When did university book stores become T-shirt shops?

 I live about a mile from the Barne & Noble bookstore, the official bookstore for Louisiana State University. Yesterday, I walked over for a cup of hot chocolate at the bookstore's Starbucks coffee shop.

While the barista was constructing my cocoa (a laborious business), I contemplated the murals above the counter. Overhead, I saw some of the great English-language authors: Faulkner, Hardy, Joyce, Kipling, Melville, Nabakov, Shaw, Whitman, and others. 

I found myself wondering whether Barnes & Noble sold any books by the authors who are celebrated at Starbucks.  It is a college bookstore, after all.

So I went upstairs to the store's tiny "fiction and literature" section and looked for works by these famous writers.  Most of them I couldn't find: no Kipling, no Nabakov, no Whitman. 

I did see some comic books, however, in a section titled "graphic novels."  And I saw a hell of a lot of  $20 LSU T-shirts, $70 LSU sweatshirts, and hundreds of LSU ballcaps, selling for $25 a pop.

I also saw $9 LSU wine glasses and $27 LSU waterbottles. And I saw a pile of stuffed animals depicting Mike, the LSU tiger mascot.

In fact, as I scanned both floors of LSU's bookstore, I realized that Barnes & Noble's campus address isn't a bookstore at all; it's a T-shirt shop.  Yes, it sells some textbooks in an obscure corner, but most of the space is dedicated to overpriced souvenirs. 

I am not saying LSU students should be reading the authors who are memorialized at the Starbooks coffee shop.  I've read some Faulkner, some George Bernard Shaw, some of Henry James's excruciatingly dull novels. In my opinion, students can skip all that.

But I find it unsettling to see LSU students swiping their credit cards to buy exorbitantly priced junk and $5 lattes. Why? Because I know many of these students are purchasing that stuff with their student-loan money. 

If these students graduate and can't find good jobs--and many of them won't--what will be their best option? For millions, it will be to sign up for a 25-year income-based repayment plan. That's a high price to pay for an LSU T-shirt.

Preparing for an academic career? Better have Plan B in your back pocket

As reported by the Star Tribune a couple of weeks ago, the University of Minnesota will not accept new students into many of its liberal arts programs in the fall of 2021.

The university is stopping admission in twelve programs, including history, political science, theater arts, and gender studies. New enrollments will be limited in 15 other programs.  No program outside the university's college of liberal arts will be affected.

Universities across the nation are making similar decisions--cutting or reducing programs in languishing liberal arts disciplines.

Interest in the traditional fields of liberal arts has been declining for decades, and job opportunities in these disciplines have dwindled.

I recall sitting in Professor William Stott's graduate-level American Studies class at the University of Texas more than 30 years ago. Professor Stott handed out the vitae of about a dozen candidates for a history professor's job at UT. Every applicant had a Ph.D. from an Ivy League school: Harvard, Yale, Brown, etc.

Dr. Stott didn't have to say anything to make his point. How can you compete with a Harvard Ph.D. holder for a professor's position with your doctorate from a less prestigious public university?

I took the hint and went to law school. And I have never been sorry.

Without question, there will be fewer faculty positions for liberal arts professors in the years to come.  Many of these positions are in second- and third-tier liberal arts colleges that are experiencing enrollment declines--especially those located in the Northeast and the Mid-Atlantic states.  

If you take out student loans to get a Ph.D. in history or political science, you will find yourself in serious trouble if you can't find a position in your chosen field.

You may think a Ph.D. will get you an excellent job of some kind, even if you can't find one in academia. But you may be wrong. Employers may be reluctant to hire an employee with a doctorate in medieval history, thinking that such a person is overqualified or will be unhappy working in a mundane bureaucratic job.

Paul Campos, writing about the job market for lawyers in his brilliant little book Don't Go to Law School (Unless), advised law students with mediocre grades at bottom-tier law schools to consider cutting their losses dropping out before graduating:

 [G]iven the state of the legal market, most people at most law schools who find themselves in the bottom half of their class after the first year would be better off dropping out.

As bad as it would be to have student loans and no degree, he pointed out, it might be worse to take out more loans to get a J.D. and then be unable to find a job.

These are volatile and unstable times for American higher education--especially graduate education. Don't be lured into an expensive master's program or doctoral program with a vague sense that another university degree will somehow improve your job prospects.

You could be wrong--terribly wrong. And if you wind up with a graduate degree, no job, and six-figure student-loan debt, you will have doomed your financial future and perhaps the future of your family. 

A cushy professor's job: You probably won't get one.

SUNY chancellor Jim Malatras chirps cheerily while college enrollment applications plunge 20 percent

 College enrollment applications plunged 20 percent at the State University of New York, an enormous college system with 64 campuses. The coronavirus pandemic bears most of the blame.

