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Possible Selves: Harnessing Intrinsic Motivation in Mature Students

Cathryn Robson BA (Hons), CT ABRSM

www.singshop.co.uk – Online Singing Evaluations and Lessons

This essay will reflect on my mature students’ motivation for starting and continuing to sing, and my tools for channelling this motivation. This part of my studentship is remarkable because they have every reason not to start singing. Parental and peer pressure is far behind them, as is the influence of the education system. In many cases their voices are starting to be affected by natural deterioration. Furthermore, they are often armed with undermining memories of singing. Regardless these students recognise and value ‘…what it is that is intrinsically motivating in music…’1 so deeply that they choose to return to it later in life, with little possibility of external reward.

In surveying my mature students, many of whom are senior citizens, it was revealed that most decided to start singing in order to develop self-confidence and to provide an outlet for self-expression, typical intrinsic rewards for engaging with artistic activity. Any strategies I have take into account these responses and how they can be progressed within existing motivational models. It should be clarified that in referring to mature students I am referring to people of retirement age.

Mature students quite often come to their first lesson citing a defining childhood moment that has deterred them from singing for decades. In part they are convinced that they have no right to sing and that I, as the ‘expert’ will reinforce this deep-rooted belief. These undermining memories are simultaneously ‘away from’ and ‘towards’ motivators and if they are not addressed a stasis prevails. One student revealed a few weeks after we started working together that whenever she opened her mouth she heard her 20 year old self singing out of tune along to a Joan Baez song. The student had recorded herself on reel-to-reel, listened back and been so appalled by what she heard that she threw the recording away and decided never to sing again. Given the student’s evident ability this memory was surprising so in a subsequent lesson I asked if she would allow me to record her performing the material we were working on. In listening back she heard that her voice is in fact expressive, resonant and most certainly in tune which did much to improve her self-confidence, a crucial step in any motivational model. Further recording during lessons is providing a pragmatic and effective antidote for this student’s ‘negative transference’2 and new memories are starting to replace the 40 year-old one. The fact that ‘…students can be very complex, having a variety of conflicting motivational forces within them…’3 is something teachers need to be particularly sensitive to when dealing with less confident singers.

Further using technology in the studio, I have started to video students during lessons, naturally with their consent. As I have found these observations so instructive it occurred to me that students may also find the experience useful. One elderly student had poor posture and this was compromising her breathing, despite her best attempts to address it. It was only when she could observe herself stooping and tensing in the footage that she appreciated what we had been trying to previously eradicate. The beauty in using digital technology is that playback is instant and painless and corrections can be put into practice immediately. It also gives me an alternative to correcting through ‘negative demonstration’, which can be interpreted as tactless by fragile students. When a student is shown that the tools for improvement are easily within their reach they become motivated to put these into practice and their self-confidence expands. In this above case the student re-sang the aria after adjusting her posture and the improvement to her sound was immense.

Though all of my mature students cite self-expression as a main reason for starting to sing many of them are wary of what this actually involves. Considering this, I introduce the exploration of emotional colour through routine scale and arpeggio warm-ups. Foreign language phrases are used in these musical shapes so that there is no intimate or immediate meaning for native English speakers. As a result the exercise is unthreatening and paradoxically the emotions explored become impersonal. The student and I take turns singing with a specific emotion in mind, leaving the other to guess which emotion we are trying to convey. Dynamics, tempi and improvisation are explored. Successful attempts are noted and analysed so that the student starts to build a sort of vocal palette of expressive sounds and techniques. The most inhibited students lose themselves in these ‘nonsense language’ exercises and we have a lot of fun. This has been keenly evident in my most taciturn and self-critical student, a septuagenarian, who recently told me he is starting to trust his ability to emote in songs. Already he is preparing for the next student concert, choosing unusual and exposing material. Similarly, one of my mature female students stated that she felt she had ‘come home’ after working with belt technique, a sound many women initially experience as being raucous and ‘unfeminine’. Older students have proven to grasp the exercise’s efficacy, i.e. its transference to repertoire, more quickly than my younger ones. Suffice to say that in exploring emotion and texture in their voices singers can come into contact with vocal ‘possible selves’ – those entities identified by motivational theorists. Students are motivated by having crossed into what was expected to be vulnerable territory and surviving. This is no small task for any student though entrenched habits of ‘not doing’ can make it more taxing for mature ones.

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Increased self-confidence has a positive impact all round and moving on to tasks such as tackling challenging repertoire is less daunting as a result. Acknowledging that ‘…motivation is likely to increase when the pupils understand why they are doing what they do…’4 I have started to classify the repertoire I cover with all of my students, grading it and pointing out how it benefits them, e.g. good for legato singing, agility, working the chest register etc. The self-confidence of my mature students has soared seeing the grades of the pieces they are undertaking and they have reacted well to the fact that I have high expectations of them. This is mirrored in their practice; my clarity is rewarded by their clarity as they are more certain about what they are aiming to achieve during the week. Not many of my older students were aware that singing can be formally examined and several are beginning to express an interest in this possibility. These students seemingly appreciate teacher-led and traditional methods of learning, perhaps due to being of a generation where such approaches prevailed.

