college

It's not every day we report on a campus newspaper editorial here, but sometimes one is problematic enough to require a response.

The Georgetown student newspaper -- the Hoya -- published a disappointing editorial today, calling for the disempowerment of students while arguing that national leaders should be left to continue their assault on our generation.

...Student body presidents are elected to represent their peers in campus-specific proposals that are designed to make college life easier. National political representation, however, should be left to the congressmen and senators that many of those two million-plus college students elect of their own free will.

The campaign, which kicked off August 2, claimed to represent "our generation," but what it became was a grandstanding gesture by student leaders who saw a publicity opening. They got what they wanted: endless web, newspaper and television press, including buzz over a conference call with President Obama. The coalition expanded quickly, not because the student body presidents were being urged by their respective constituents to mobilize, but because they found company in their equally ambitious counterparts at other universities.

But in the end, what was actually accomplished? Elected campus leaders may have written a letter and filled the Twitter feeds of Congressmen with the now famous hashtag, but students did not march en masse in the streets of Washington. Student body presidents did not compel their peers to action by coordinating a phone-a-thon to congressional leaders. Nor did they solicit the cooperation of the College Republicans or College Democrats, two political forces on campus who may have been better equipped to take on Capitol Hill during the debt crisis.

While we understand GUSA's good intentions, it is important they remember their place as representatives of Georgetown students to the administration, not to politicians. GUSA executive representatives did not advertise a political campaign when they were running back in February. While Healy Hall and Capitol Hill were designed to mirror each other across Washington, GUSA leaders should stick to leading who they were elected to lead — our student body.

The editorial board disapproved of their fellow Georgetown student, student body president Mike Meaney, organizing a coalition of national student government presidents. The campaign--"Do We Have a Deal Yet"--was created to pressure Congress to stop bickering during the debt ceiling debate/budget crisis and to strike a deal with the next generation in mind, not the next election. It seems that the editorial board would have rather seen more of a focus on campus-specific matters than on "grandstanding gestures" protesting policies and discussions that ostensibly have no direct relevance to Georgetown students' lives.

Of course, the discussions and eventual compromise--if one could call it that--absolutely impacts the quality of life of each college student. For example, did you know that part of the ceiling deal takes money out of the pockets of loan-paying students? Grad students--used to being able to attend class without worrying about interest accruing on their loans--now find that reality taken away. Students who made 12 consecutive payments on their loans in a timely fashion used to be rewarded with a credit. As of July 1, 2012, that no longer exists.

Yes, these issues are made abstract and mind-numbing by the media, which generally aren't capable of facilitating a meaningful, substantive discussion on issues. And a system of higher education, resting on a bunch of siloed departments and divisions unwilling to cooperate, doesn't exactly serve as the best socializing force. Mix those together with an inability to see healthy conflict and a distaste for anything containing the word "politics," and we get the editorial quoted above, which surely represents something close to the views of many students.

What's sad is that this view--that officeholders are the experts and that students' roles are to merely take space on college campuses and exclusively agonize about matters like campus pub closures--is misguided at best and simply unaffordable right now given the problems we all face. Yes--there are problems on our campuses that student governments were elected to solve. But any student government with which I've affiliated is tasked with the responsibility of improving the lives of the students they represent. There is no such thing as a "campus bubble."

Various cultural, economic, and social forces infiltrate campus confines every second of every day. In taking on the task of representing students, student government representatives are obligated to lobby their local, state, and federal governments. Because politics is everywhere, the reality is that everyone is a politician, navigating various systems of power whether they like it or not--even the student journalists writing the editorial.

While compartmentalizing these systems would simplify the job of covering their campus, unfortunately things in the "real world" aren't that cut and dry. Yes, students are citizens of their campus and should have a say on something like a campus pub being slated to close. But students are also citizens of the town, state, country, and planet in which their campus is located. Policies passed at various levels of society impact the student experience, thereby creating a need for any elected student representative to serve as an advocate on and off campus; it also creates a need for student journalists to help their peers understand these impacts. Even though it might make these journalists' jobs a bit more complicated, that's what we need.

