When you agree 80%, this might not show up in the fall debates → →

Scott Fleming, a Romney education adviser:

“Nobody is saying we shouldn’t have an emphasis on college access, on college success,” Fleming said, estimating that the campaigns agree on “80 percent” of higher education issues. “Nobody is saying that we shouldn’t find a way to get more students through the door. Those are principles we all agree on.”

And the differences:

“The role needs to be less focused on checking boxes and implementing regulations, and more on the core of improving access and affordability,” said Fleming, whose criticism of increased regulation under the Obama administration drew applause from the audience of financial aid administrators.

Good summary of the talking points of both campaigns and gives some perspective on where finanical aid, politically, will be headed over the next four- to five-years.

Waiting for the FSA Conference Hotel to Open ♦

The Department of Education still has not openned up their room block for the Federal Financial Aid Conference November 27th to the 30th (it was already open and fully booked at the MGN Las Vegas by this time last year), but I was trying to find a way to be notified as soon as they change the page. Granted, this conference is free and the room block does not fill up at the same speed as the Apple WWDC conference, but I wanted to see if it is possible to be notified as soon as it does open. Do you really want to have to stay at one of the secondary hotels or even worse?

While I have never used this service, I figured it was worth a try. I setup monitoring of the main confernce page with ChangeDetection.com. I set it to send an email to an email address that is setup on my iPhone using push notification, so there should not be a lag between the email being sent and receipt on the iPhone.

While not a guarentee, it is worth a try. If I find a little more time, I will test it out with my own site.

If you wanted to get really serious about this (and who really would), you could always sign up for a Pingdom account, but that starts at $9.95 a month after a 30-day free trial and is really meant for monitoring mission critical services.

Department of Education Still Learning UI Design ♦

The Department of Education rolled out their finanical literacy program through StudentLoans.gov this week. From my inital look, it looks really good and I am sure many schools will be pushing it out to their students and even making it some type of requirement in order to receive intitutional aid (since it does not appear that you can make it a requirement in order to receive federal finanical aid, ironically).

My one gripe is what they decided to call it and where they put it. Most schools now use the loan entrance counseling built into studentloans.gov that students are required to complete before receiving federal student loans. Students are usually instructed to login to studentloans.gov and click on "Complete Entrance Counseling". The Department of Education decided to call the financial literacy program "Complete Financial Awareness Counseling" and placed the link right above "Complete Entrance Counseling".

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Just when you thought that the Department of Education was finally figuring out user interface design, they do this. I am all for finanical literacy and intergrating it into the financial aid process, but do we have to confuse students in order to get them to do it? I found out a few days before the department announced that it was live by a handful of confused students calling into to see which one they are supposed to do.

Two steps forward, one step back.

A Two-Tiered System of Student Loans ♦

This week the San Francsico Chronicle published their, it seems, yearly article on the dangers of private loans.

Facts You Didn't Know About Private Student Loans

In most cases, private student loans aren't your best option, so make sure you know exactly what you're signing up for. Research each loan before you accept the terms. Your loan could be with you for a very long time, so don't jump into anything without knowing exactly how much it's going to cost and for how long.

They caught all of the usual reasons why private student loans are more dangerous then federal student loans. This article was written for parents and students. What this article missed is the changing environment of private loans. It was at one point that private loans were the last resort for students who needed more funds then federal loans could provide. Often these were students who the Department of Education still considered dependent of their parents, but the parents could not or would not provide support. The parents would not apply for Parent PLUS loan and the student did not qualify for higher loan limits granted independent students. These student would often not have high credit scores (or co-signers with high credit scores) and would thus be offered high variable interest rates on private loans.

A few things have changed--a recession, an environment of low interest rates for people with outstanding credit, the exclusion of the private lenders from federal loans, and finally, the option of fix-rate private loans. Student loan lenders tightened credit requirements and stopped even offering credit to even marginally risky borrowers.

The environment for the past two academic years is one where if a student (or in some cases a parent) with a co-signer with an excellent credit rating could take out a private student loan with a 2.5% to 3.5% APR. Often these loans had zero origination fees. The interest rate was still variable. The variable interest rate, I believe, still scared many families coming out of the variable interest rate mortgage collapse, but I think that is already starting to fade into the background. Federal Direct Unsubsidized loans have fixed interest rates at 6.8% with a 1% origination fee and Direct Parent PLUS loans (the loans that are offered to parents of dependent undergraduate students) have fixed interest rates at 7.9% with a 4% origination fee. Student and their well-qualified credit parents seem to be really weighing these comparisons now.

Add to this, the introduction of private fixed-rate loans from many of the major players in private student loans. These loans (again for well-qualified students and their co-signers) often complete with Direct Unsubsidized loans and beat the Parent PLUS loans.

I believe this is going to be the year to watch for this shift and see how many well-qualified credit students and their families forgo their federal (Unsubsidized and PLUS) loans in place of a private loan. Non-well-qualified credit students and their families will still be stuck with the higher interest rate "safe" federal loans.

What would happen to the federal loan program over a few years if the well-qualified credit students and their families exited the federal loan programs while at the same time the lower-income students and their families remain in the program? What would happen to school default rates for those federal loan programs? Student loan defaults are a trailing indicator because they take years, if not a decade, to play out.

While I do see this playing out, I worry what this will mean for college access if we have a two tiered student loan program.

A Caption and Cross-Reference Guide

Another useful article by Aleh Cherp over at Academic workflows on Mac.

When I am doing academic writing bound for print, it always ends up finally in Word. Much like a final resting place. I wish it was not the case, but it currently has to be. In most academic work that I write there are numerous figures and tables that all have to be in the right place at the right time. While you can try to piece together captions and cross-references through many youtube videos, he puts it all in one place, in a clear guide.

His final point:

Transferring texts from Scrivener and then adding automatic captions and cross-references is certainly tedious so I am always open to an alternative solution for caption management.

While I do not have an alternative solution to this, a simple hack I use is a placeholder in my captions and text. The placeholder I use is "Table X" or "Figure Y". When the final text is placed in Word, I can do a simple find and update those with the proper caption or cross reference. While it still requires a good deal of manual work, they are at least easier to find.

Markdown certainly does not have this and I do not know of it in MultiMarkdown, but captions and cross-reference for the most part are things of paper and not the internet.