Portside

Reader Comments - Today's Student Protests; Vietnam War History, My Lai; Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism; Israel - Right Wing Nation with Nukes; Unions Key to Fighting Inequality; Women Fighters; Venezuela Sanctions; Socialists, Socialist Movement and Socialism; Human Genome Tinkering; Hey, World! Let's create a nuclear-free future -- April 24-26, New York City Remembering Jean Hardisty, Geraldine Blankinship and Grace Paley

The strikers, dubbed the “Corinthian 15” after the now-bankrupt network of for-profit schools they attended, announced the strike with a simple message directed at the Department of Education: “We owe you nothing.”

The Department of Education is creating its own college ranking system based on access, affordability and performance. US News and World Report has long been aware that it uses a deeply flawed system for assessing colleges' educational quality. In 1997, the National Opinion Research Center. The NORC study found, '...the current approach is that the weights used to combine the various measures into an overall rating lack any defensible empirical or theoretical basis.'

'We are determined,' said students organizers in a joint letter, 'to build a movement too big to ignore that puts free, accessible and public education back on the political agenda.' Thousands marched supporting those demands yesterday.

America's student loan debt crisis is a massive, devastating, trillion dollar morally criminal conspiracy, committed by Wall Street banksters, libertarian billionaires and Reaganomics devotees.

Should we care that our college experiences are being funded by borrowed money? In recent years, financial markets have become increasingly entangled in budget decisions, and often those decisions have little to do with educating students. In many cases, schools are just borrowing for huge capital investments that help the college market itself, such as gleaming new football stadiums and shiny dorm buildings.

Since the founding of public higher education, our nation has moved progressively toward expanding the doors of access. But in the last generation, we have moved in the opposite direction. State higher education funding on a per-student basis is lower today than it was in 1980. Federal financial aid no longer provides grants robust enough to defray the rising cost of college.

The well-intended regulations don’t do enough to protect students who are easy prey for for-profit universities.

The state of education is in disarray just like the state of capitalism.

The college ranking game diverts from the need for public support to make higher education affordable.