But SUNY Chancellor Jim Malatras is upbeat.  The coronavirus "invites us how we can do better," he assured the public a few days ago.

 "Let's ride the wave," he chortled. After all, SUNY is "on the cutting edge of the new student-focused approach." 

Of course, Chancellor Malatras can afford to be upbeat. He makes $450,000 a year and gets a $60,000 annual housing allowance. 

Where did this bozo come from? Did SUNY do a national search before it hired Mr. Malatras?

No, it did not.  According to Nicolas Tampio, writing in USA Today, Malatras is a crony of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. Newspaper headlines referred to him as "Cuomo loyalist Malatras," and "Cuomo aid Malatras," Tampico observed. Malatras was formerly Cuomo's director of operations and one of the governor's advisors on New York's COVID response.

I feel so much better. After all, Cuomo's administration did a great job managing the coronavirus pandemic--especially at the nursing homes, where COVID deaths were underreported by 50 percent.

Merryl Tisch, SUNY's board chairwoman, stoutly maintains her board acted wisely when it hired Malatras without a national search. Why?  

[Because the board] felt it was imperative to act now in a reasonable and deliberate and socially aware moment to protect the SUNY system across the full array of challenges and help produce a model for sustainability in a post-COVID world.

What the hell does that mean? Did chairwoman Tisch pull that sentence out of her butt? Or did some hack in SUNY's public relations office pump out that swill?

But perhaps I'm too hard on Chancellor Malatras. After all, SUNY pays him half a million bucks a year to be a cheerleader--not Debbie Downer.

But here is some advice to New Yorkers about their college choices. Make up your own mind about your post-secondary education, and don't take out too many student loans to pay for it. Don't just listen to some clown blather on about his university's "student-focused approach" for spending your borrowed money.

Don't borrow too much money to "ride the wave" with Chancellor Malatras.

The Parent Plus Program was a policy blunder that hurts low-income and African American families: Shut It down

Our government's Parent PLUS Program is an insidious scheme to lure low-income parents into taking out student loans so their kids can go to colleges they can't afford.

 Insider Higher Ed's Kery Murakami tells the story of Ewan Johnson, whose mother owes $150,000 in Parent PLUS loans--money she borrowed so her son could get a degree from Temple University in strategic communications and political science.

As Johnson related, he comes from "a low economic background." Will his mother will ever pay off her Parent PLUS loans? I doubt it.

Johnson's mother is one of 3.6 million parents who collectively owe more than $96 billion in Parent PLUS loans. For the most part, parents aren't taking out these loans so their kids can attend elite
private schools like Harvard. "Rather," as Wall Street Journal reporters Andrea Fuller and Josh Mitchell observed, "they include art schools, historically Black colleges and private colleges where parents are borrowing nearly six-figure amounts to fulfill their children's college dreams . . "

Indeed, African American parents are hurt the most by the Parent PLUS Program. The WSJ reported that 20 percent of African American parents who took out Parent PLUS loans in 2003-2004 defaulted on their loans by 2015.  

Default rates for some colleges are exceptionally high. A New America study found that 30 percent of Parent PLUS borrowers at 15 institutions default within two years!

Should all this debt--nearly $100 billion--be forgiven? President Biden proposes to knock $10,000 off of every federal student loan, but it is unclear with his plan includes people with Parent PLUS loans. 

Policymakers worry that forgiving all Parent PLUS debt will unfairly benefit wealthy families who have the resources to pay back their loans.  Sandy Baum, a student-loan expert, said that forgiving all Parent PLUS debt would be "outrageous."

Hardly anyone suggests that we just eliminate this dodgy government boondoggle that exploits low-income and minority families.  

So why don't we just make one straightforward reform? Let's allow parents who wrecked their financial futures so their kids could attend the wrong college to discharge their Parent PLUS loans in bankruptcy. 

College professors are burned out by the coronavirus pandemic: Hey, join the friggin' club!

 College professors are burned out by the coronavirus epidemic. According to Liz McMillen, Executive Editor of The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Faculty members are stressed, sometimes extremely so; they're tired and anxious about a required return to campus; they say they are neglecting their research and publishing. They aren't sure that their institutions have their safety as their top priority.

In short, as the cover of The Chronicle's special issue proclaims: "The Pandemic is Dragging on. And Professors Are Burning Out."

I'm not surprised. Professor Gary Dworkin, the leading researcher on teacher burnout, has linked the phenomenon to feelings of hopelessness, meaninglessness, and isolation.

Professors have certainly been isolated during the pandemic. Almost all face-to-face learning shut down last spring, and instructors were forced to teach their classes online--whether or not they wanted to or were trained for teaching with computers. Not fun.