Students and young people are marginalized enough in our society; we don't need to do it to ourselves. If it were up to the Hoya editorial board, young people would go back to the kids' table and mind our p's and q's. We can't afford to take that approach any longer, however. The college student body presidents should be commended for 1.) observing the impact the debt discussion has on our generation--their campuses included--and 2.) for speaking out against the process. If anything, these student leaders had the opportunity to, and could have done more to stand up for their constituents, including broadening the number of participants to include the constituents themselves. I hope this collaborative activism continues and intensifies, and I hope to see the Hoya and other student newspapers cover it as they should.

Maria Kefalas has written an interesting post at The Atlantic. She begins by relaying a phenomenon she heard immigration scholar Frank Bean discuss, pointing out the decrease in the number of native-born men who have completed the 12th grade while also noting the increase in the number of men enrolling in post-secondary education. Kefalas and Bean posit that immigrant men--mainly from Mexico--account for the discrepancy. On the ladder of social mobility, both black and white native men from the working class are going head-to-head at an increasing rate with the immigrant men, and the latter group is winning.

Why? Kefalas explains:

In this competition, immigrant men have the edge, not simply because they take lower wages and don't have union protection, but also because, as a group, they have lower rates of criminality and drug abuse--and that may become even more true as today's out-of-work blue collar workers remain out of work for a year or two or more. So as more and more native high-school-educated workers find themselves unemployed (and possibly become unemployable), Bean speculates that immigrant workers may fill the gap, and get many of the blue collar jobs that return, as we recover.

Kefalas, while noting her support of immigration and its societal benefits (which I also share), goes on to raise a concern regarding what this means for young native men who, out of options, look for some way to express their frustrations. The consequences of a large, downtrodden segment of the population recognizing their impotence would probably have enormously detrimental--possibly destructive--effects on society, especially when other complicating factors like race, ethnicity, and generational dynamics are thrown in (cue the footage of the London riots).

Kefalas sees the notion of "college-for-everyone" as a pipe dream doing a disservice to this group of native men; even as someone working in higher education, I tend to agree that college is not for everyone. Yet, school systems today won't hear any of this. Kefalas proposes her own solution.

Americans hate the idea of educational tracking, and I'm not proposing is a system that would give teachers and administrators all the power to determine a teenager's educational trajectory. But right now the only tracks are "college" or "bust." We need to provide alternative pathways for high school students, including those that would mix classroom learning with apprenticeship and applied-skill training.

What would be wrong with creating a system that honors a young person's dreams but also respects the practical concerns of a kid's abilities and talents? What purpose does it serve to tell a kid graduating from high school who tests below 9th-grade levels in math and English that he or she should head off to college to become a doctor?

No other system in the developed world would allow such a thing to happen. It wastes people's time, money, and resources. And it is soul-destroying for the young people who endure it. Foundations and philanthropists should be looking to programs like those in Germany where kids can finish the equivalent of high school (for free) with the training to enter the full-time labor force in a good job. Here, high school graduates end up in community colleges only to languish in remedial courses when they could be in trade and vocational programs preparing them for work that is respected, well-paying, and secure.

I mostly agree with Kefalas' proposal. I do believe that our educational system does a relatively poor job of preparing students for a variety of options not including college. One report from 2006, called "The Silent Epidemic: Perspectives of High School Dropouts" and released by Civic Enterprises in association with Peter D. Hart and Associates for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, cited a handful of reasons why high school students drop out. Two of the reasons are particularly interesting when thinking about the dilemma of young native men discussed above:

• Nearly half (47 percent) said a major reason for dropping out was that classes were not interesting. These young people reported being bored and disengaged from high school. Almost as many (42 percent) spent time with people who were not interested in school. These were among the top reasons selected by those with high GPAs and by those who said they were motivated to work hard.
• Nearly 7 in 10 respondents (69 percent) said they were not motivated or inspired to work hard, 80 percent did one hour or less of homework each day in high school, two-thirds would have worked harder if more was demanded of them (higher academic standards and more studying and homework), and 70 percent were confident they could have graduated if they had tried. Even a majority of those with low GPAs thought they could have graduated.

