Cuomo to student-loan companies: Shape up. Or I’ll sue you.

It turns out New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo won’t have to take legal action against eight student-loan companies who he said used “false and misleading advertising practices.”

The companies, Campus Door, EduCap, GMAC Bank, Graduate Loan Associates, Nelnet,  NextStudent and Xanthus Financial Services, agreed to a code of conduct today that banned

My Rich Uncle voluntarily agreed to the code.

Seven of the companies also agreed to pay a total of $1.4 million to help educate students and their families on the student loan and financial aid process.

In June, Cuomo’s office launched investigation into the companies’ practices, like luring student borrowers with cash and iPods and being dishonest about loan terms and benefits. Last week, he announced he would prepare a lawsuit against the companies because these practices broke state and federal laws.

Cuomo isn’t new to this game — he kicked off another major investigation last year, when he was the first to uncover conflicts of interest in the way lenders dealt with universities (like, I don’t know, lenders who paid universities to recommend their companies to students. Someone in public relations missed that red flag …)

Because of that, Cuomo developed a separate code of conduct  for lenders and universities that became the model for New York State’s SLATE, the Student Lending, Accountability, Transparency and Enforcement act.

Between SLATE and the new code, New York state students, at least, can sleep safe knowing they’re getting more complete knowledge about the loans they take out. Now if only Cuomo could figure out a way to reduce the cost of education … he wouldn’t have to regulate at all.

College News Roundup: Buy Yourself A College!

antiochAntioch College looking for buyers - for only $12.2 million! After negotiations with an alumni group trying to keep the school alive broke off, the school’s now up for sale - for anyone who can provide the money up front. The tiny, 200-student school is planning to close June 30 for at least one year unless a deal is reached that could keep the school open.

Plagiarizing a plagiarism code: At the University of Texas at San Antonio, students drafting the school’s honor code that forbids plagiarism plagiarized the honor code of another school, Brigham Young University, according to the AP. Cheating expert: “Students think of their computers as cut-and-paste machines.”

Senate kills campus gun legislation: The bill, which passed in the House, would have allowed veterans and others with weapons training to carry concealed weapons on campuses, with the logic that a Vietnam vet in every classroom will stop school shooters. Thankfully, this is dead.

Hostage incident teaches administrators to watch their wording: After the situation at the University of Kentucky at Louisville, where a mom killed her kids and then barged into the school’s health center with a gun, school officials unofficially revised their text message warning policy: make sure the message is clear. Many who received the message thought the incident was taking place at another health center miles away. Whoops!

College news roundup - VTech consequences issue

klaxonSound the alarm public alert system! After the Virginia Tech massacre and the communication debacle that followed, more than a dozen colleges have installed sirens or announced plans to do so in the past year, citing the flaws in a text message or phone alert system. The systems cost more than $100,000 to purchase and set up.

U.S. proposes to update student privacy laws: After Virginia Tech’s fatal shootings last year, the Family Education Rights Privacy Act (Ferpa) is due for an update. Lawmakers hope to give administrators “more latitude in sharing information about a student.” Expect more letters home, kids.

Obama, Ron Paul to visit Penn State: Lucky Bastards. Obama will speak this Sunday, and Ron Paul’s scheduled to visit April 11th. Ron Paul has campus libertarians practically peeing themselves with joy, and Barry O’s visit is a direct result of students at Penn registering more than 7,000 students to vote in the Pennsylvania primaries. Well, I guess they deserve it.

Howard University suspends student newspaper from publishing: Says the Hilltop is in debt. Editors’ (meager) salaries will continued to get paid, and it will publish online.

University techie finds widespread porn use: After alerting administrators to the fact that over 300 university employees at the University of Texas Health Science Center were surfing porn sites, she was pressured to leave her job. Only 10 people caught surfing porn received any punishment. That’s justice for you. No more porn at work, profs!

Higher-ed in China “not delivering results”: Only 16 percent of Chinese students say they’re satisfied with their educational experience, and have received a quality education that prepares them for the workplace. Administrators blame an exam-based system.

No one likes a gossip site: New Jersey is subpoenaing the site, Juicycampus.com, student councils are crafting resolutions (this is huge lame) and students vilified on the site are protesting.

And now for something completely different: The NYT says running can get you high. Throw out those drugs, and go for a jog, kids.

A giant bomb in the center of campus, you say?

reactor Here’s a fun little topic sure to find an audience in every person who doesn’t enjoy being close to a nuclear reactor meltdown: Congress has accused the Nuclear Regulatory Commission - the government agency responsible for the safety of nuclear plants and facilities - of underestimating the risk of a terrorist attack on a campus nuclear reactor.

Large research universities typically have reactors to study the properties of atoms or to conduct fission research. According to the Arkansas Morning News, there are still 28 colleges and universities in the U.S. licensed to operate nuclear reactors.

Congress has said that the NRC ignored or misrepresented nuclear experts who said that a nuclear meltdown at a university campus could have “significant consequences” and a “high socio-economic impact.” Meaning: lots of people will be diagnosed with really horrible cancers afterward, and most of them will be poor.

I’m just glad that Congress finally got the balls to state the obvious: nuclear power plants on university campuses are really f***ing dangerous, and a couple concrete walls, fences, and “unarmed campus police officers” aren’t going to stop several determined, crafty terrorists. Or even drunk college kids on a Friday night, for that matter.