The intrinsic rewards of singing, the aforementioned self-confidence and self-expression desired by my mature students, cannot thrive in a vacuum. Singing is not a solitary activity. When a student sees and hears themselves through recorded media as a result of lesson tasks it crystallises their awareness that their intrinsic motivation can be expressed in an extrinsic goal i.e. live performance for an audience. Most students do ultimately want to share their discovery of musical and self-expression with others. This is something that all of my mature students have started to do, many for the first time in their lives. Locally there are few but notable outlets for this e.g. a choir for retired people and a local amateur dramatics group made up of the same. Other opportunities to facilitate this transition between intrinsic and extrinsic are put into place by me with student concerts and recordings. The ‘new task’5 of live performance and its subsequent completion, ensures students keep travelling the motivational circuit, consolidating technique, new skills and confidence as they progress. The deadline of a student concert focuses efforts all round and all stages of the Crozier/ Harris motivational model are explored in preparation for it.

Mature students are exciting to work with as performers and artists. Life experience equates with emotional maturity and this can be harnessed by interpretive tools in a number of ways. The most recent method I have utilised is the ‘ad lib story’ which can clarify motivation within a song, and therefore result in a more informed expression by the student. The student and I decide on the parameters of the story, relating it to the theme and characters of the song to be worked on. We pass the story back and forth until it has reached a natural conclusion and the student is motivated to sing. As a result the student launches into the song with more expressive clarity and connection than they would have had otherwise. This exercise has proven to be a success with all of my older students despite some initial reticence and claims of ‘not being good at stories’.

Another interpretive tool I introduce is the neutral mask, a standard training device for actors. The student puts on the neutral half-mask and sings a chosen song in front of the studio mirror. The mask helps the student in two respects; its blankness can facilitate the student in moving into an impersonal and timeless space from which freedom of emotional connection in the singing can take place. The second benefit of the mask is that the limits of personal body vocabulary become evident as the usual focus of communication, the face, is hidden. Working at moving in a free, open and impersonal way helps the student open into the song. The mask facilitates expression and has proven to be particularly useful for shy students. One elderly student remarked that working with the mask gave her the confidence to perform in front of her peers. Both the ‘ad lib story’ and neutral mask remove the burden of personal responsibility for the song. A bonus of both exercises is the insight I gain about how comfortable a student is approaching right-brain tasks.

Gentle competitiveness is also a good motivator. Mature students can be very competitive with themselves, through watching and hearing their recorded performances and targeting how they can be improved. They also bounce off each other through this watching and listening, giving feedback on each other’s performances and being inspired by seeing their peers achieving vocal goals. After the most recent student concert the video recording and feedback circulated for weeks. As vocal role models for older people do not proliferate in our youth-oriented society, these group experiences are affirming.

Motivation is a vast subject and my work would benefit from more exploration of its different facets. In reflecting on intrinsic motivation it is clear that the psychological aspects of teaching and singing merit further investigation. I feel that the work of Lucinda Mackworth-Young and voice coach Patsy Rodenburg would provide good starting points for this route.

Mature students come to singing out of the blue for many different reasons and with many different expectations. When Keith Swanwick states that a ‘…strong sense of personal significance occurs frequently enough to motivate many people to put themselves in the way of musical experiences…”6 it is initially for me to discover what this personal significance may be and to go about expanding and nurturing it. Responding to older students’ intrinsic motivation is rewarding because it is varied and such students have a maturity and clarity in their aims. Another significant benefit I have gained through working with older students; listening to tales of lost vocal experience from their perspective motivates me even more keenly to not produce the vocally damaged of the future. I endeavour to anchor my younger students in their voices and to give them the tools for making their vocal ‘possible selves’ accessible throughout their lives.

Bibliography:

Hallam, S (2002) Musical Motivation: towards a model synthesising the research
(Music Education Research Vol. 4, No.2)

Mackworth-Young, L (2000) Tuning In: Practical Psychology for Musicians who are Teaching, Learning and Performing (MMM Publications)

Crozier/ Scaife/ Marks (2004) All Together! Teaching Music in Groups (ABRSM Publishing)

Swanwick, K (1999) Teaching Music Musically (Routledge)

Crozier/ Harris (2000) The Music Teacher’s Companion (ABRSM Publishing)

Footnotes:

1 Hallam, S (2002) Musical Motivation; towards a model synthesising the research

2 & 3 Mackworth-Young, L (2000) Tuning In: Practical Psychology for Musicians who are Teaching, Learning and Performing

4 Crozier/ Scaife/ Marks (2004) All Together! Teaching Music in Groups

5 Crozier/ Harris (2000) Circular Motivational Model for Learning

6 Swanwick, K (1999) Teaching Music Musically

© Cathryn Robson 2009

For college students, November and December are filled with research projects and final exams. For recent graduates, however, these months can be exceptionally stressful, especially if a post-graduation dream job hasn’t materialized on schedule. For graduates who left school with debt from student loans, November and December can be a month of reckoning.