In addition to agreeing with Kefalas that more educational "tracks" may be needed, the statistics above also leave me wondering if part of the problem lies with the staffing of junior high and high school teachers. Are we hiring teachers whose experiences connect with these students? Are we providing educational experiences that match a variety of students' backgrounds, situating the learning in their worlds, or are we shoving the cliched square peg through the round hole in the name of efficiency and standardized testing? Granted, The Silent Epidemic statistics represent the experiences of both men and women, but they still hint that many of those young men leaving school experience significant boredom with their education. They, and we, deserve better.

• Starting off with some health news... One study recently found that many young people with Type 2 diabetes have impaired cardiovascular function due to stiffened arteries.
• Kurt Metzger's "Talk to Young People about Sex" album will be released on Comedy Central on June 28th
• We need to see more of this: An Iowa City city council candidate is running to give young adults a voice.
• Call it the scone rush? For struggling young people, one cafe in the Chicago area intentionally creates opportunities for recently imprisoned youth to get back on their feet.
• Obama again reaching out to youth through youth roundtables.
• New York's state financial aid agency offers college students advice on how to strengthen their financial fitness following college.
• The San Francisco Chronicle offers its own advice.
• But before you graduate from college, you need to succeed there. Here are some tips for first year students in your first year.
• Entrepreneurship 101: A guide for new college grads looking to fly solo
• Grants that help youth be their own bosses? Interesting.
• The trials and tribulations of the intern and other tales of unpaid labor
• The for-profit price of student loans (and it's not stormtroopers on a collection mission. At least in this story).

Some quick hits for you as we head into the weekend (or, perhaps, just the end).

• A Washington Post piece asks if college is worth it
• Ezra Klein flags a graphic showing the percentage of recent college grads with jobs, by major.
  

  

• Speaking of college, here are ten reasons to get pumped for life following graduation.
• Nebraska's 4H organization and the YMCA team up to offer youth entrepreneur classes. An interesting partnership and initiative.
• CBS writes up the story we covered yesterday regarding Rockefeller's belief that young people are morally hollow. (Apparently 13 more people like him on Facebook between yesterday and today.)
• New Hampshire is aging.
• The Pope knows what's up--at least regarding the wisdom of listening to young people.
• Two young candidates in the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania area won primaries this week.
• Young Canadian city council candidate links young people to the local community.
• UK developing youth "underclass"
• The government: Just say no to sexting.
• Young people afraid to call themselves feminists.
• When will the GOP realize they are on the wrong side of history?

CIRCLE has a post today exploring the difference in reasons college youth and non-college youth give for not voting.

Peter Levine notes that data about voting is notoriously suspect given its ambiguity and the potential for people to withhold their actual behavior.

However, we do see that college-attending non-voters attribute their lack of participation to not being home on Election Day, while their non-college-attending, non-voting peers cite a distrust that their vote will carry any impact.

Of course, the question I am left with is how do we get students to believe in the power of their vote, to commit to voting somewhere whether that's at home or at college, and to actually do the deed. In a post on Monday articulating a ten point plan for renewal, Levine puts forth a vision for how we might start this work.

4. Prepare a new generation of active and responsible citizens. People form attitudes and habits related to civil society when they are young and keep them for the rest of their lives. But civic education has been cut in most school systems, and there are too few opportunities for young people to learn through service and extracurricular activities. Congress should revive the small Learn & Serve America program that provides competitive grants for service-learning, eliminated in 2011 after 21 years of work. Congress should also restore funding for civic education in schools (eliminated in 2011), but direct the funds to organizations that test or expand innovative educational methods and rigorously evaluate their impact. Meanwhile, the Office of Civic Education within the U.S. Department of Education should be elevated from its current low status (within the Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools) and given a leadership role in coordinating the civic education functions of all federal agencies, including the National Parks Service, the national endowment for the humanities and the arts, the Defense Department, and Homeland Security.