And many professors have good reasons for feeling hopeless. University budgets are being cut, programs slashed, instructors laid off.  Two of my colleagues at prestigious private universities had their retirement benefits slashed--not a good sign for the future.

Finally, some faculty members are probably feeling that their work is meaningless. Many universities adopted pass/fail grading policies during the pandemic, which tends to erode the rigor of teaching and learning. If students believe they will pass a course with only a minimum amount of work, most will slack off; and if a professor is required to assign 100 grades under a pass-fail policy, that professor will likely pass every student who has a pulse.

But hey, things are tough all over. Minimum-wage workers, people in the hospitality industry, small-business owners are all suffering.  Parents with small children are stressed to the max as they try to juggle their jobs with daycare. Many of these folks do not have health insurance.

Professors, after all, have paid health care and retirement benefits. If they are tenured, they have rock-solid job protection. And most of them have flexible work schedules.  I don’t think there is one tenured professor out of ten who goes to the office on Friday or shows up at work before 10 AM on a Monday morning.

As for all that neglected research and publishing that Editor McMillen mentioned, I'm not buying it. 

First of all, a lot of stuff gets published that is totally worthless except as a stepping stone to tenure. We could save thousands of trees if the professors published less--especially the professors in education and the soft-science fields.

In any event, I'm not convinced that the pandemic has slowed down productive research that much.  Admittedly, some researchers must do their work in laboratories or the field. The coronavirus probably impedes their progress.

But what prevents a professor from going to work on the book that's perpetually described as "in progress"? After all, a lot of profs are teaching at home in their pajamas. Maybe there's a little time for writing during the day instead of watching The View. Whoopi's not going to help you write that bestseller.

In short, esteemed scholars, stop your whining. 

Despite what you might think from reading The Chronicle of Higher Education’s special issue on professor burnout—it’s not all about you.

Neal v. Navient Solutions: A simple student-loan dispute ends up in 12 years of litigation

 Trey Neal took out a private student loan with JP Morgan Chase Bank in 2008.  Neal and Chase signed a promissory note agreeing that interest on the loan would be governed by Ohio law. 

Later, Neal concluded that he was being charged interest at a higher rate than Ohio allowed.  So he sued Chase for damages.

Mr. Neal ran into two problems in getting this dispute resolved. First, he had difficulty determining the proper party to sue.

Chase sold Neal's loan to Jamestown Funding Trust, which assumed Chase's interest in the loan. Jamestown is "related" to Navient Credit Finance, an affiliate of Navient Solutions. Navient Solutions then became Neal's loan servicer. Apparently, Neal was uncertain about who owned the loan because he dropped Chase from the lawsuit and added four Navient entities as defendants to his suit.

Neal's lawsuit had a second problem: he had agreed to arbitrate any dispute over his student loan rather than litigate.

The Navient entities asked a federal court to order Neal to arbitrate his claim under Neal's credit agreement with Chase. A federal district court rejected Navient's request, concluding Navient did not have the legal right to enforce the arbitration clause.

But Navient appealed that decision to the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, which reversed the lower court's decision.  The appellate court ruled that Navient did have the right to compel arbitration under Ohio law. So Neal must submit his interest-rate complaint to an arbitrator, and Neal will probably be required to pay half the arbitrator's fees to get the matter resolved. 

A couple of points. First, Neal's complaint about the interest he was charged on his loan is a simple dispute, but it wound up before a federal appellate court that did not rule until 12 years after Neal took out his loan.

Second, Neal's private student loan became ensnared in a web of entities: 1) Chase Bank, 2) Jamestown Funding Trust, 3) Navient Solutions, 4) Navient Corporation, and 5) Navient Credit Finance Corporation, and Navient Private Loan Trust. No wonder Neal had trouble figuring out whom he was dealing with.

So Mr. Neal must submit his complaint to arbitration. 

One thing seems sure. Whether Mr. Neal wins or loses, his transaction costs will likely be far greater than the sum of money at stake. 

Thus, Neal v. Navient Solution teaches us all this message: Don't mess with the student-loan industry because it won't be worth your while.

References

Neal v. Navient Solutions, LLC, 978 F.3d 572 (8th Cir. 2020).

The Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program is a bureaucratic nightmare, and litigation hasn't helped

In 2007, Congress enacted the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program to give student-loan debt relief to people who took on burdensome student loans and went to work in relatively low-paying public service jobs: first responders, medical professionals, school teachers, etc.

Under the terms of the PSLF program, individuals employed in qualified public service jobs who made 120 loan payments in an approved income-based repayment plan would have the balance of their debt forgiven. Furthermore, the forgiven debt would not be considered taxable income.

Pretty straightforward, right?  

