Wednesday was a difficult day for The American Independent News Network, which is the larger entity that operates The Iowa Independent. Our chief executive and founder announced two of our sister sites would close and their content would be moved to The American Independent.
A recently introduced bill could have far-reaching impact on the U.S. sugar industry, including American Crystal Sugar, a farmer-owned cooperative that locked out 1,300 Midwest workers on Aug. 1.
The chairman for Herman Cain’s Iowa effort says the campaign “relied more on the word of farmers than Washington regulators” in deciding to run an ad containing claims the Environmental Protection Agency says are false.
The Iowa Senate will remain under the control of a slim 26-25 Democratic majority when it reconvenes in January 2012.
Loan default rates among for-profit college graduates could be worse than U.S. Sen. Tom Harking originally suspected.
In calling for more scrutiny of for-profit colleges, Harkin criticized the disproportionately high rate at which for-profit school alumni fail to repay loans compared to students at nonprofit and state-funded institutions. Harkin’s office reported last month that 23 percent of students default on student loans within three years of leaving a for-profit college or university.
However, a longer-view examination of data since 1995 reveals 40 percent of for-profit school attendees eventually default on their loans payments.
The Chronicle of Higher Education reports:
[Those numbers] show that the government’s official “cohort-default rate,” which measures the percentage of borrowers who default in the first two years of repayment and is used to penalize colleges with high rates, downplays the long-term cost of defaults, capturing only a sliver of the loans that eventually lapse.
When confronted with the 15-year numbers, Harkin reportedly said, “Whoa.”
Less than 10 percent of college students in the U.S. attend for-profit institutions. But among student loans which went into repayment in 2007, almost half of the defaulting borrowers were for-profit college students, according to The Chronicle.
Opponents of for-profit education say schools like Iowa-based Kaplan University and Ashford University spend millions to market online vocational programs to low-income prospects. The schools students garner almost $20 billion annually in federal loans. But their for-profit educations often fail to attract job offers, leaving many of them unable to pay off their student loan debt.
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