New England colleges have one big worry: 2025

[TexasTowelie]

When she was a high school freshman, Praise Hall lived in a hotel room in Colorado with her parents and six siblings. Even back then she knew she wanted to go to college one day, but it didn’t seem possible.

“I looked at my parents and I was like, how are we going to afford college?” she recalled in an interview last week from Bowdoin College, where she is a sophomore. “My mom looked at me and she was like, it’s all going to work out.”

And it did — in what she calls a miracle, she was awarded a full scholarship to Bowdoin, an elite liberal arts college in Maine. Her life will never be the same.

In college admissions jargon, Hall is a first-generation, low-income student of color, the type of student who used to be an anomaly on the white, middle-class campuses of New England’s many colleges. But increasingly, people like her are becoming a more common presence.

Read more: http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2018/02/03/new-england-colleges-have-one-big-worry/DWUWVTg36Z2Yz9C8QO9sAM/story.html

[MichMan]

1. Maybe the gravy train of students borrowing regardless of cost is ending

For too many years, colleges have raised tuition and exponentially over rises in inflation, and continued to build more and more lavish facilities. As long as students were willing to take out bigger and bigger loans to cover skyrocketing tuition costs, it really wasn't affecting them.

Perhaps that gravy train is finally slowing down