When times get tough, big banks and auto companies have the government to bail them out. Kids have their grandparents.
Educational Financing
Budget Deal Forces Grad Students to Help with Spending Cuts
If you were a politician looking to raise a paltry sum of money to make it look like you’re serious about balancing the budget, there are a number of places you might look. Wasteful farm subsidies, defense spending, and tax …
Top Chef Dreams: Are Cooking Schools a Rip-Off?
The idea of becoming a gourmet chef and maybe even owning your own restaurant someday is one of those enduring fantasies that percolate through each generation. And today, with the popularity of starmaking competition shows like …
How Much Will Students Really Save Using Amazon’s E-Textbooks?
It’s a very frustrating part of the college experience. You pay more than $100 for a textbook, haul it home and then never open it. You turn it in at the end of the semester and get a pittance back. Heck, even if you read the …
College Revenues From Credit Card Companies Hit the Skids
A new Federal Reserve report shows that in 2010, credit card issuers paid $73 million to colleges as part of marketing deals — down 14% from $85 million in 2009.
Should You Buy a House with a Ton of Student Loan Debt?
Liz Weston, one of the best personal finance experts out there, recently received this question from a reader:
Next year we will be shopping for a house in the $150,000-to-$200,000 range and hope to have $20,000 to $30,000 saved for a down payment. We have about $75,000 in student loans we are paying down. Would it be better to
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The Two Most Confusing Phrases in Financial Aid
There’s a lot of confusion and misinformation out there when it comes to college admissions and financial aid, and a lot of it surrounds terminology. One of the most common misunderstandings concerns a policy that most U.S. …
Why the Federal Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program is Unfair
You probably aren’t even aware of this, but there’s a special loan forgiveness program available for recipients of federal student loans — but if you work for someone who has the nerve to be seeking a profit, you’re not eligible.
The 24 Most and Least Affordable Public Colleges
Last week, the U.S. Department of Education released a new web tool that lets users calculate the costs of getting a college degree. While much has been made of the highest and lowest tuition rates, you can also use the tool to …
One Really Bad Way to Overhaul the Student Loan Market
Jonathan Glater, a visiting assistant professor of law at the University of California, Irvine, and a former reporter at the New York Times, has published a paper called The Other Big Test: Why Congress Should Allow College …
Sallie Mae’s Misleading and Dangerous Press Release
Our old friend Sallie Mae is up to her old tricks again: trying to sell students on extremely dangerous variable rate private student loans with this press release, which touts “changes in the law and improvements in the economy that translate into student loans at among the best interest rates in the last five-year period.”
Why You Should Still Go to College
Over the past year or so, the idea of going to college has been under attack. Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel has been encouraging people to skip college, and my buddy James Altucher has been making the media rounds touting the idea of skipping college.