Restoring Learn & Serve America moves us in the right direction, while increasing the power and visibility of the Office of Civic Education sends a message that civic education isn't a joke. We need these steps, combined with many others, to build a foundation for our education system that cultivates civic responsibility among students. The problems in our society are large enough that we need as many people as possible--especially young people-- to be on board and willing to make tough decisions and worthy contributions toward our future.

At the NAFSA: Association of International Educators Annual Conference and Expo this week in Kansas City, Missouri, members and the board of directors approved a resolution formally opposing SB1070, Arizona's unjust immigration legislation.

NAFSA's own Everett Egginton, a past president, describes the resolution in a blog post at the NAFSA website:

The resolution calls for the immediate repeal of anti-immigrant legislation by the State of Arizona urges other states to refrain from passing similar measures; asks the U.S. Congress to act quickly to enact comprehensive immigration reform; and resolves the association to not hold national and regional meetings in the State of Arizona until the situation is rectified.

[...]

Of course there is great meaning in this resolution for me at personal level as well, related to where I live, work, and seek personal satisfaction in my life. New Mexico, one of Arizona’s neighbors, is a majority-Hispanic state. But it’s not only the Hispanics in New Mexico that are hurt and embarrassed by this legislation; the hurt and embarrassment are felt across the entire state. As such, we as New Mexicans are concerned with the burdens of this legislation on our Arizona colleagues...

As an employee working in higher education (and a student studying it), I am encouraged to see higher education groups mobilizing on this issue. Unfortunately, those opposed to the legislation are in the minority nationally. This makes standing up and speaking out against this legislation even more paramount. Props to NAFSA for taking a stand. Hopefully similar groups follow its lead.

UPDATE: NAFSA has also launched an advocacy campaign here. (You can automatically tweet a message or post it to your Facebook status, and also write a letter to your governor asking that they take a stand against the Arizona law.)

If you have followed Future Majority over the last couple years, you will recognize that Thomas Friedman's hit piece on Millennials, labeling them "Generation Q" for being too quiet, serves as the foundation for many a post. His Boomer paradigm interferes with his ability to understand how Millennial activism differs.

Friedman argues that Millennials may be "too quiet, too online, for its own good, and for the country's own good." The problem most of us had with Friedman's writing was that he was unable to see that one could be mad, could be online, and could be productive all at once. Another issue was the power Friedman ascribed to symbolic and yet meaningless acts. What good is chaining one's self to a bulldozer actually going to accomplish long-term? Very little.

With that in mind, we now have some more information regarding college students' heavy use of social media, and it is easy to see how our activism has changed course. The International Center for Media and the Public Agenda (ICMPA) at the University of Maryland released a study revealing the considerable depth of students' connections to social media.

200 University of Maryland (College Park) students, as part of a class assignment, were asked to abstain from all media for 24 hours straight. Following this time window, they were then asked to describe their experiences in private blogs. Perhaps the most interesting nugget of information this study yielded was just how interwoven social media has become in 18-21 year olds' lives.

"The students did complain about how boring it was go anywhere and do anything without being plugged into music on their MP3 players," said Moeller. "And many commented that it was almost impossible to avoid the TVs on in the background at all times in their friends' rooms. But what they spoke about in the strongest terms was how their lack of access to text messaging, phone calling, instant messaging, email and Facebook, meant that they couldn't connect with friends who lived close by, much less those far away."

"Texting and IM-ing my friends gives me a constant feeling of comfort," wrote one student. "When I did not have those two luxuries, I felt quite alone and secluded from my life. Although I go to a school with thousands of students, the fact that I was not able to communicate with anyone via technology was almost unbearable."