Government-issued federal student loans and many non-federal private student loans grant students a six-month grace period after they leave school before they need to begin making loan payments. For students who graduated in May and June, then, those college loans come up for repayment in November and December.

And if you’re a graduate who’s caught up in the current recession and the highest unemployment rate on record for new college graduates, you may be getting your first student loan bill having no idea how you’re going to make the payment.

Just ignoring those student loan bills isn’t going to help. Defaulting on a federal student loan is no light matter. The government can step in and garnish your wages, once you get a job, or seize any income tax refunds you may have coming to you in order to put money toward your student loan debt.

Both federal and private student loans are nearly impossible to discharge in bankruptcy, so your student loan lenders can keep coming after you for payment, even if a judge declares you bankrupt and wipes out your other debts.

All your student loan accounts appear on your credit report, so your credit rating is also at risk. Repeated late and missed payments on your student loans will drop your credit score, will linger on your credit history for years, and can have a lasting impact on your ability later on to qualify for anything that requires a credit check. You may not be able to get a credit card, take out a car loan or home loan, rent an apartment, or even get a job — more and more employers are conducting credit checks on job candidates as a measure of your responsibility and maturity.

Clearly, keeping your student loans current needs to be a priority, for the sake of your credit and the health of your financial future. Whether you’re a newly minted college graduate or a longtime borrower who’s now having some financial troubles, if you’re facing student loan payments that you can’t afford, here are five ways to get help now.

1. Contact your student loan lenders.

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Whether you’re approaching the end of your grace period or you’re already in repayment, if you know that you don’t have the ability to make the payments on your student loans, contact your lenders immediately, explain your situation, and see what they can do to help.

For your federal student loans, the U.S. Department of Education can grant you additional periods of deferment or forbearance if you’re facing financial hardship. With a government-approved deferment or forbearance, your student loan payments are postponed, with no adverse effect on your credit.

Non-federal private student loans aren’t required to offer the same deferment and forbearance protections that federal student loans provide. But your private student loan lender may be willing to offer you a temporary forbearance or work something else out, perhaps accepting a lower monthly payment, giving your more time to repay your loan, or lowering your interest rate temporarily.

These approaches won’t stop the interest from accruing on your student loan debt (with the exception of deferments on subsidized federal student loans, during which the government will cover the interest on your subsidized loans), but they will help you avoid debt collection.

2. Ask for more time to repay.

If you’re carrying more than ,000 in federal student loan debt, you may be able to extend your loan repayment terms from 10 years to 25 years. With a repayment extension, since your student loan debt is being spread out over a longer period, your monthly payments will be lower. Keep in mind, however, that the longer you take to repay your student loans, the more you’ll pay in interest, so your loans will end up costing you more overall in the long run.

Private student loans don’t offer the same built-in repayment extensions as federal loans. But your lender may still be willing to offer longer repayment periods on a case-by-case basis. Contact your private student loan lender, and ask.

3. Consolidate your student loans.

Student loan consolidation allows you to bundle multiple student loans into one single consolidated loan with one monthly payment. Student loan consolidation may allow you to extend your repayment term and give you a lower monthly payment than what you were paying each month on all your individual student loans separately.

To consolidate your federal student loans, you’ll need to contact the U.S. Department of Education directly at loanconsolidation.ed.gov.

Private student loans can’t be consolidated with federal student loans, but some private lenders are currently offering private consolidation loans that allow you to consolidate all your private student loans into a single consolidated loan. Do an Internet search for lenders offering private consolidation loans.

4. Cut your monthly student loan payments.

A new federal student loan repayment plan, known as income-based repayment, allows some borrowers to make monthly payments based on their income. If your income is tight, check out this option to see if it works for you.

Income-based repayment can cut your monthly payments on your federal student loan to an amount that’s affordable for you. As an added bonus, if you’re on the income-based repayment plan for 25 years and make all your monthly payments on time, you may be eligible to have any remaining balance on your federal student loans forgiven.

Again, private student loans don’t offer a built-in income-based repayment option the way federal student loans do, but your lender may be willing to work with you in order to encourage you to continue making payments on your debt. Your lender should rather receive at least some money each month than no money at all if you default. Contact your lender, and see if you can work something out.

