Election night pics

'Got Tuition?' team member, Whitney Ripley, lobbied Congressional leaders on election night in Washington, DC. She asked House Education Committee Chairman George Miller and Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman-Schulz, the Democratic Chief Deputy Whip, to make sure that issues of college affordability and student debt be high on the list of priorities as the 111th Congress convenes in the January 2009.

Representative George Miller, D-CA

Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-FL

Gloria Schindler, CA

This video from the USSA conference comes courtesy of Gloria Schindler of California.



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Tiffany Coftin, CA and Shane Coleman, MA

We have another USSA video for you today. This video comes from Tiffany Coftin of California and Shane Coleman of Massachusetts.



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Gregory Cendana, CA

Got tuition recently had the chance to attend the United States Student Association conference and many of the attendees took the time to talk about their debt. This video is from Gregory Cedana, a recent graduate of UCLA.



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Are free, online textbooks the answer?

The Los Angeles Times has a nice article about one way professors are helping their students to afford college. R. Preston McAffee (an economics professor at Caltech) has written a free, open-source textbook and made it available online. This book is so highly regarded that it has been adopted by many prestigious universities, including Harvard. Is this a possible answer to the rising costs of textbooks?

Congress recently passed laws that would require textbook publishers to offer "un-bundled" editions of books, so students won't be forced into buying workbooks and DVDs that aren't used in classes. While this is a good first step, people like R. Preston McAffee believe that this doesn't go nearly far enough to help students cope. You can read the complete article here.

Student aid requests soar as economy plummets

An article from Monday's San Francisco Chronicle has some interesting statistics about federal student loan requests. 8.9 million students have already filed federal student aid forms this year, a 16.3 percent increase over last year. According to the associate vice provost at Santa Clara University, Richard Toomey, the university has seen a large increase in the number of students requesting aid, more of those students are qualifying, and they are requesting larger sums of money than ever before. Justin Draeger of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators has made it clear that since many states are facing budget problems they are contributing less to public universities, which is translating to higher tuition costs for students.
You can read the complete article here.