The student responses to the assignment showed not just that 18-21 year old college students are constantly texting and on Facebook -- with calling and email distant seconds as ways of staying in touch, especially with friends -- but that students' lives are wired together in such ways that opting out of that communication pattern would be tantamount to renouncing a social life.

Bringing this back to the Friedman contention that students should cut out the online crap and do something meaningful with their lives, this survey points to how misguided Friedman actually was in his writing. Social media is so pervasive and such a large part of our world that it is rewiring our brains. As the piece argues above, there is no exiting the social media world to "act" in the real world. To the wide majority of young people, social media is reality. If one had to renounce his or her social life in order to please Friedman, the activism would not mean anything.

Another enlightening conclusion was the impact the abstention from media had on these students' information-gathering capabilities. Participants in the study reported that they normally do not read the newspaper, watch mainstream television news, or listen to radio news, yet they were informed enough to discuss specific news stories. During the study, though, participants remarked on how uninformed they felt.

..."To be entirely honest I am glad I failed the assignment," wrote one student, "because if I hadn't opened my computer when I did I would not have known about the violent earthquake in Chile from an informal blog post on Tumblr."

"Students expressed tremendous anxiety about being cut-off from information," observed Ph.D. student Raymond McCaffrey, a former writer and editor at The Washington Post, and a current researcher on the study. "One student said he realized that he suddenly 'had less information than everyone else, whether it be news, class information, scores, or what happened on Family Guy."

"They care about what is going on among their friends and families and even in the world at large," said McCaffrey. " But most of all they care about being cut off from that instantaneous flow of information that comes from all sides and does not seemed tied to any single device or application or news outlet."

Students clearly rely on social media for information. Given our knowledge -- going clear back to Thomas Jefferson -- that information is vital in managing our country's affairs, dispensing with internet-based activism would be foolish and regressive, breeding even more disengagement and misinformation.

Friedman's Boomer lens assumes that we still have a critical mass of institutions that need tearing down, and that it needs to happen quickly. These Millennial college students, as Morley Winograd and Michael Hais point out, understand how decentralized our lives are, and, in role-modeling their "civic" archetype, they must rely on these anything-but-linear connections and the decentralized flow of information to reconstruct society.

Because idealist generations are unwilling to compromise on moral issues, they've always failed to solve the major social and economic problems of their eras. In the decades after the 1828 election, the country was pulled apart over slavery, ultimately leading to the Civil War. After the 1896 campaign, the United States couldn't find a way to help blue-collar workers and farmers to share fully in the wealth generated by the Industrial Revolution. It took the Great Depression to usher in the sense of urgency that led to Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. Today, issues such as affordable health care or quality education or climate change are endlessly debated but never resolved by two sides unwilling to set aside their ideological agendas for the common good.

But now, with another civic generation emerging, the times, as boomer troubadour Bob Dylan sang, they are a-changin'. Civic generations react against the idealist generations' efforts to use politics to advance their own moral causes and focus instead on reenergizing social, political and government institutions to solve pressing national issues. Previous civic realignments occurred in 1860, with the election of Abraham Lincoln, and in 1932, when the GI generation put Roosevelt in office. It's no coincidence that these "civic" presidents, along with George Washington, top all lists of our greatest presidents. All three led the country in resolving great crises by inspiring and guiding new generations and revitalizing and expanding the federal government.

In their book Millennial Makeover, Winograd and Hais describe technology as "[enabling] these changes by creating powerful new ways to reach new generations of voters with messages that relate directly to their concerns" (p. 24). Yes, face-to-face interaction continues to have its place in our society. However, if we were to scrap our reliance on social media, we would be willfully ignoring the new generations of voters Winograd and Hais mention. This study's results underscore how vital social media is to our generation's civic health. If we were to purge ourselves of our internet activism, only then could we legitimately be considered "quiet."