5. Get your student loans forgiven.

Depending on your job field, you may qualify for student loan forgiveness on your federal student loans. Public service careers  — like teaching, social work, public safety, government service, and health care and legal support for the impoverished — may qualify you to reduce or wipe out your remaining federal student loan obligations, depending on how long you serve following graduation.

The federal Public Service Student Loan Forgiveness Program allows you to have your federal student loans forgiven after 10 years, provided you’ve been making on-time payments and you meet other certain requirements. Contact the U.S. Department of Education for more information and details.

It was announced last summer that total student loan debt, at 0 billion, now exceeds total US credit card debt, itself bloated to the bubble level of 7 billion. And student loan debt is growing at the rate of billion a year. 

There are far fewer students than there are credit card holders. Could there be a student debt bubble at a time when college graduates’ jobs and earnings prospects are as gloomy as they have been at any time since the Great Depression?

The data indicate that today’s students are saddled with a burden similar to the one currently borne by their parents. Most of these parents have experienced decades of stagnating wages, and have only one asset, home equity.  The housing meltdown has caused that resource either to disappear or to turn into a punishing debt load. The younger generation too appears to have mortgaged its future earnings in the form of student loan debt.

The most recent complete statistics cover 2008, when debt was held by 62 % of students from public universities, 72 % from private nonprofit schools, and a whopping 96 % from private for-profit (“proprietary”) schools. 

For-profit school enrollment is growing faster than enrollment at public schools, and a growing percentage of students attending for-profit schools represent holders of debt likely to default. In order to get a better handle on the dynamics of student debt growth, it is helpful to sketch the connection between the current crisis in public education and the recent rapid growth of the for-profits.

Crisis of Public Education Precipitates Private School Growth

Since the most common advise to the unemployed is to “get a college education”, and tuition at public institutions is at least half or less than private-school rates, public higher education institutions have been swamped with an influx of out of work adults. This has resulted in enrollment gluts at many state colleges. At the same time, tuition is increasing just when household income and hence the affordability of higher education are declining. 

Here is how this scenario unfolds:

With few exceptions, state-funded colleges and universities set tuition rates based on policy and budget decisions made  by state legislatures. High and increasing unemployment and declining wages have resulted in  declining public revenues. This in turn leads to  budget cut directives from legislative bodies to public higher education institutions, often accompanied by the authority to increase tuition. 

For example, a 14% budget cut to an institution may be “offset” by giving the governing boards of the school the authority to raise tuition by a maximum of 7%. Often the imbalance created by a cut to the base budget and an increase in tuition is made worse by limits on enrollment. A state legislative body may cut an institution’s budget, allow it to increase tuition, but not provide per-student funding increases to keep pace with the accelerating enrollment demand. 

This affects tuition rates at for-profit institutions. More students who would otherwise attend a state institution or a private, non-profit school are finding themselves without a seat at over-enrolled campuses. More students are pushed into the online and for-profit sectors, and proprietary schools sieze the day by inflating their tuition costs. 

Because online colleges lack the enrollment constraints of a physical campus, they are uniquely poised to capture huge proportions of the growing higher education market by starting classes in non-traditional intervals (the University of Phoenix, for example, begins its online classes on a 5-week rolling basis) and without regard to space, charging ever-increasing rates to students who have no other choice. 

Instead of waiting for an admissions decision or a financial aid package from a traditional college, students can enroll immediately online. This ease of use and accessibility to any student has allowed the for-profit sector to capture a growing portion of the higher education market and a growing proportion of education-targeted public money. Enrollments at for-profit colleges have increased in the last ten years by 225%, far outpacing public institution increases. 

Thus, the neoliberal assault on public education not only tends to push more students into private institutions, it also generates upward pressure on tuition costs. This results in growing pressure on enrollees at proprietary schools to take on student loan debt.

How Healthy Are Student Loans?

The extraordinary growth of student debt paralleled the bubble years, from the beginnings of the dot.com bubble in the mid-1990s to the bursting of the housing bubble. From 1994 to 2008, average debt levels for graduating seniors more than doubled to ,200, according to The Student Loan Project, a nonprofit research and policy organization. More than 10 percent of those completing their bachelor’s degree are now saddled with over ,000 in debt.

Are student loans as financially problematic as the junk mortgage securities still held by the biggest banks? That depends on how those loans were rated and the ability of the borrower to repay. 

In the build-up to the housing crisis, the major ratings agencies used by the biggest banks gave high ratings to mortgage-backed securities that were in fact toxic. A similar pattern is evident in student loans. 

