Links for 3/9/10

Paul Basken

A new analysis by Congressional budget analysts shows that President Obama's proposal to end the bank-based system of distributing student loans would save $67-billion over 10 years, more than 20 percent less than the previous year's estimate…

For now, Congress could adopt the $67-billion figure immediately as the bill's score, or continue to use the old $87-billion estimate, but it must use the new figure once it passes a budget outline for 2011, which is expected to occur in the next month or two.

Megan McArdle

I have been struggling mightily to find some sensible arguments in the movement of students protesting budget cuts at their campuses...

I'm not sure what they think is supposed to happen. There's no money. This is not some question of reallocating resources from bad uses to good--everything is being cut because their institutions are under serious financial duress...

they might protest the core business model, in which so many employees are effectively unfireable, meaning that everyone else has to take a disproportionate share of the cuts. But other than that, what is all this protesting going to accomplish?...

Kevin Carey

The higher-education lobby's zealous resistance to any form of disclosure benefits only the elite institutions that already have plenty of money and receive the lion's share of federal financing. The hundreds of rank-and-file colleges and universities that would gladly provide more information about their successes in exchange for new federal support in a time of draconian state budget cuts are being left out in the cold.

Jennifer Epstein

Since the 1960s, the national mean G.P.A. at the institutions from which he’s collected grades has risen by about 0.1 each decade – other than in the 1970s, when G.P.A.s stagnated or fell slightly. In the 1950s, according to Rojstaczer’s data, the mean G.P.A. at U.S. colleges and universities was 2.52. By 2006-07, it was 3.11.