This week President Obama signed the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act. This common-sense reform that will generate an estimated $80 billion in savings by bypassing for-profit lenders in the loan process and will instead provide loans directly to students. This reform makes government more efficient and invests the savings in the education of young Americans without raising taxes or adding to the deficit, this is the largest investment in higher education in history that will put the country on track to have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world by 2020.

However the Kansas Republican delegation continues to put the interests of Wall Street, banks, and lenders ahead of the interest of Kansas students and their families. This law will not only make college more affordable but it will also save taxpayers billions of dollars.

The Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act will eliminate wasteful subsidies to private bankers by switching to a system of direct lending of federal student loans.

It will make historic investments in America’s workforce by making college dramatically more affordable – at no cost to taxpayers. I will invest $36 billion over 10 years to increase the maximum annual Pell Grant scholarship to $5,550 in 2010 and to $5,975 by 2017. It will reduce the deficit by $68 billion over the next 11 years and meets Pay-As-You-Go fiscally responsible principles.

By standing against this law Lynn Jenkins, Todd Tiahrt, Jerry Moran and Sam Brownback have once again turned their backs on the Kansans they represent. Once again their talk of Kansas values and fiscal responsibility has proven to be nothing but empty words.

It’s unfortunate they don't support a law that will make government more efficient and effective, will allow more Kansans to pursue higher education at lower cost, and allow Kansan families to keep more of their money.

Colin Curtis
State President
Kansas Young Democrats

America has always recognized the link between education and economic success--from the mandate for free public education in the Northwest Ordinance through Lincoln's support for the Morrill Land Grant College Act to the GI Bill of Rights legislation after World War II. In each of these previous civic eras, governments at all levels have invested heavily in education based on the belief that these expenditures would return much more in the future earnings capacity of its citizenry than the short term costs incurred. Now new research indicates the best way to bring good jobs and rising wages to our newest civic generation, Millennials, is by breaking down the barriers to post-secondary educational success.

According to a recent study by Louis Jacobson and Christine Mokher, "Pathways to Boosting the Earnings of Low Income Students by Increasing their Educational Attainment," the key to future earnings potential is COMPLETION of whatever course of study is undertaken. "Course for course the returns to community colleges and four year college attendance are comparable. However students who complete a community college credential tend to have higher earnings than four-year college students who do not graduate." Those who earned an associate degree at a community college earned 27% more than those who failed to get a degree of any kind and those with a certificate, even if for only one year of post high school education, still earned on average 8% more a year than those who failed to complete their higher education studies.

The two major obstacles to postsecondary success identified in the study were the need to finance education and living expenses by working while attending school and the lack of adequate preparation in academic subjects such as math and science while in high school. Given the documented importance of completing a post-secondary field of study, the report's identification of these two principal barriers to students finishing what they start gives policy makers a clear path to improve both educational attainment and the acquisition of good jobs with decent salaries and benefits for Millennials.

Financing Post-secondary Education

The Jacobson and Mokher study found that in 2007-2008 just about every one of the lowest income students attending community colleges was in debt, with an average of $7,147 in unmet expenses after taking into account all the grants or scholarships they received. Student per class tuition rates are even higher at private one or two year "career colleges," which enroll only about 10% of the number of students that attend government subsidized community colleges. As a result, three-fourths of associate degree or certificate seekers end up working to help cover their educational and living expenses. The burden of needing to work is a major reason why only 26% of community college students get a degree or certificate within three years of starting their studies and only 38% get their degree within six years.

Meanwhile federal support for higher education has failed to keep up with rising costs so that more and more students find themselves financing their education with student loans of one type or another. In Indiana, for instance, 62 percent of those who do manage to graduate carry student loan debt averaging $23,264 per student. The loan burden in that state is even higher for graduates of for-profit colleges who leave school with an average debt burden of $32,650.