To administer this program, the U.S. Department of Education appointed Fedloan Servicing to determine if PSLF applicants worked for qualified public service employers. Fedloan Servicing then became the loan servicer for those individuals. 

Still pretty straightforward.

Apparently, however, policymakers underestimated the cost of PSLF.  First of all, student borrowers who enrolled in the program had higher debt levels than other borrowers, which Congress probably did not anticipate. 

As Jason Delisle pointed out in a Brookings paper, PSLF actually allows many people to get graduate degrees for free.  College graduates who already have student debt can borrow more money for graduate school without increasing their monthly loan payments. 

Additionally, Congress unintentionally increased the cost of PSLF when it rolled out the GRAD Plus program, allowing individuals to borrow the full cost of attending graduate school, no matter how high that cost might be. Law school graduates, for example, borrow an average of $100,000 to get their JD degrees.  

Thus, PSLF and GRAD Plus acted together to create a perverse incentive for people to go to graduate school and borrow the maximum amount possible. 

At some point, during the last years of the Obama administration, the  Department of Education realized that the cost of the PSLF program would be enormous. As Delisle described the program, PSLF had become a "bonanza" for graduate students and needed to be scaled back.

The Department of Education, realizing belatedly that PSLF was a giant money pit, adopted regulations to limit the number of people who are eligible for PSLF relief. 

Thus, in the first year of processing PSLF relief applications, DOE approved only about 1 percent of the claims even though the vast majority of claimants had been certified by Fedloan Servicing as working in approved public service jobs.

The American Bar Association sued DOE on behalf of itself and four of its employees, claiming that DOE had applied its PSLF rules arbitrarily and capriciously in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act.

In a 2019 decision, Judge Timothy Kelly ruled in favor of three of the four ABA employees, finding that DOE had, in fact, acted arbitrarily and capriciously.

Congrees, dimly aware that something had gone wrong with the PSLF program, approved $350 million specifically to benefit PSLF applicants. But this legislation did not straighten out the mess that the PSLF program had become.

In July 2019, the American Federation of Teachers filed suit on behalf of five teachers who had been denied PSLF relief. AFT and the teachers charged DOE with acting arbitrarily and capriciously n violation of the Administrative Procedure Act and in violation of the teachers' constitutional right to due process. 

In June 2020, Judge Dabney Friedrich issued an opinion in the AFT lawsuit.  Judge Friedrich ruled that the individual teachers had not stated a valid claim for violation of the Administrative Procedure Act. But the judge ruled that the teachers had stated a claim for breach of due process, and he allowed that claim to go forward.

Did these two lawsuits straighten out the PSLF program? No, they did not.  In June 2020, about the time of Judge Friedrich's decision in the AFT case, the state of California sued DOE, also claiming that DeVos's bureaucracy had screwed up the PSLF program. That litigation is ongoing.

To summarize, PSLF is a fiasco. Congress's $350 million cash infusion did not fix it, DOE's regulations did not fix it, and litigation in the federal courts didn't straighten it out. 

Betsy DeVos's DOE wanted to scrap the program, and Delisle recommended that the program be shut down and "letting a standalone IBR program do what PSLF [was] meant to accomplish."

Politically, however, the PSLF program may be impossible to repair.  Almost four years after the first program participants were scheduled to get debt relief, few have received it. Thus, a program intended to assist Americans working in public service jobs has turned into a bureaucratic nightmare.

References

American Bar Association v. U.S. Department of Education, 370 F. Supp. 1 (D.D.C. 2019).

Stacy Cowley. 28,000 Public Servants Sought Student Loan Forgiveness. 96 Got It. New York Times, September 27, 2018.

Stacy Cowley. Student Loan Forgiveness Program Approval Letters May Be Invalid. New York Times, March 30, 2017. 

 Jason Delisle. The coming Public Service Loan Forgiveness Bonanza. Brookings Institution Report, Vol 2(2), September 22, 2016.

Richard Fossey & Tara Twomey, American Bar Association v. U.S. Department of Education: Federal Judge Rules That DOE Acted Capriciously in Denying Public Service Loan Forgiveness  to Three Public Service Lawyers, 366 Education Law Reporter 596 (August 8, 2019). 

Lauren Hirsch & Annie Nova. California sues Education Secretary DeVos, saying she has failed to implement student loan forgiveness program. CNBC News (June 3, 2020).

Weingarten v. DeVos, 468 F. Supp. 3d 322 (D.D.C 2020).

Jordan Weissmann. Betsy DeVos Wants to Kill a Major Student Loan Forgiveness Program, Slate, May 17, 2017.

U.S. Government Accountability Office. Federal Student Loans: Education Could Do More to Help Ensure Borrowers Are Aware of Repayment and Forgiveness Options. GAO-15-663 (August 2016).