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In a surprising move, The Cooper Union has announced a return to tuition-free education for all undergraduate seniors within each of the next four years starting with its Class of 2025. The reversal comes ten years after school trustees formally voted to do away with its free mandate for the first... View full entry
The American Institute of Architects (AIA) has released a new study examining the impact of student debt across different demographic groups in the architecture industry. The organization used the research company Ipsos to conduct an interview survey of over 700 members who provided insights on... View full entry
Otis College of Art and Design has received a significant donation that will allow for the payment of student loans of students in the graduating Class of 2022. The money comes from Snap Inc. CEO Evan Spiegel and his wife Miranda Kerr, KORA Organics CEO and model, through their philanthropic... View full entry
The American Institute of Architects (AIA) has announced that they are working with members of Congress to help craft student loan debt relief and create more entryways towards the architecture field. The potential pathways for student loan debt relief include service-based loan forgiveness in the... View full entry
University of Southern California (USC) President Carol Folt has announced that the institution will eliminate tuition costs for students whose families make less than $80,000. In addition, the private university will no longer consider home equity when making financial aid calculations for... View full entry
Two weeks ago, somebody untied Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos’s $40 million yacht from its mooring. It got me thinking about another opulent display of wealth owned by DeVos: her 22,000-square-foot nautical-themed summer mansion, located in Holland, Michigan. Just a few more years of climate change and it’ll be floating too. — vox.com
Kate Wagner critiques Betsy DeVos’s Michigan summer mansion on her humor blog McMansion Hell. Wagner unpacks not only the architectural design but also the greater social implications of why the education secretary's McMansion is so horrendous. The essay is dedicated to "all of the public... View full entry
Have you heard the latest wisecrack about Harvard? People are calling it a hedge fund with a university attached [...]
Though the exact figure is hard to determine, experts I consulted estimate that over $100 billion of educational endowment money nationwide is invested in hedge funds, costing them approximately $2.5 billion in fees in 2015 alone. The problems with hedge funds managing college endowments are manifold, going well beyond the exorbitant...fees they charge for their services.
— the Nation
"The time has come for students to connect the dots between ballooning student debt, the poor treatment of campus workers, and the obscene wealth of hedge fund oligarchs."A rallying cry for a divestment movement to oppose hedge funds and their involvement with academia, the article discusses the... View full entry
A student was underpaid almost $7000 during an internship with a Sydney firm of architects, a Fair Work Ombudsman investigation has found. The student was completing a masters degree in architecture when he was paid $12 per hour for six months of full-time work. His duties included architectural drawing, consulting with clients and and conducting site visits...the student, aged in his 20s,... was short-changed $6830. — smh.com.au
According to Australian labor laws, the student was performing work that was not part of his architectural education and should have received minimum wage payment. Australia's minimum wage is $16.88 (in comparison, the US minimum wage is currently $7.25/hr) and after the student's graduation his... View full entry
This week on the podcast: student debt, Chicago's "State of the Art of Architecture", and our new series, Archinect's Lexicon. Paul, Amelia, Donna and Ken are joined by architecture students Jarrod and Elliott to discuss how student debt is changing their lives and careers. We also consider... View full entry
This week, the U.S. Department of Education will release data on the percentage of borrowers who have defaulted on federal student loans over the last three years. Schools with high rates of default face consequences. [...]
Is default the student’s burden? Or the institution’s? And the federal government doesn’t always consider a would-be borrowers’ credit risk the way private lenders can.
— marketplace.org
Related:Architects Laud Introduction of Bipartisan National Design Services Act As Way to Cut Spiraling Student Loan DebtArchitects Support Students' Call for Pro Bono Work in Exchange for Loan ReliefObama only 8 years out of student loan debt #dontdoublemyrate View full entry
[Cooper Union], which announced last April that it would charge undergraduate students tuition for the first time, released figures on Friday that showed overall applications were down this year by just over 20 percent. [...]
The new figures indicate that the admission rate nearly doubled, from 7.7 percent last year to 14.4 percent this year, which still places Cooper Union among the most selective schools in the country.
— The New York Times
The freshmen class of Fall 2014 will be the first in Cooper Union's history to pay tuition. It remains to be seen whether Cooper Union's reputation overtime will falter, as quality considerations are matched against tuition rates and student debt, and students are given fewer options to pursue... View full entry