The health of student loans is officially assessed by the “cohort-default rate,” a supposedly reliable predictor of the likelihood that borrowers will default. But the cohort-default rate only measures the rate of defaults during the first two years of repayment. Defaults that occur after two years are not tracked by the Department of Education for institutional financial aid eligibility. Nor do government loans require credit checks or other types of regard for whether a student will be able to repay the loans.

There is about 0 billion in total outstanding federal and private student-loan debt. Only 40% of that debt is actively being repaid. The rest is in default, or in deferment (when a student requests temporary postponement of payment because of economic hardship), which means payments and interest are halted, or in forbearance. Interest on government loans is suspended during deferment, but continues to accrue on private loans.

As tuitions increase, loan amounts increase; private loan interest rates have reached highs of 20%. Add that to a deeply troubled economy and dismal job market, and we have the full trappings of a major bubble. As it goes with contemporary bubbles, when the loans go into default, taxpayers will be forced to pick up the tab, since just about all loans to date are backed by the federal government.

Of course the usual suspects are among the top private lenders: Citigroup, Wells Fargo and JP Morgan-Chase.

Financial Aid and the Federal Tilt to Private Schools

A higher percentage of students enrolled at private, for-profit (“proprietary”)  schools hold education debt (96 %) than students at public colleges and universities or students attending private non-profits. 

Two out of every five students enrolled at proprietary schools are in default on their education loans 15 years after the loans were issued. 
In spite of this high extended default rate, for-profit colleges are in no danger of losing their access to federal financial aid because, as we have seen, the Department of Education does not record defaults after the first two years of repayment. 

Nor have the disturbing findings of recent Congressional hearings on the recruitment techniques of proprietary colleges jeopardized these schools’
access to federal funds. The hearings displayed footage from an undercover investigation showing admissions staff at proprietary schools using recruitment techniques explicitly forbidden by the National Association of College Admissions Counselors. Admissions and enrollment employees are also shown misrepresenting the costs of an education, the graduation and employment rates of students, and the accreditation status of institutions. 

Student Loan Settlement
These deceptions increase the likelihood that graduates of for-profits will have special difficulties repaying their loans, since the majority enrolled at these schools are low-income students. (Forbes magazine, Oct. 26, 2010, “When For-Profits Target Low-Income Students”, Arnold L. Mitchem)

A credit scoreisnot requiredforfederal loan eligibility. Neither is information regarding income, assets, or employment. Borrowing is still encouraged in the face of strong evidence that the likelihood of default is high. 

Loaning money to anyone without prime qualifications was “subprime lending” during the ballooning of the housing bubble, when banks were enticing otherwise ineligible candidates to buy houses they could not afford. 

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Shouldn’t easy lending without adequate credit checks to college students with insecure credit also be considered “subprime lending”? 

Government’s Bias Toward the Private Educational Sector

In 2009 President Obama initially pledged billion in stimulus funds to help community colleges through the economic crisis. Last March that sum was slashed to billion.The umpteenth example of a broken Obama promise.

We see a drastic cut in federal stimulus funding even as state funding for higher education is expected to fall even further. At a time whencommunity colleges across the country are overflowing with returning students seeking new skills and high school graduates who can’t afford ever-rising tuition rates at many four-year schools,the majority of education-bound stimulus funds are going to for-profit institutions, not community colleges. (Our home state of Washington illustrates the general direction of the administration’s “reform” of higher education: for the first time in the state’s history, public funds no longer pay the majority of higher education costs.)

Apart from stimulus funding, overall government student aid is disproportionately aimed at those attending proprietary schools. Nearly 25% of federal financial aid is spent on students attending for-profit colleges, even though these colleges enroll less than 10% of the nation’s college students. 

Proprietary schools now rely on federal financial aid – PELL Grants and federal loans – as their primary source of revenue. 

Even the most profitable proprietary schools receive the majority of their funding from federal financial aid programs. According to a U.S.-Senate-sponsored study, The University of Phoenix, the largest private university in North America, receives 90% of its funding from the federal government. Not-so-incidentally, proprietary schools are among the largest donors to Education Committee members.

Proponents of the system defend it by pointing out that public colleges also rely on taxpayer subsidies for the majority of their revenue. But this overlooks a decisive difference: what proprietary schools don’t have that  public schools do, is an obligation as a state agency to deliver a high quality education to its students. Instead, proprietary schools have a legal fiduciary duty to their stockholders, like any other for-profit enterprise. As a result, according to a PBS Frontline investigation, the sector spends 20 to 25 % of its budget on marketing and only 10 to 20 % on faculty.

The Track Record of For-Profit Colleges

The track record of for-profit colleges does not justify their disproportionate share of government largesse. 

Drop out rates are higher than they are at public and non-proprietary private schools, often as high as 50 %. Irrespective of whether a student drops out, the for-profit college has already pocketed tuition and fees. The student is left still burdened with a substantial loan obligation.

