Links for 10/26/10

Project on Student Debt

We estimate that college seniors who graduated in 2009 carried an average of $24,000 in student loan debt, up six percent from the previous year…

Jason Delisle

If tax credits are more difficult to deliver than grant aid or loan subsidies, why does Congress continue to create them for higher education expenses? There are two main reasons. First, grant aid and loan programs, unlike tax benefits, show up in the budget as spending. As such, they are highly visible, subject to intense scrutiny, and must compete with other priorities in the budget process. This isn’t the case for tax benefits. That makes it easier – in the political sense – for lawmakers to deliver assistance through the tax code rather than direct grant aid. In other words, tax benefits don’t look like spending and therefore win more support from lawmakers. But from a true budget perspective, tax benefits and grants have the same effect.

That leads to the second reason why Congress and the president like to enact tax credits instead of “spending programs”. Tax benefits can be doled out to more affluent families with surprisingly little opposition, but a grant program targeting the same income groups with the same amount of aid would never fly…

JULIA WERDIGIER

Ashmount is one of three state schools in Britain that decided to outsource part of their teaching to India via the Internet. The service — the first of its kind in Europe — is offered by BrightSpark Education, a London-based company set up last year. BrightSpark employs and trains 100 teachers in India and puts them in touch with pupils in Britain through an interactive online tutoring program.

The feedback from pupils, the schools and parents is good so far…

Tutors are being paid £7 an hour, more than double the minimum wage in Punjab…

Paige Chapman, David Glenn, Jennifer Howard, Audrey Williams June, and Travis Kaya

Following word that the state faces a budget gap of up to $500-million in the 2012 fiscal year, Gov. Jay Nixon, a Democrat, ordered the Department of Higher Education to conduct a statewide review of all academic programs at public institutions.

As a result, on October 1, the provost of the University of Missouri at Columbia, Brian L. Foster, released a list of 75 "underperforming" degree programs being considered for potential realignment or elimination. The threatened programs had awarded an average of fewer than 10 undergraduate, five master's, or three doctoral degrees in the past three years. Most programs on the list are graduate programs…

"People are walking around saying, 'Mine is the essential program on campus that can't be cut,' but they're secretly fearing that their program will be the one,"…