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today’s news for Tuesday, July 21, 2015

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NEWS FROM NASFAA

The 2015 NASFAA National Conference continued on Monday, with events ranging from a debate on whether there is a student loan crisis to NASFAA President Justin Draeger’s address to the membership. See below for summaries of selected sessions and follow along with conference happenings in real time on Facebook and Twitter using #NASFAA2015.

During yesterday morning's general session, Beth Akers, a fellow in the Brookings Institution's Brown Center on Education Policy, and Andrew Kelly, director of the Center on Higher Education Reform at the American Enterprise Institute, argued that there is no U.S. student loan crisis while Mark Huelsman, senior policy analyst at Demos, and Kevin Fudge, manager of government relations and community affairs at American Student Assistance, argued the opposite. Watch the video to see the debate or read a summary of it in this morning's conference summaries article. Be sure to join the debate by sharing your opinion in the comments section.

School XYZ's academic year is defined as 36 credit hours and 30 weeks of instructional time. Its academic year is composed of three quarters. Olivia, a student at School XYZ, will complete her program after the winter quarter. She is enrolled in 12 credits during the fall quarter and 8 credits during the winter quarter. She has a remaining eligibility period (REP) of 0.5 for Direct Subsidized Loans. In this case, the proration is based upon 20 credits divided by 36 credits. Would proration allow Olivia to receive over half of her REP? Read on to see if you got the answer right!

The National Training for Counselors and Mentors (NT4CM) will hold its annual Training of Trainers webinar on Thursday, August 13, at 1:30 pm ET. The broadcast will share information about the program, provide a federal update, and review the available training materials. NT4CM is a collaborative effort of NASFAA, the Department of Education, and other higher education associations to make high-quality financial aid training available to high school counselors and other college access professionals. Register now.

U.S. DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION

The eCampus-Based application for the Fiscal Operations Report for 2014-2015 and Application to Participate for 2016-2017 (FISAP) is now available on the eCampus-Based (eCB) Web site.

Under the 150% Direct Subsidized Loan Limit requirements, a borrower who has no eligibility for additional Direct Subsidized Loans due to the 150% limit may lose interest subsidy on existing Direct Subsidized Loans if the borrower continues enrollment in an undergraduate program.

x - HEADLINES

National News

"A small but vocal group of student borrowers crashed a parade of financial-aid administrators here on Monday, demanding free college for all," The Chronicle of Higher Education reports. "'They have legitimate concerns,' [NASFAA President Justin Draeger] said, in an interview before the parade. 'But I think their tactics get in the way of their message.'"

"Without student loan debt, Hill Harper may have never appeared in nearly 200 episodes of CSI:NY or invested in a hotel here, and he certainly wouldn’t have met a young then-Harvard law student named Barack Obama," Marketwatch reports. "Harper used his keynote address at the National Association of Financial Aid Award Administrators’ national conference Sunday to encourage the group, a trade association for financial aid professionals working in schools across the country, to use their 'passion,' 'reason,' and 'courage' to find innovative ways to increase access to education for those who might not be able to afford it."

"The U.S. Department of Education continues to work on its plan to grant experimental federal aid eligibility to partnerships between accredited colleges and alternative providers, such as job skills boot camps, coding academies and MOOCs," Inside Higher Ed reports.

Opinions

"Here is one solution to the rising cost of college: Make it free. That's what a group of anonymous donors in Kalamazoo, Michigan, accomplished a decade ago for local students," Richard V. Reeves writes in an opinion piece for Newsweek.

"'Free college,' 'free tuition,' 'free community college,' and 'debt-free college,' have dominated recent discussions about college affordability. Sparked by growing anxiety over rising college prices and increasing student debt levels, these proposals appear compelling, at first glance. But what does 'free' really mean, and who stands to benefit?" Michelle Asha Cooper, president at the Institute for Higher Education Policy (IHEP), and Mamie Voight, director of policy research at IHEP, write in an opinion piece for The Hill.

"For five years, the Institute for Higher Education Policy tracked 1.8 million student loan borrowers who left school in 2005. By 2010, only 37 percent of these borrowers were current on their loans, the rest had gone delinquent on the debt, defaulted, had their loans put into deferment, or had been forced to take out hardship forebearances. 1.8 million borrowers is a very large sample size, and surely an accurate representation of all borrowers who left school that year," Alan M. Collinge, founder of StudentLoanJustice.org, writes in an opinion piece for The Hill.

Blogs & Think Tanks

"Moody’s Investors Service has upgraded its outlook for the higher-education sector from 'negative' to 'stable,' citing expected increases in state funding and federal research funding. Higher education had been assigned a 'negative' outlook since January 2013," according to The Chronicle of Higher Education's The Ticker.

"Last month was tough for accreditation. Congress, the U.S. Department of Education and the press all sent the same message. Accreditation must be more directly engaged in protecting students and serving the public interest," according to Roll Call's Beltway Insiders.

"Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), who is running for president in 2016, has a strong record of supporting for-profit colleges, namely Corinthian Colleges, which shut down all of its remaining campuses in April," ThinkProgress reports.

"Families are ramping up spending on college — a shift from cost-cutting measures they were taking in the wake of the recession," The Wall Street Journal's Money Beat reports.

x - INDUSTRY NEWS

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