is over. The longer we wait to address these issues, the more severe the consequences will be for future generations. It's time for our leaders to prioritize the nation's long-term economic health over short-term political gains and take bold steps toward fiscal responsibility. Only then can we hope to secure a stable and prosperous future for all Americans.

COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM.

The post The Congressional Budget Office's Alternative Scenarios Forecast a Dire Economic Picture appeared first on Reason.com.

Is college worth it? Well, it depends on what degree you're getting and where you're getting it, according to a new paper from the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity (FREOPP), an economic opportunity think tank.

While more than three-quarters of all bachelor's degrees have a positive return on investment (ROI), according to the paper, master's and associate degrees are much riskier bets—with many costing students in the long run.

The paper, by Senior Fellow Preston Cooper, examined data from over 50,000 degree and certificate programs at thousands of American colleges and universities. Cooper's analysis looked at how much students were earning immediately after graduation, as well as how much they were making 10 years later. The paper also took into account a student's chance of dropping out when calculating a degree program's ROI.

In all, Cooper found that 31 percent of students are enrolled in a program with a negative ROI—meaning that "the earnings benefits of the degree are unlikely to fully compensate students for the cost and risk of pursuing post-secondary education."

However, different kinds of degrees were more likely to have a negative ROI than others. For example, 77 percent of bachelor's degrees and doctoral and professional degrees have a positive ROI. In contrast, just 57 percent of master's and associate degree programs have a positive ROI. 

For bachelor's degrees, fine arts, education, and biology programs had the lowest median ROI, while engineering, computer science, and nursing degrees gave students the highest long-term rewards.

However, where college students were enrolled also mattered when it came to ROI. For example, an English degree from the University of Virginia has a $581,925 positive return on investment—climbing to over $600,000 when only including students who graduated on time. In contrast, students at Virginia Commonwealth University—another public university—who majored in English have a negative $30,000 ROI, with just a $3,624 benefit for those who end up graduating on time.

"When choosing a college and program of study, students should evaluate several key variables that contribute to ROI. The most important is earnings after graduation," Cooper writes. "Besides starting salary, another critical factor is the institution's completion rate. While students' individual ability and motivation affects their likelihood of completion, research shows that college quality also has an impact on completion rates."

Cooper also pointed out just how much federal dollars go toward funding low-value degree programs. He found that 29 percent of the federal funding that went to the programs he studied went to programs with a negative ROI.

"That figure includes $37 billion in Pell Grants, $47 billion in loans to undergraduates, and $39 billion in loans to graduate students," Cooper writes. "Because ROI is negative for these programs, it's unlikely that most of those loan dollars will be repaid." 

This latest paper paints a detailed picture of the kinds of concerns prospective students and their families should take into account when deciding whether to enroll in college. While bachelor's degrees are still a good bet overall, students need to consider what they'll really get out of both the major they want to study and the school they've been accepted into.

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Following persistent technical issues with this year's updated, streamlined Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) form, the Education Department has announced a $50 million program to help more students complete the form—next year.

The chunk of funding is aimed at "expand[ing] the availability of advisers, counselors, and coaches to support students and contributors through the FAFSA applications," according to a Monday press release.

"We are determined to close the FAFSA completion gap," Deputy Secretary of Education Cindy Marten said. "The funding we're announcing today will support states, districts, and community-based groups [to] build capacity and leverage their power to ensure that every student who needs help paying for college turns in their FAFSA form."

FAFSA is required for any college students seeking federal grants or loans. Most colleges also use the form to determine how much institutional financial aid to offer students. In a typical year, over 15 million students and their families fill out the FAFSA form. But as of late April, successful applications are down 24 percent this year due to ubiquitous technical bugs in the updated form.

This year's issues stem from the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021, which mandated that the Education Department release a simplified version of the FAFSA form. The updated form was released in December—more than two months later than the typical release date. Almost immediately, the form was plagued with errors and bugs that made it nearly impossible to complete for many students.

FAFSA's own website details many of the issues with the form since its release. While most can be fixed with complicated "workarounds," some kept affected students from filling out the form for months. In March, the Education Department even announced that they had incorrectly calculated the completed forms of 200,000 students, leading to some possibly receiving more generous financial aid offers than they were actually eligible for.

Instead of publicly committing to solving these issues for next year's form, the Education Department is attempting to ameliorate its mistakes by throwing money at the problem. Why make a better FAFSA when you can pay people to shepherd students and their families through an infuriatingly complex process?

According to USA Today, the Education Department usually releases a draft version of next year's FAFSA in February or March, but that hasn't happened yet—hardly a good sign for next year's form.

While it's unclear whether students will have a smoother FAFSA experience next year, at least they can say they've gotten an apology. 

"I apologize to the students and families that have had to deal with delays," Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said during a congressional hearing this week. "I know how frustrating that is."

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On Friday, the Biden administration unveiled final Title IX regulations, nearly two years after the administration proposed dramatic changes to how colleges handle sexual assault allegations. The new rules largely mirror proposed regulations released last year and will effectively reversing Trump-era due process reforms. 

According to the final regulations, accused students will lose their right to a guaranteed live hearing with the opportunity to have a representative cross-examine their accuser. This is accompanied by a return to the "single-investigator model," which allows a single administrator to investigate and decide the outcome of a case.

Further, under the new rules, most schools will be required to use the "preponderance of the evidence" standard, which directs administrators to find a student responsible if just 51 percent of the evidence points to their guilt. Schools are also no longer required to provide accused students with the full content of the evidence against them. Instead, universities are only bound to provide students with a description of the "relevant evidence," which may be provided "orally" rather than in writing. 