As for graduation rates, a 2008 report by the National Center for Education Statistics puts the graduation rate for students at for-profits beginning their studies in 2002 at 22%,  an 11% drop from students enrolling in 2000. The same cohort attending public and private non-profits graduated at rates of roughly 54% and 64%, respectively. Graduate or not,  the debt burden remains.

Suppose the student does not drop out but either seeks to transfer to a public or another non-profit, or completes her studies and enters the job market with a proprietary degree?  Many students assume that credits are transferable to a public or nonprofit, but they aren’t, so they pay twice to attain their degree. The school holds out the lure of high-paying jobs upon graduation, but either no such jobs exist or they require education or experience beyond what the school provided. Congressional studies have shown that the earnings of proprietary graduates are the lowest of all graduates. According to a 2009 Bloomberg report on salary comparisons between traditional and online degree-holders, graduates with bachelor’s degrees from traditional colleges earn a median salary of ,200, while those with degrees from the University of Phoenix earn only ,500, and ,100 from for-profit American Intercontinental.

On top of these earnings and job-prospectdisadvantages, proprietary graduates bear the heaviest academic debt burden. The Education Department reports that 43 % of those who default on student loans attended for-profit schools, even though only 26% of borrowers attended such schools. Many of those who attended for-profits don’t earn enough to repay their loans. It’s not uncommon for a student who either paid out of pocket or took out a loan for a ,000 degree to find herself stuck in a ,000 a year job. This only adds insult to injury: a Government Accounting Office study reports that “A student interested in a massage therapy certificate costing ,000 at a for-profit college was told that the program was a good value. However, the same certificate from a local community college cost 0.00.”

Paying back student loans out of low income and over a long period of time can rule out the possibility of making other financial investments required for the vanishing American Dream, such as buying a house, or saving for retirement or for one’s children’s education.

All in all, the for-profits’ track record is more than dismaying. In too many cases, students leave proprietary schools in worse financial shape than they were in before they enrolled. The problem is not limited to proprietary graduates: most of this generation of college grads now possess more debt than opportunity. 

You might think that the unflattering record of for-profit schools would restrain government gift-giving. After all, the Obama administration’s current education policy would punish “underperforming” public schools and teachers. But these policies target the public sector exclusively: the aim is to undermine teachers’ unions and encourage privatization by boosting charter schools. It is entirely consistent with Washington’s agenda that the dismal performance of proprietary schools does not jeopardize their future access to public financial aid funds – as long as the student does not default on their loan within two years of dropping out.

The Career College Association, the lobbying arm of publicly traded colleges, finds all this to be irrelevant. It relies on a different type of indicator from the rest of the higher education sector to measure the success of its for-profit colleges: stock prices. Remarkable. We see the disproportionate flourishing of  ”schools” whose primary concern has nothing to do with education.

Proprietary Schools and the Military

Proprietary schools target the military market with an aggressive and highly successful marketing campaign. For-profit colleges are the destination of high numbers of active duty and recently discharged military personnel. Data from the US Army and Defense Department show that the University of Phoenix is the third largest receiver of education funding from the US Army. 

29% of military enrollments are in the for-profit sector, and 40% of annual tuition assistance to veterans winds up going to proprietary schools. Often targeted while still enlisted, military personnel are attracted to the relative ease with which they can attend school, often at night, on the weekends, or for active-duty military, even while deployed. With the recent reduction of troops in Iraq, more service members are returning to the United States. Waiting for them are generous G.I. Bill benefits, allowing them to pursue vocational or baccalaureate degrees at accredited colleges. The for-profit sector is poised to corner that market aspublic institutions squeezetheir enrollments, raise tuition and watch public support of higher education dwindle in the current resurrection of pre-Keynesian economic policy. 

The job prospects for military personnel at for-profits are predictably poor. A Bloomberg report quotes a retired Marine Corps Colonel who now directs human resources for U.S. Fields Operations at Schindler Elevator Corp., as saying “we don’t even consider” online for-profit degree-holding candidates for the company’s management development program.

THE PRIVATE LENDERS: SECURITIZATION AS USUAL

The two largest holders of student loans are SLM Corp (SLM) and Student Loan Corp (STU), a subsidiary of Citigroup. SLM -Sallie Mae-  was originated as a Government Sponsored Enterprise (GSE) in 1972. The idea was to prime it for eventual privatization. In 1984 the company began trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol SLM.In 2002  Sallie Mae shed the its GSE status and became a subsidiary of the Delaware-chartered publicly traded holding company SLM Holding Corporation.Finally,in 2004 the company officially terminated its ties to the federal government. 

As the nation’s largest single private provider of student loan funding, SLM has to date lent to more than 31 million students. In 2009 it lent approximately .3 billion in private loans and between .5 billion and billion in 2010. 