In addition to the steps Democrats have already taken to increase the maximum amount available from Pell Grants and the value of tax deductions for parents able to afford to pay their child's tuition, Congress should follow the President's lead in addressing this debilitating burden on students who are required to finance their education while attending school. One important step would be to increase support for community colleges along the lines advocated by NDN. Congress should also eliminate the current subsidy to banks that provide risk free private student loans guaranteed by the government and redirect the money saved to expanding the federal loan program that allows students to borrow directly, at lower costs, from the government. This Obama Administration initiative was part of the student loan reform bill the House passed last year, but it appears to be stymied in the Senate with sponsors hard to come by. Finally, whatever entity is eventually charged with protecting consumers from deceptive marketing of loans and other credit instruments as part of reforming our nation's financial regulatory structure, should also be given oversight of the student loan market and the power to set strong rules for fairer private student loan marketing and terms.

Fixing our nation's high schools

Among the brightest success stories of the Obama Administration are its educational reform policies under the leadership of Secretary of Education, Arnie Duncan. Its Race to the Top grant program designed to reward performance is already having transformative impact on educational policy in many states even as the program's first grants are awarded. Focused on providing more money to schools that are turning out students able and willing to learn, this program should be expanded in line with the administration's budget requests and supported by Democrats at all levels of government, from school districts to state legislatures. Now its time to bring the Gen X parents of Millennial students into the game as well and get them engaged in making sure their kids get the education they will need to succeed when they graduate from high school.

Already successful charter schools, such as UPrep in Detroit, have demonstrated that any child of any background can graduate from high school and get accepted into a post-secondary educational experience if provided with the right learning environment, one that sets expectations of success right from the start. Bringing parents into the process of establishing such learning environments, as California's recent "parent trigger" legislation does, represents the cutting edge of educational reform in this Millennial Era.

As Neil Howe, co-author of Generations, wrote in the most recent edition of School Administrator magazine, "when these Gen-X "security moms" and "committed dads" are fully roused, they can be even more attached, protective and interventionist than Boomer [parents] ever were. . .They will juggle schedules to monitor their kids' activities in person. . . [and] will quickly switch their kids into - or take them out of - any situation according to their assessment of their youngsters' interests." Congress could take a big step toward improving America's high schools by empowering these Gen-X "stealth-fighter parents" to take over failing schools as part of the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law. Howe writes that "Gen Xers believe their children's education should be a fair and open transaction with complete and accurate information and unconstrained consumer choice" and Congress should use its funding leverage to give them just what they are looking for.

Winning the hearts and minds of both Millennials and their parents is an achievable political goal for Democrats. Furthermore, as the latest research reveals, knocking down the barriers to obtaining a certificate or degree after high school is the key to economic success for both students and the country, making the idea good public policy as well as good politics. Making higher education more affordable and fixing our nation's high schools should be at the top of Democrats economic policy priorities now and throughout the decade ahead.

Crossposted from the NDN Blog

A friend of mine at American University put up a few status posts on Facebook last week about filling out the FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid). It was long, complicated, scary, and confusing. Some of the forms it asked for were incorrectly labeled and overall the entire system just seemed messy.

Some reports suggest that as many as 1.5 million students who are ELIGIBLE for Federal Aid don't even apply. Most would tell you that the application is just too large and confusing to bother with. Those involved in education, especially students, have been calling for FAFSA Reform for years. Some universities are even offering special workshops to explain the FAFSA to students.

The Obama Administration has made reform of the application a priority for their Education Department. The new application has eliminated SEVENTEEN web screens and TWENTY-TWO questions. If you've ever even glanced at the system, you know this is a huge step forward.

Another step I would like to see taken is removing questions about assets and finances which require information not found on a standard tax return! The United States Student Association says the House has already passed legislation aimed at doing just that.

Although not everyone agrees that the changes are good, I can tell you that the first time I looked at the FAFSA I was completely scared off. I'm glad the Administration and Congress understand that something needs to change.

ALSO if you'd like to donate to the Disaster Relief Effort in Haiti, you can text HAITI to 90999 to donate $10 to the Red Cross.