On July 1, interest rates will double for millions of students – from 3.4% to 6.8% – unless Congress acts; and the legislative fixes on the table are largely just compromises. Only one proposal promises real relief – Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s “Bank on ...

Ironically, June is both the month of the summer solstice and of America's biggest annual blizzard.

I don't mean a weather event blowing in from the Arctic, but a merciless ...

Last month Senator Elizabeth Warren put forward her first bill as a senator, a proposal to allow students to borrow for college at a 0.75 percent interest rate, the same rate that the Federal Reserve Board charges banks for borrowing reserves. In putting forward the bill Warren noted the rapid run up in student debt at a time when recent graduates face an especially bleak job ...

Here may be the most commonplace sentence anyone could write about graduation day in any year: when I think back to my own graduation in 1966, an eon, a lifetime, a world ago, I have no memory of who addressed us.  None.  I have a little packet of photos of the event: shots of my ...

We may not have time for exercise, but there's always time to read about exercise. And while the motivation to exercise may not be tops, the motivation to shop for "aids" to exercise seems forever strong.

Both activities offer the gratifying sense that we're getting somewhere, fitness-wise. We know that at some ...

The worldwide debate over fiscal policy and austerity was turned upside down last week by a paper co-authored by a University of Massachusetts grad student Thomas Herndon and two professors, Michael Ash and Robert Pollin (HAP). The paper uncovered serious ...

On Dec. 1, 1955, Rosa Parks famously refused to give up her seat on the bus to a white passenger in Montgomery, Ala., thus launching the modern-day civil-rights movement. Monday, Feb. 4, is the 100th anniversary of her birth. After she died at the age of 92 in 2005, much of the media described her as a tired seamstress, no troublemaker. But the media got it wrong. Rosa Parks was a ...

The "ivory tower" of academia has become overshadowed by a new edifice on campus that is reaching ridiculous heights: the tower of mammon.

As public ...

America’s children seem to be shortchanged on almost every issue we face as a society.

Not only are we failing to protect our children from deranged people wielding semi-automatic guns.

We’re not protecting them from poverty. The rate of child poverty keeps rising – even faster than the rate of adult poverty. We now have the highest rate of child poverty in the developed world.

And we’re not protecting their health. ...

Unions are under attack in the United States—not only from people like Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, but now, with the teachers strike in Chicago, from the very core of President Barack Obama’s inner circle, his former chief of staff and current mayor of that city, Rahm Emanuel. Twenty-five thousand teachers and support staff are on strike there, shutting down the public school system in the nation’s third-largest school district. This fight now raging in Chicago, ...

Let's take a trip deep into the magic kingdom of "Laissez Fairyland" and prostrate ourselves before the infallible and inscrutable force known as the free market.

While this awesome deity cannot be seen, the high priests of free-market fundamentalism insist that we mere mortals must simply have faith that its mysterious workings are always in our best interest. Yeah, sure, your holiness. We saw how well that worked out for us wandering pilgrims after you ...

Fraternities, sororities and football, along with other outsized athletic programs, have decimated most major American universities. Scholarship, inquiry, self-criticism, moral autonomy and a search for artistic and esoteric forms of expression—in short, the world of ethics, creativity and ideas—are shouted down by the drunken chants of fans in huge stadiums, the pathetic demands of rich alumni for national championships, and the elitism, racism and rigid definition of gender ...

Members of the Class of 2012,

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On the HBO series "Girls," Hannah asks her boss at a publishing house for a salary. The 24-year-old has been working as an unpaid intern for over a year, and her parents will no longer support her.

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A modern knowledge economy thrives on highly trained workers. The way to get them, obviously, is through education — from basic reading skills for some, to mastery of algorithms for others. It thus would seem a basic public good to provide that learning at little or no cost to students, which most advanced countries do. But America has turned post-high-school education into a taxpayer-subsidized business — a business not unlike real estate at the height of the housing ...

Public education is under attack around the world, and in response, student protests have recently been held in Britain, Canada, Chile, Taiwan and elsewhere.

California is also a battleground. The Los Angeles Times reports on another chapter in the campaign to destroy what had been the greatest public higher education system in the world: “California State University officials announced plans to freeze enrollment next spring at most campuses and to wait-list all applicants the ...

Talk K-12 education for more than five minutes, and inevitably, the conversation turns to charter schools — those publicly funded, privately administered institutions that now educate more than 2 million American children. Parents wonder if they are better than the neighborhood public school. Politicians tout them as a silver-bullet solution to the education crisis. Education technology companies promote them for their profit potential. Opponents of organized labor like the Walton ...

Only 25 percent of all Americans go to college, and only 16 percent of those actually try to learn anything. Welcome a nation of helots.

"In the 21st century, the best anti-poverty program around is a first-class education," President Obama famously declared in his 2010 State of the Union address, just as millions of high-schoolers across the nation were going through the annual ritual of picking their preferred colleges and preparing the grand tour of the prospects, with ...

Affirmative action is a policy that does not poll well these days. Large majorities typically reject the idea that hiring or school admissions should take into account the discrimination that African Americans, women and other groups face. Most people will argue that we should have a strictly merit-based system with people evaluated on their records.

It might seem like a good idea that people stand or fall on their track record, but that doesn’t seem to fit the United States ...

Last week Rick Santorum called the President “a snob” for wanting everyone to get a college education (in fact, Obama never actually called for universal college education but only for a year or more of training after high school).

Santorum needn’t worry. America is already making it harder for young people of modest means to attend college. Public higher education is being starved, and the middle class will shrink even more as a result.

Over just the last ...