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New Book Exposes U.S. Higher Education's Broken Business Model and Offers Bold New Plan to End "Graduation Gridlock"

(Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20110708/DC32485)

Synopsis

While it has never been more important in life to get a college degree, it has never been harder to do so. Taxpayers have been so impressed with the lifetime earning benefits of a degree that they have radically reduced their direct subsidies to higher education institutions, leaving both the middle class and the disadvantaged to mortgage their futures to pay the resulting hyper-inflated tuition rates. Yet the same taxpayers are unwittingly underwriting expensive, for-profit educational enterprises by taking the default risk on federal student loans, which often go to fund some shady marketing and educational practices that call to mind the "subprime" mortgage industry at its worst.

All but a few elite universities face challenges to their long-term financial models and their viability. All but well-off students confront uncertain pathways and staggering education debt, whether they graduate or not.

In the authors' view, a "new normal" in America's colleges and universities offers shocking statistics:

    --  45 out of 100 who start college today will not earn a bachelor's degree
    --  Those who manage to finish college take, on average, about six years
    --  Only 15 out of 100 college students are traditional--85 struggle to
        complete degrees in non-traditional settings (working adults)
    --  Current outstanding student loan debt could fund the entire TARP
        "bailout" or the whole Obama Stimulus Package.
    --  Only about 30% of Americans over 25 have bachelor's degrees

The authors propose a new "public option": an affordable, scaleable, no-frills, three-year bachelor's degree template, employing a flexible hybrid of in-person and online learning, which can best take root in the distinctly American setting of the community college system. We believe this will break America's graduation gridlock as well as the chokehold of debt on student families that is strangling their economic futures.

Media: Jenny Holmes 606.923.3371 or jenny@thepubplace.com

SOURCE Golden Gate University