In the 1990s, well before its full privatization, Sallie’s operations were increasingly swept into the financialization of the economy.It jumped whole hog onto the securitization bandwagon, lumping togetherand repackaginga large portion of its loansand selling them as bonds to investors. SLM created and marketed its own species of asset-backed securitized student loans, Student Loan Asset Backed Securities (SLABS).When derivatives trading went through the roof following the 1998 repeal of Glass-Steagal, increasingly diverse tranches of Sallie-Mae-backed SLABS entered the market. The company is now also buying  and selling the obligations of state and nonprofit educational-loan agencies. 

Student loans were included in the same securities that are blamed for the triggering of the financial crisis, and financial products containing these same student loans continue to be traded to this day. The health of these tranches and securities is, as we have seen, highly suspect. 

SLM’s risk was minimized as long as the feds guaranteed its loans. But as part of last March’s health care legislation, starting in July 2010 federally subsidized education loans were no longer available to private lenders. What do education loans have to do with health care? Since the government took federal loan originations in-house, making them available only through the Department of Education, it no longer has to pay hefty fees (acting as the guarantee) to private banks. The Obama administration expects to save billion between now and 2020. billion of this will be used to pay for the 0 billion health care bill.

SLM will do quite well despite this seeming setback. The company anticipated the change in government lending policy by executing an ingenious trick as a borrower. Early last year it made its insurance subsidiary a member of the Federal Home Loan Bank of Des Moines, which agreed to lend to big-borrower SLM at the extraordinary rate of .23%. And anyhow,  subsidized loans are almost always insufficient to cover the entire cost of a college degree. For a while the student gets to enjoy the benefits of a government loan. Interest rates are lower and during deferment interest does not accrue. But eventually many students must also take out a private loan, usually in larger amounts and with higher interest rates which continue to mount during deferment. Defaulted Student Loan Assistance

THE WORST-CASE SCENARIO: GOING BANKRUPT

Credit card and even gambling debts can be discharged in bankruptcy. But ditching a student loan is virtually impossible, especially once a collection agency gets involved. Although lenders may trim payments, getting fees or principals waived seldom happens.

The Wall Street Journal ran a revealing report on the kinds of  situation that can lead to financial catastrophe for a student borrower. (“The 0,000 Student Loan Burden: As Default Rates on Borrowing for Higher Education Rise, Some Borrowers See No Way Out”, Feb. 13, 2010) Here is an excerpt:

“When Michelle Bisutti, a 41-year-old family practitioner in Columbus, Ohio, finished medical school in 2003, her student-loan debt amounted to roughly 0,000. Since then, it has ballooned to 5,000.

It is the result of her deferring loan payments while she completed her residency, default charges and relentlessly compounding interest rates. Among the charges: a single ,870 fee for when her loan was turned over to a collection agency.

Although Bisutti’s debt load is unusual, her experience having problems repaying isn’t. Emmanuel Tellez’s mother is a laid-off factory worker, and 0 from her 0 unemployment checks is garnished to pay the federal student loan she took out for her son.

By the time Tellez graduated in 2008, he had ,000 of his own debt in loans issued by SLM… In December, he was laid off from his ,000-a-year job in Boston and defaulted.

Heather Ehmke of Oakland, Calif., renegotiated the terms of her subprime mortgage after her home was foreclosed. But even after filing for bankruptcy, she says she couldn’t get Sallie Mae, one of her lenders, to adjust the terms on her student loan. After 14 years with patches of deferment and forbearance, the loan has increased from ,000 to more than ,000. Her monthly payments jumped from 0 to 6. Last month, her petition for undue hardship on the loans was dismissed.”

THE FIRST AUSTERITY GENERATION’S JOB PROSPECTS

Most of those affected by the meltdown of 2008 had completed their education and were either employed or retired. The student loan debt bubble signals a generation that enters the work of paid work cursed with what is more likely than not to be a life of permanent indebtedness and low wages.  

Both recent trends and the most informed projections for the future of the labor market reveal that most of the current cohort of indebted students will face earnings prospects far poorer than what job seekers could expect during the period of the longest wave of sustained economic growth and the highest wages in US history, 1949-1973. The present generation will experience the indefinite extension of Reagan-to-Obama low wage neoliberalism. 

According to the National Association of Colleges and Employers more than 50 % of all 2007 college graduates who had applied for a job had received an offer by graduation day. In 2008, that percentage tumbled to 26 percent, and to less than 20 % in 2009. And a college education has been producing diminishing returns. For while a college degree does tend to correlate with a relatively high income, during the last eight to ten years the median income of highly educated Americans has been declining.