Although many of the rules concerning reactor safety changed after 911, the Congressional auditors concluded that the NRC should reexamine expert findings on how to better safeguard universities from potential terrorist attacks.

This is an issue that could have struck close to home, too. Cornell University, our neighbor across the hill, had a reactor on campus as recently as May 2001. Thank god they decommissioned that.

Congress reauthorizes sneaky Higher Ed Bill

SenateOn Thursday the House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed the The College Opportunity and Affordability Act of 2007. This is good news, for many reasons. Here are some of the things this bill will do, if implemented:

Here’s the bad news, for administrators and students who like stealing music from the Internet. Buried in the middle of the bill, rather inconspicuously, is a small paragraph with potentially controversial effects. Essentially, any college or university accepting any money under the auspices of the bill must:

“develop a plan for offering alternatives to illegal downloading or peer-to-peer distribution of intellectual property as well as a plan to explore technology-based deterrents to prevent such illegal activity.”

However, Nate Anderson at Ars Technica writes that this won’t have much of an effect, because schools that don’t make a plan won’t actually be denied federal funding. Phew. Illegal procedures, proceed.

“Not making such plans would carry no consequences, however, and we’re told by House staffers that no one’s federal financial aid is in danger.”

I guess we can have our cake and eat it too.

Senate to wealthy colleges: stop being stingy

SenateThe Senate, concerned with the huge growth of the endowments of wealthy, elite universities, demanded information this week about endowment spending from the 76 colleges and universities in the United States whose endowments have surpassed $1 billion.

?Tuition has gone up, college presidents? salaries have gone up, and endowments continue to go up and up,? said Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the ranking Republican on the committee. ?We need to start seeing tuition relief for families go up just as fast.?

It seems like the government has finally caught on to the fact that maybe these super-rich colleges should be providing some serious tuition assistance to their students. Although in the past few weeks/months many schools, including Harvard, Yale and Dartmouth have replaced loans with grants and basically thrown money at their students, the Senate has said with such huge endowments (Harvard’s is $34.6 billion), huge tuition assistance should be the norm across all levels of higher education. However, for those of us with smallish endowments (Ithaca College’s is $237 million, for perspective, and the endowments of all the colleges in New York state combined do not equal Harvard’s) this kind of sweeping tuition assistance would cost millions that smaller colleges just can’t afford.

While we applaud this move as it pertains to wealthy universities, we hope that the federal government can do something to help students at all other universities (read: 99% of us) afford our increasing tuition.

Congress throws money at the piracy problem

At first glance, the The College Opportunity and Affordability Act of 2007 seems like a pretty good thing. And don’t get me wrong, it is. Mostly.

The 747-page bill (a much quicker summary here) is intended to make college cheaper by streamlining the FAFSA process, keeping student lending practices honest, and creating more need-based aid. It also provides incentives to colleges to keep down costs, makes a half-hearted attempt to make books cheaper (try Half.com instead) and plans to forgive $5,000 in loans to students who enter public service jobs (Here’s to wishing that protecting democracy journalism was considered a public service). It’ll also provide money to help disabled students go to college and in case of a disaster will provide money for schools to rebuild.

So, all in all, sounds just peachy, right? Well, not if you read between the lines, or more specifically, just pages 411-412. Practically buried in Congressional jargon and verbosity is a lovely little section entitled CAMPUS-BASED DIGITAL THEFT PREVENTION.

Essentially, any college or university accepting any money under the auspices of the bill must:

“develop a plan for offering alternatives to illegal downloading or peer-to-peer distribution of intellectual property as well as a plan to explore technology-based deterrents to prevent such illegal activity.?

It also authorizes the Education department to offer all-purpose, monetary grants (read: free cash) to colleges who pledge to “eliminate the illegal downloading and distribution of intellectual property? on campuses through the use of technology and other policing methods.

Well, the stick didn’t work, so now they’re trying the carrot, I guess. But this bill, with its promise of easy money, could potentially pit colleges (or their internet providers) against students illegally downloading music and movies, when in reality, it’s not their job to hunt down students trying to grab “Crank Dat” off LimeWire.

Guess who’s loving this, though: the people whose job it is to police illegal downloading. Here’s an adoring statement from the MPAA:

?The MPAA commends Chairman Miller for taking this step to protect intellectual property on college campuses,? said MPAA Chairman and CEO Dan Glickman. ?Intellectual property theft is a worldwide problem that hurts our economy and costs more than 140,000 American jobs every year. We are pleased to see that Congress is taking this step to help keep our economy strong by protecting copyrighted material on college campuses.?

Oh, and while researching this, I found a funny little thing on the RIAA’s homepage: featured prominently in the menu on the side of the site is a link called: “For Students Doing Reports.“

Apparently they get so overwhelmed with questions from college students writing research papers about downloading music illegally — while probably simultaneously downloading the top 500 rock songs of all times off Bittorrent — that they’ve put together a special page summarizing their views on music piracy for those adorable little college kids who just want to learn more about the enemy, essentially.

Thanks for being interested in the music industry and our positions on various issues. We get many requests from students and others for information for papers and other research needs.

So what are its views on illegally downloading copyrighted materials, you ask? PIRACY: BAD. PAYING US: GOOD.

Sounds like a great start for a research paper to me.