Matt Yglesias

Sallie Mae Thinks $17 Billion a Year in Giveaways to Banks is a Good Job-Creation Program

As I’ve had occasion to mention in the past, many legislators, including Representative Buck McKeon (R-CA) and Senator Judd Gregg (R-NH) have developed the curious notion that the essence of the free market is wasteful crony capitalist giveaways to private sector student lenders. That’s why they’re opposing an Obama administration initiative to end subsidies to private lenders and just lend the money directly, instead.

Today’s New York Times has an article on the lobbying frenzy that’s under way as private lenders try to keep their ill-gotten gains. It seems that Sallie Mae has put forth a compromise position that they say would achieve 82 percent of the cost savings of Obama’s plan. Sallie Mae’s estimates seem likely to prove unduly favorable to Sallie Mae, but even if the estimates are accurate we’re still talking about $17 billion in pure waste. The Times writes that “Lenders are also emphasizing the jobs they provide.” And, indeed, it would be remarkable if that $17 billion wasn’t employing anyone. But if you gave it to students, it could send an extra 500,000 kids to college for free each year and that would create jobs as well.

in addition to jobs, the waste is also suppose to produce valuable competition. But the direct lending program already contains competition for the contracts to administer the program. The competition the private lenders engage in is competition for the favor of college financial aid offices, a form of competition that fails to produce cost-savings—Sallie Mae concedes that even under their compromise there’ll still be billions in waste—but does produce lots of scandals:

When we discovered that several financial aid directors at major universities and a Department of Education official owned and sold a significant amount of student loan company stock, we became suspicious. Our subsequent investigation and those of others revealed a series of payoffs, kickbacks, and luxury gifts to aid officials, thus compromising college-student relationships. Supposedly impartial intermediaries in the federal financial aid system were operating with substantial personal conflicts of interest.

This page contains information about our investigation and the fallout in the financial aid world, including 10 firings and resignations, hundreds of settlements with state Attorney Generals, and new federal legislation.

Meanwhile, when Republicans were in charge neither they nor the private lenders showed much interest in competition. Rather, like all businesses everywhere they were trying to eliminate the competition by getting congress to undermine or eliminate the cheaper, more efficient direct loan program. Now the administration is, sensibly, trying to do the reverse. Unfortunately, in addition to its friends in the GOP, private student lenders seem to be an important force in Nebraska, home of oft-wavering Senator Ben Nelson, and Sallie Mae is staffing up with Democratic lobbyists and “has hired two prominent lobbyists, Tony Podesta, whose brother, John, led the Obama transition, and Jamie S. Gorelick, a former deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration.”

No, Fuck You

Ladies and gentlemen, the nation’s top journalism school:

But the push for modernization has also raised the ire of some professors, particularly those closely tied to Columbia’s crown jewel, RW1. “Fuck new media,” the coordinator of the RW1 program, Ari Goldman, said to his RW1 students on their first day of class, according to one student. Goldman, a former Times reporter and sixteen-year veteran RW1 professor, described new-media training as “playing with toys,” according to another student, and characterized the digital movement as “an experimentation in gadgetry.”

This is like saying that writing books is an experiment in playing with printing presses.

Judd Gregg Thinks The Essence of America Is Wasteful Giveaways to Corporate Lenders

Judd Gregg (R-NH) hopes on the ignorant Francophobia bandwagon rather than dealing with the administration’s budget proposals on their merits:

The president’s budget also proposes to set us on a path to nationalize the health-care system at a huge cost, and, for good measure, it throws in nationalizing the ability of people to borrow to send their kids to college. It suggests that the best way to address climate change is to create a new national sales tax on everyone’s electric bills. And, at a time when millions of Americans are struggling to find jobs, it proposes taxing small businesses, our nation’s engine of job growth, at rate that could be seen as confiscatory.

In other words, the president’s proposal is a massive and breathtaking document, and it should not be called a budget. Rather, it should be called a blueprint for the France-ification of America, a notebook for nationalization, or a memo for massive debt creation. But a budget, by any sense of the word, it is not.

I’ve dealt with France comparisons in general elsewhere. On the specifics of student loans it should of course be noted that this isn’t really a policy concern in France since instead the universities receive more generous direct funding from the state and charge dramatically lower fees. And of course this is the typical system throughout the world, and hardly a unique aspect of the French social model. More broadly, Gregg’s being coy about his own policy preferences. Obama wants to have the government spend a certain amount of money doing direct loans to students. Gregg, by contrast, wants to preserve the status quo in which the same total amount of lending takes place, but the government spends more money because the government is spending it on subsidies to private lenders. I think it would be fine to have an honest debate between proponents of a truly free market approach to student loans, which would save the taxpayers money at the cost of worse-educated and more class-bound society, and between proponents of direct lending. It would even be fine to have an honest debate between proponents of direct lending and proponents of Gregg-style crony capitalism, in which costly subsidies are doled out to favored firms. But Gregg is trying to claim the mantle of the free market while also raking in the support from business that comes from a substantive position in favor of crony capitalism. It’s nonsense.

On the rest:

– What Obama thinks is that since carbon emissions are causing climate change, the best way to curb climate change is to charge the emitters for their emissions and use the funds to cut taxes on working- and middle-class people and on subsidies for clean energy. Does Gregg have a better idea?

– There’s no plan to “nationalize the health-care system at a huge cost” in Obama’s budget. There’s a plan to spend more money in the short-run on creating a more integrated, universally affordable system in which nobody will be forced out of private sector provision of either care or insurance, in order to better control costs in the long-run.