This is a stunning rollback of due process rights for accused students. Under the new regulations, a student can be found responsible for sexually assaulting a classmate because a single administrator believed there was a 51 percent chance he had committed the assault, and this conclusion can be reached without ever allowing the accused student to know the full evidence against him or providing a hearing during which he could defend himself.

The rules also represent a continuing partisan tension in education policy. Following President Barack Obama's 2011 "Dear Colleague" letter, which first mandated campus sexual assault tribunals, regulations have flip-flopped consistently along party lines. In 2020, the Trump administration introduced broad due process rights for accused students while prohibiting schools from taking many cases that occurred off-campus. Today's reforms mark the third major change to Title IX regulations in as many presidents.

"Justice is only possible when hearings are fair for everyone. So today's regulations mean one thing: America's college students are less likely to receive justice if they find themselves in a Title IX proceeding," the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) said in a Friday statement. "When administrators investigate the most serious kinds of campus misconduct, colleges should use the time-tested tools that make finding the truth more likely. But the new regulations no longer require them to do so."

So far, the new rules have been met with widespread praise from victims' rights groups.

"Students who experience sexual violence or discrimination shouldn't have to weigh our safety against our ability to go to class or participate in campus life," said college student Emily Bach in a press release from Know Your IX, a campus sexual assault awareness group. "The Biden Administration's updated Title IX rule will make sure that students who experience harm can come forward and seek support without jeopardizing our ability to graduate on time or get a degree."

But contrary to what many victims' rights activists say, due process rights for accused students are essential, not contrary, in treating campus sexual assault as a pressing issue. College sexual assault victims should be taken seriously—but taking their accusations with the gravity they deserve also means providing those they accuse with the right to defend themselves in kind.

Even if Title IX hearings don't have the gravity of criminal proceedings, they have the potential to upend accused students' lives. Students have been expelled, had their degrees revoked, or even been deported after being found responsible for a Title IX violation. 

If we want university investigations into sexual assault allegations to maintain any sheen of legitimacy, we can't entrust the power to inflict such severe penalties to a single administrator working behind closed doors. Instead, we need a process that puts due process front and center—any other system quickly becomes shamefully untrustworthy.

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This week's featured article is "The Real Student Loan Crisis Isn't From Undergraduate Degrees" by Emma Camp.

This audio was generated using AI trained on the voice of Katherine Mangu-Ward.

Music credits: "Deep in Thought" by CTRL and "Sunsettling" by Man with Roses

The post <I>The Best of Reason</I>: The Real Student Loan Crisis Isn't From Undergraduate Degrees appeared first on Reason.com.

Claudine Gay resigned as president of Harvard University in January, following numerous allegations that she plagiarized passages in her published works. But in some corners of the media, the fact that she committed plagiarism mattered much less than the fact that it was conservative writers who caught her.

Aaron Sibarium, a reporter at the right-leaning news website The Washington Free Beacon, performed the lion's share of the digging. Christopher Brunet, a conservative writer; Christopher Rufo, a conservative writer and activist; and Phillip Magness, a libertarian economic historian, also made important contributions. Their allegations were very serious, and what they found led many commentators—including Harvard students—to conclude that she should be held accountable. Even The Harvard Crimson's editorial board, writing in support of Gay, nevertheless acknowledged that she had committed plagiarism and that the university's investigation had been inadequate.

Gay's defenders said the charges against her lacked importance and that she was guilty of mere sloppiness—failing to sufficiently paraphrase the passages she had copied. This position became less tenable after subsequent reporting from Sibarium revealed that she had in fact committed traditional plagiarism as well: copying passages from other scholars without citing them.

The next course of action was to shoot the messengers. Since many of the people accusing Gay of committing plagiarism were conservative, their motivations were deemed political and thus dismissible. New York Times columnist Charles Blow described the campaign against Gay as "a project of displacement and defilement meant to reverse progress and shame the proponents of that progress."

Gay's defenders had a point, at least, in noting that conservatives had first set their sights on the president of Harvard after her disastrous testimony before the House of Representatives concerning antisemitism on campus. When Gay ultimately stepped aside, her resignation letter leaned into this explanation while merely nodding at the plagiarism accusations.

"It has been distressing to have doubt cast on my commitments to confronting hate and to upholding scholarly rigor—two bedrock values that are fundamental to who I am—and frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus," she wrote.

Gay is a more sympathetic figure when the hearing is considered in isolation. While her explanations of Harvard's speech policies in the face of relentless grilling by Republican political figures seemed tin-eared, it is in fact true that such policies are context-dependent; calls for political violence are not necessarily violations of Harvard's policies unless they are directed at specific individuals. She should not have lost her job for articulating that.

Yet Gay is no free speech hero. She may have defended provocative political speech at the House hearing, but her brief tenure at Harvard has not been marked by a dramatic return to free speech principles. In 2023, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression ranked Harvard dead last on its college free speech list. Indeed, one might conclude that in order to restore free speech at Harvard, different leadership is sorely needed.

In any case, the plagiarism allegations had teeth. Reporters discovered numerous instances of Gay lazily copying other scholars' exact passages without naming them. The political ideology of some of her accusers should make no difference; Gay must be held to the same standards as other professors and students. As one member of Harvard College's Honor Council wrote in an editorial for The Harvard Crimson days before her resignation, "There is one standard for me and my peers and another, much lower standard for our University's president."

When Harvard's governing board picks the next president, it should look for someone who both abides by principles of academic integrity and vows to improve the college's free speech standing.

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