News and updates

Here’s a selection of articles the Federal Relations team is enjoying this leap week.

S-T-O-P – Two days after Super Tuesday, the GOP establishment’s knives are once again out for Donald Trump — whether it’s Mitt Romney’s speech today, tonight’s debate in Michigan, or the new TV ads targeting Trump. And here’s the reality: The opportunity to stop Trump is real. After the Super Tuesday results, it’s clear that Trump had a good (though hardly great) night. Despite winning seven out of the 11 contests, Trump holds just a 23-delegate lead over Ted Cruz from the Super Tuesday delegates. Read more at NBC.

Security Checks – Many low-income students and children of undocumented parents are having a harder time finishing their financial aid applications this year. That’s because of a new system that’s meant to protect sensitive financial information but in practice keeps out already-disadvantaged populations. Californians must submit the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) by midnight Wednesday to be eligible for the biggest pot of state college funds, the Cal Grant. Officials are asking students to submit even an incomplete FAFSA immediately, so that they make the deadline but can fill in more information later. Read more in the LA Times. 

He Speaks – After a decade of silence on the court, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas asked a question. Read more in The New York Times.  

Broken Crown? – Dozens of students, parents, educators and activists are urging the U.S. Senate not to confirm John King, President Obama’s choice to succeed Arne Duncan as education secretary, because he pushed education policies when he was education commissioner of New York State that they say were “ineffective and destructive.” Read more in The Washington Post. 

He’s BAAACK! – Astronaut Scott Kelly has landed after a year in space, and he . Kelly, an identical twin, spent a year in space to help NASA study the effects of zero gravity on the human body, while his twin stayed terrestrial as a control subject. Read more at Voxx.

Here’s a selection of articles the Federal Relations Team is reading this week.

Diverse – NSF has launched it’s long-awaited diversity initiative called INCLUDES.  The program will administer small grants later this year to dozens of institutions to test novel ways of broadening participation in science and engineering. Winners of the 2-year, $300,000 pilot grants will be eligible to compete next year for up to five, $12.5 million awards over 5 years. Read more in Science. 

The Very Model of a Modern Major University – In 2009, Georgia State University set out to create a better university, in the heart of a large, diverse city, where many of your students are first-generation or low-income, and who face challenges not seen as commonly at a typical flagship institution. It does so with data tracking and analysis and a team of specialty advisors, who increase student persistence and help them graduate into careers that benefit the community and region. Read more in University Business.

Disproportionate Impact – Students from the poorest households are shouldering more of the pain from rising college costs, borrowing at far higher levels as a share of family income than ever. It is now the norm for U.S. students from the lowest income bracket to borrow at least half of their household income to attend most four-year colleges. At 58% of 1,319 four-year colleges with available federal data, students from households earning $30,000 or less a year left those schools during the 2013 and 2014 school years owing a median $15,000 or more in total debt, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis. Read more in WSJ. 

Total Fear of Getting In Line – Speaker Paul Ryan, the highest elected leader and presumptive leader of the Republican party currently, has been working on a conservative policy agenda for the Republicans in Congress and a road map for the Republican presidential nominee.  However, with wins in South Carolina and Nevada, Trump becomes more clearly the Republican presumptive nominee, and Ryan and Trump agree on very little. If Trump becomes the nominee, Ryan and all Republicans are expected to fall in line with Trump’s campaign. Will they? Read more in The New York Times. 

Cracked Up – As Trump’s insurgency continues to overwhelm the party, the recriminations are growing more scathing. Could Donald Trump (now with three primary wins, including the Nevada Caucus) have been stopped? But the Republican Party did try to stop Trump. It just failed. And until the nature of that failure is appreciated, the strength of Trump’s candidacy is going to be underestimated. Read more in Vox. 

Bring in the Billionaires! – As Trump momentum continues to grow, there is still elements at play that could change his fate. Politics is fickle and little things can become big things and sure things can evaporate quickly (ask Hillary in 2004). There are four things that might impact the Trump campaign. Read more in The New York Times. 

Cubic Zirconia? – People with more education have higher earnings. Boosting college education is therefore seen by many—including me—as a way to lift people out of poverty, combat growing income inequality, and increase upward social mobility. But how much upward lift does a bachelor’s degree really give to earnings? The answer turns out to vary by family background. Read more in Brookings. 

Turn the Ugly Cheek – Division between the President and Congressional Republicans has reached a new low this year. First, Republicans told the White House budget director this month not to bother making the ritual presentation of a spending plan. Then Senate Republicans announced that they would not act on a nominee for the Supreme Court made by the President. Read more in the The New York Times. 

Inverse Relationship – Jet fuel prices keep falling, but airline prices are going up quickly…why? Read more in NPR. 

In honor of the Academy Awards ceremony this weekend, we enjoyed John Oliver’s take on the Whitewashing controversy connected to this year’s Oscars nominations being nothing but white people. See the take here. 

Bucket List – For those visitors to our nation’s capital with a little extra time on their hands (between Hill and agency meetings with Federal Relations, of course), here’s a list of not obvious sites to see when in DC. Read the list of 20 at Curbed. 

Here’s a selection of articles the federal relations team is reading this week.

Standoff –  Education Department is standing by its controversial guidance to colleges on sexual harassment and sexual assault in response to questions raised by a prominent Senate critic.  Catherine E. Lhamon, the department’s assistant secretary for civil rights, defended her agency’s actions in a letter on Wednesday to Sen. James Lankford, who, as head of the Senate’s subcommittee on regulatory affairs and federal management, had accused the department of overreach in pressuring colleges to fight sexual discrimination to comply with the gender-equity law known as Title IX. Read more in The Chronicle of Higher Education. 

Regular Order – Speaker Ryan has pledged to return Congress to regular order, but what is that exactly? Read more in Roll Call.

Not Exactly – In a country where 40 million people owe upward of $1.2 trillion on their student loans, it’s not hard to imagine why a tale about armed federal agents’ showing up at the door of a Texas man to arrest him over unpaid student loans set the Internet abuzz. But as is the case with many stories that go viral, the truth is a bit more complicated: Mainly, the authorities said they had been trying for years to get the Houston resident, Paul Aker, to pay back a single student loan from almost three decades ago. Read more in the New York Times. 

Slash or Burn – Facing a $940 million budget deficit, Louisiana will stop funding its merit-based scholarship program for the rest of the year. And if the Legislature doesn’t find new sources of revenue by June, Louisiana’s commissioner of higher education warned, the state’s public colleges and universities will have to suspend operations. Read more in Inside Higher Ed. 

Building Bernie Buzz – More Democrats are seeing Sanders as electable. Read more in Political Wire. 

Zika – As late as 2007, there had only been 14 documented Zika cases in the world. Research on the virus was so limited, in fact, that printouts of all the world’s published literature could basically fit into a shoebox. With the explosion, scientists still have five big questions. Read more in Vox. 

Cardboard – The ugly side of e-commerce is all the cardboard it uses, and the environmental impact. Read more in the New York Times. 

Payback – It’s not just the amount of student debt that someone takes on that matters. It also comes down to how well positioned one is to pay it back. And that’s an area where racial disparities show up glaringly – in a new set of student-debt delinquency heat maps released Wednesday by two groups pushing for solutions to income inequality. Read more in the Christian Science Monitor.