Jesse Singal

Quick housekeeping announcement: Today will be my last day blogging for the Washington Monthly. Tomorrow I am leaving Washington and heading back to my hometown of Boston to take a new job up there. I’ve greatly enjoyed my time at the Monthly and am proud of what this site has become over a short span […]

I like this fake letter written up by the folks at Higher Ed Watch, in which a hypothetical financial aid offices explains to a hypothetical student body why it doesn’t make sense to follow Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s advice and begin making preparations for the likely switch to direct lending in the fall of 2010: […]

From San Jose State University’s Daily Spartan: In the middle of drastic state budget cuts, a proposal to tax oil companies in California to fund higher education has won support with some student and faculty organizations. … According to the text of the bill, a 9.9 percent tax would be placed on all oil and […]

From USA Today: A new study by Elizabeth Warren, Harvard Law School Leo Gottlieb professor of law, and Deborah Thorne, Ohio University associate professor of sociology, finds that personal bankruptcy has become a largely middle-class phenomenon led by filers who are college-educated and owners of homes. According to the study, “The Vulnerable Middle Class: Bankruptcy […]

From Inside Higher Ed: Whichever way you choose to count, athletes in the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s Division I and II are graduating at higher rates. The NCAA on Wednesday published its annual graduation rates reports, in which the association is increasingly focusing on its measure of choice, the NCAA-created Graduation Success Rate, which association […]

As with all such items, it’s impossible to verify the authenticity of this (via reddit). Still, it’s a pretty hilarious exchange, and the ending, given what we know about how people interact with one another over the Internet, is more surprising than anything Hollywood could have come up with. (Obligatory Serious Addendum Which Serves To […]

Inside Higher Ed has more about Pittsburgh mayor Luke Ravenstahl’s extremely popular plan to tax tuition at the city’s universities 1 percent. Here’s one strike against his arguments for the tax: Beyond the challenges that municipalities face in trying to skirt tax-exempt status is the fact that many institutions do indeed make substantial contributions to […]

Inside Higher Ed has an interview with James P. Sterba, the author of Affirmative Action for the Future, a defense of affirmative action. Sterba is confident that this is one area in which the skeptical can be convinced: Most opponents of affirmative action can be convinced to change their minds because they have formed their […]

SeattlePI.com has a piece on Foster Care to College, a program that, as the name suggests, “help[s] students in foster care pursue and prepare for post-secondary education.” About 25,000 young people across the country “age out” of foster care each year. Without permanent homes or support from family members, they’re at a higher risk for […]