Every two years the Bureau of Labor Statistics issues projections of how many jobs will be added in the key occupational categories over the next ten years. The projected future jobs picture indicates that the grim employment situation is not merely a temporary reflection of the current unusually severe downturn. But you miss this if you get your news only from mainstream sources. The New York Times’s report on the most recent BLS projections, issued in December 2009, paints an unduly optimistic picture of future employment opportunities. (Catherine Rampell, “Where the Jobs Will Be”, Dec. 15, 2009) Here is how a misleading report can be produced without falsifying the facts:

BLS releases two job projections, on the Fastest Growing Occupations (www.bls.gov/emp/ep_103.htm ) and on  Occupations With the Largest Job Growth (www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_104.htm). The Times focuses on the former, where the two fastest growing occupations, biomedical engineers and network systems and data communications analysts, require a college degree.  The Times echoes BLS’s comment that occupations requiring postsecondary (a bachelor’s degree or higher) credentials will grow fastest. This is redolent of the ideology of the “New Economy” : the US is turning into a society of professionals and knowledge workers, and the key to success in this upgraded economy is a college education.

But we need more information, about  the degree requirements of the total number of job categories listed in both projections, and about the number of new jobs expected to materialize in each projection. Of the total jobs listed, only one of five require a postsecondary degree. By far the fastest growing category is biomedical engineers, projected to grow 72.02 %, from 16,000 in 2008 to 27, 600 in 2018. That’s 11,600 new jobs. Is that a lot? Well, compared to what? The percentage figure, 72.02, is high, but what about the number of new jobs? Let’s compare that Fastest Growing occupation with retail salespersons, the fifth occupation on the Largest Growth list. Retail sales workers will grow by a mere 8.35 %. But that amounts to almost 375,000 new jobs, an increase from 4,489,000 jobs in 2008 to 4,863,000 jobs in 2018. Compare that to the 11,600 new jobs at the top of the Fastest Growing list. Just do the simple math on all the categories on both lists: the great majority of new jobs will be low-paying. 

The US is a nation of knowledge workers? Most new jobs will offer the kind of wage we would expect from an economy in which, according to one of Obama’s most repeated mantras, “we” will “consume less and export more”. BLS avers as much when it projects 51 million “job openings due to growth and replacement needs,” fewer than 12 million of which will require a bachelor’s degree. 

Our first austerity generation will be in debt to its teeth and stuck with low-wage work. The relative penury will require more debt still. Michael Hudson calls this debt peonage. We need to begin thinking of political organization that has little to do with the ballot box. And thinking won’t be enough…

4 Techniques for Helping Students Develop a Far better Understanding of Math

Solving math difficulties is the core to understanding math concepts. This is why it is critical for student to develop math difficulty solving abilities. The only way a student will be profitable in math is by means of issue solving practice. This is not to be confused with worksheets these are real world math troubles which permit students to make a personal connection. Worksheets are viewed by most students as busy function and worksheets are hated with a passion.

For a student to develop difficulty solving skills related to distinct math concepts, the difficulty must be something that he or she can visualize and make a personal connection. There are many ways to accomplish this, so here are a  four techniques to help them succeed.

Math Issue Solving Stratiges

The very first strategy is to start every single math class with a word issue related to the concept that was taught in the prior math class. The key with these math difficulties are that they should not be abstract – teachers believe in abstract, students do not. The examples employed in the issue must be some thing suitable to the grade level and cultural environment of the school setting.

Rural farming communities really should use examples that a farm related. Suburban schools should use some thing related to the community and the students’ lives. Urban schools need to have to use examples that are related to students’ environment. This makes it a lot more personal and meaningful to stimulate internalization of the math idea, along with how to dilemma solve.

The second method is to have students develop their own problems caution should be utilised to ensure that word troubles are suitable and are idea focused. The teacher can then post the questions on the board for other students to answer. Every single student in a class need to be given the chance to develop a problem.

A third method is a difficulty solving exercise is a hands-on situation where students are necessary to manipulate materials to solve the dilemma. For example, present a issue in which students require to figure out how numerous marbles will fit inside a jar. In this scenario students are provided with marbles so they can measure the average volume of comparable marbles. Then they establish the accessible volume in the jar. Next they are given a smaller container to determine volume and how several marbles fit in the smaller container. From this they extrapolate a reasonable estimate of the number of marbles that will fit in the jar.

A fourth problem solving physical exercise involves many math concepts for actively engaged in real globe math. Students learn a lot more from this dilemma solving physical exercise than they every single will from performing ten worksheets on the exact same math concepts. The connection to hands-on, minds-on critical math difficulty abilities are the foundation of teaching and learning math. Without having having visual and manipulative materials to solve this issue few students would be effective.

Does the requirement to solve a issue a day make the bad grades go away, the answer is a resounding yes. Students develop a much better understanding of the math concepts as they apply critical thinking and difficulty solving abilities for creating connections in math.