“Textbook costs to students at higher education institutions are rising 6% per year on average, and have risen 82% over the last decade …”

“The complexity of texts students are being assigned to read has declined by about three grade levels over the past 100 years. A century ago, students were being assigned books with the complexity of around the ninth- or 10th-grade level. But in 2012, the average was around the sixth-grade level.”

“Asked about a situation where 40 percent of a submission is copied word for word without using quotations, citations or references, 91 percent of respondents accurately identify this as plagiarism. However, in the same situation where “some changes” have been made to the copied text, almost 40 percent say they do not think it is plagiarism or are unsure whether it is. Among British students the figure is 31 percent, compared with just 6 percent in the “word for word” scenario. “It’s surprising how many students are not sure whether that’s plagiarism or have changed their minds from a previous question, when actually it’s the same,” said Irene Glendinning, a member of the Impact of Policies for Plagiarism in Higher Education across Europe project.”

“in 2006, Amherst decided to reserve the majority of its transfer slots for students coming from community college. In some ways, the decision represented potentially a more radical commitment to underprivileged students than online courses — as it came at an actual cost to the school, while online courses are highly profitable. Seven years later, Amherst president emeritus Anthony Marx argues claims the program has worked brilliantly, just as his administration had expected. Broadening its search for transfers to the roughly one million students who graduate from community college every year, “we could find amazing jewels that no one else is looking for,” he told an audience at a panel hosted by The Century Foundation on Thursday.”

“Most are driven mainly by curiosity rather than the desire to show off their certificates to any potential employer, and none has paid for a verified certificate. Consider Anna Nachesa, a 42-year-old single mother in a village near Amsterdam who logs on to MOOCs for several hours each night after dinner with her teenage kids. She has always found TV boring, she says, and for her, MOOCs replace reading books. She is a physicist by training, with a degree from Moscow State University, and she works as a software developer. “This stuff is actually addictive,” she says. In some ways the lure is like Everest: Some want to climb it to see if they can. “The Dutch have the proverb ‘If you never shoot, you already missed,’” she says.”

“If most top colleges wanted to be truly equitable, they could not be with their current business model. There is not a golden pot of low-income applicants that schools want but are failing to reach. Instead, many schools don’t want more low-income students because they won’t be able to pay for them without a major overhaul of school funding practices. Outside of the handful of super-elite universities with fortress endowments, colleges’ finances are currently designed around enrolling a disproportionately high number of high-income students. These schools could not afford to support more low-income or middle-income students absent either a huge increase in tuition, a commensurate reduction in spending, or a dramatic change in public funding. In fact, schools are already moving away from a more equitable system. Colleges actively recruit “full pay” students who can attend and will not need financial aid. A 2011 survey by Inside Higher Ed found that about 35 percent of admissions directors at 4-year institutions, particularly public colleges, had increased their efforts to target “full pay” students. Far from wanting to enroll more low-income students, colleges recruit more affluent ones who will pay full price to attend. A follow-up survey of college business officers found that the most common strategy to deal with financial challenges in the next few years was to “raise net tuition revenue.” More than 7 in 10 college CFOs cited this answer. In other words, schools are becoming more reliant on the inequality in the system than ever before.”

“Lending standards have gotten suffocatingly tight in the wake of the housing bust, and young people with too much student debt compared to their income, or who’ve fallen behind on their loan payments, may simply be unable to qualify for a mortgage. As the Fed noted, student borrowers now also have worse credit scores, on average, than their ed-debt-free peers.”