Archive for August, 2010

Kantro’s Tips to Save You Money!

August 31st, 2010

Fastweb’s Financial Aid Guru Mark Kantrowitz has compiled his top tips on repaying student loans, saving money and alternatives to student loans. Any wise student will heed this advice!

Repaying Student Loans

• Sign up for auto-debit with electronic billing, where the monthly loan payments are automatically debited from your bank account. Many education lenders offer a 0.25% or 0.50% interest rate reduction for this.

• Accelerate repayment of high interest debt first. After you make the required payments on all your debts, make an extra payment on the loan with the highest after-tax interest rate. Usually this is credit card debt or private student loans.

Smart Borrowing

• Do not borrow more than your expected starting salary for your entire education. If you borrow more, you will have to use an alternate repayment plan like income-based repayment or extended repayment to afford the monthly loan payments. If you borrow more than twice your starting salary you will be at high risk of default.

• If you find yourself needing to borrow more than $10,000 per year of education, you are probably overborrowing and should consider switching to a less expensive college.

Financial Aid

• Apply for financial aid even if you think you won’t qualify or even if you didn’t qualify last year. The need analysis formulas are complicated enough that it is difficult to predict whether you will qualify. Moreover, the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) is a prerequisite for the unsubsidized Stafford and PLUS loans, which do not depend on financial need. An estimated 2.3 million students would have qualified for the Pell Grant in 2007-08 but did not submit the FAFSA, and 1.1 million of them would have qualified for a full Pell Grant. (Two-fifths of students do not submit the FAFSA and about a quarter of these would have qualified for the Pell Grant.)

• Submit the FAFSA as soon as possible after January 1. The FAFSA is used for state grants and college grants in addition to federal student aid, and some states and colleges have very early deadlines.

Making and Handling Money

• Work part-time while you are in school. Even if you don’t qualify for Federal Work-Study, there are plenty of part-time jobs on or near college campuses. Working 10-15 hours a week will help improve your grades by forcing you to learn time management skills. Working a full-time job will hurt your performance by taking away time from academics. Enroll full-time and work part-time, not vice versa.

• Try to minimize credit card debt. Do not charge more than you can afford to pay off in full each month. Beware that spending $500 with plastic feels the same as spending $5, so it is hard to exercise restraint.

For more tips like these and expert advice visit http://www.fastweb.com/financial-aid/articles/2613-kantros-tips-to-save-you-money.

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Posted in Financial Aid

Debt on Student Loans Rising

August 12th, 2010

More students owe money the government than they do to credit cardsMore students have debt on student loans than on credit cards, the Wall Street Journal reported this week — $829.8 billion. And since the government has been doing most of the lending, the majority of that money is owed directly to Uncle Sam.

The good news about federal loans is that the interest rates are lower. The bad news is that student loans are not included in bankruptcy  — if you need to default, the government will garnish your wages first, then your tax refunds, and so on.

The WSJ report also noted that college tuition is increasing during an economic recession, forcing more people into lending. Meanwhile, an increasing number of non-profit colleges are failing the U.S. Education Department’s “financial responsibility test”.

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Posted in Financial Aid, Higher Education

Affirmative Action Hot Topic in Brazil

August 2nd, 2010
Ordem & Progresso

Affirmative Action In Brazil Hot New Topic

In 2002 Rio de Janeiro became the first Brazilian state to adopt quotas for Afro-Brazilian students in institutions of higher education. The last country in the western hemisphere to abolish slavery, Black activists hoped that the country was finally coming to terms with its bitter legacy. However,  just eight years later, affirmative-action policies—which have since been adopted by scores of other Brazilian universities on behalf of the country’s most disadvantaged groups—could be ruled unconstitutional by the country’s Federal Supreme Court.

The government’s census statistics show that 49.7 percent of Brazilians consider themselves white. Of the rest, 6.9 percent say they are black; 42.6 percent say they are pardo, a Portuguese term for people of mixed African and European descent; and 0.8 percent are categorized as “other,” which includes those who claim indigenous or Asian descent.

The numbers show that the scales are anything but equal. Only 2 to 3 percent of students at public universities are black, and a minority are of mixed race, according to Ms. Slhessarenko and the Rev. David Santos, a Roman Catholic friar and executive director of Educafro, a nonprofit that helps prepare minorities for university entrance exams.

Proponents of racial quotas, like Brother Santos, say they are necessary because Afro-Brazilians lag behind in almost every health, social, and education indicator. Getting them into universities, he argues, is the quickest way to begin addressing those distortions and to try and provide some indemnity for 388 years of slavery.

Opponents, meanwhile, argue that quotas constitute a form of reverse racism, and that they fuel racial tensions where none existed before.

Read the entire story here

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Posted in Admissions, Higher Education, Minorities

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