– Gregg is not enough of a liar to actually call Obama’s tax plans “confiscatory.” But he’s way too much of a liar to describe them honestly. There’s a plan to tax the richest Americans, including those very rich Americans who are very rich because of their small business income, but not including the overwhelming majority of small businessmen who aren’t rich, at the levels they were taxed at before George W. Bush came into office.

Long story short, he could have been a heck of a Commerce Secretary.

NCAA Chief: Running For-Profit Entertainment Subsidiaries Doesn’t Compromise Academic Values, Paying the Workforce Would

Via Kevin Carey, NCAA president Myles Brand explains that colleges can’t pay the athletes who make money for them because “Paying even a few student-athletes would turn universities into entertainment corporations and misses the point that, for most, some college is better than none.”

This is ludicrous. What’s turned universities into entertainment corporations is the decision to run their athletics programs as big-time profitable entertainment! NCAA member schools could run their sports programs just as recreation for students. Indeed, this is how most college sports programs are run. There are no national television contracts, no high-stakes recruiting, no multi-million dollar salaries for coaches, etc. But then there’s the exceptional case—big-time college football and big-time college basketball. The universities that participate in these sports at the highest levels have already turned themselves into entertainment corporations. The difference between them and other entertainment corporations is that they’ve formed a cartel that bans them from paying their workforces. And they’re backed up by additional cartels—the NBA and the NFL—that make it virtually impossible to ever be compensated for your work unless you agree to an apprenticeship period during which you work for free on behalf of an entertainment subsidiary of an American college.

The whole thing is obscene. I think it’s very understandable that a school might not want to turn itself into a crass, commercial enterprise. But the schools we’re talking about have already done that; they’ve just tacked on an unusually exploitative labor-relations structure to their crass, commercial enterprise. I’m consistently shocked that this setup is even deemed legal.

Buck McKeon’s Student Loan Crony Capitalism

The Obama administration’s budget proposes to have the federal government spend billions of dollars on student loans to help students attend college. Since conservative ideology indicates that money should only be spent on killing people, preparing to kill people, and threatening to kill people it’s not surprising to learn that some members of congress are not enthusiastic about this proposal. But there’s a twist. The government already spends billions of dollars on student loans. And the Obama administration is proposing to reduce expenditures.

How so? Well right now we do student loans through a really pointless mechanism of basically laundering the money through private firms. All of the downside risk is borne by the government in case of default. And the lenders receive federal subsidies for doing the service of undertaking no-risk lending. But of course the companies also take a slice off the top for profits and salaries for executives and so forth. Consequently, this is more expensive than just directly lending the money. And the government is bearing all the risk anyway. So what Obama is proposing to do is to save taxpayers money by simply having the government make the loans. What’s not to like? Well:

But there’s already been pushback from Republicans. Rep. Howard P. “Buck” McKeon (Calif.), ranking Republican on the House Education Committee, lashed out against the proposed shift, calling it a “government takeover of the private-sector-based student loan program, taking away options and benefits from students while adding tens of billions” of dollars to the deficit.

The government is not, however, “taking over” anything. The government already completely controls the industry since it’s existence is predicated on the existence of federal subsidies. Obama is simply proposing to cut out the middle man and save some money. The tens of billions of dollars to the deficit point, meanwhile, is just an accounting gimmick. By having the government guarantee loans that formally “belong” to the private firms, a certain level of implicit liability is kept “off the books.” But the liability is still there. And the actual overall cost to the government is lower lower.

The interesting thing here is not just the particulars of the policy, but the bizarre view of the role of government that Howard is espousing. Rather than a debate between progressives who want the government to provide a public service and conservatives who want the service to exist just insofar as it can be supported by the private market, we have a debate where both sides agree that the service ought to exist but the right thinks it’s important that it be done in a less efficient more costly manner because doing it that way generates profits for people who in turn give them money in some kind of nutty sense is supposed to preserve the integrity of the private sector. And it’s not just on student loans. You have essentially the same debate over Medicare Advantage between Democrats who want the government to provide seniors with costly medical services and Republicans who want Democrats to provide seniors with an even more costly version of those services by bringing private insurance companies in as middlemen. It’s ludicrous. Now elected officials are going to get mixed up in these kind of scams now and again, much as you see some Democrats siding with campaign contributors in the hedge fund industry over the basics of progressive politics. But when Chuck Schumer pulls that kind of stunt he takes crap about it from liberals while conservatives seem too busy whipping themselves into frenzies over fake pork-barrel schemes to send mice on maglevs to Disneyland to notice what’s happening.

How Realistic Are Obama’s College Graduation Targets

One very interesting portion of Obama’s speech last night was when he took note of how the United States has started to fall behind other countries in terms of college graduation rates. He vowed to turn this around: “By 2020, America will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world. That is a goal we can meet.” What would that actually entail? As Kevin Carey explains it depends what you’re talking about:

If we want to be #1 in the percent of adults age 25-64 with a bachelor’s degree, that won’t be too hard, because we currently trail only Norway, 31% to 30%.

If we want to be #1 in the percent of adults 25-34 with a bachelor’s degree, it will be much harder. We’re still at 30% on that measure–educational attainment in the U.S. has been steady for a long time–but Norway is at 40%, the Netherlands 34%, Korea 33%, Denmark 32%, and Sweden 31%, Israel 30%. This is the trend that has everyone so worried–the difference between the two age cohorts shows that we used to be much better than everyone else (we’re far ahead in the 55-64 age bracket), but other countries have since caught up and moved ahead.

In terms of the percent of adults 25-64 with a bachelor’s or associates degree, we’re #3 at 39%, behind Canada (47%) and Japan (40%). In the 25-34 cohort, however, we’re 12th (also 39%), and some countries like Canada, Japan, and Korea are so far ahead (55%, 54%, 53%) that catching up in eleven years is unrealistic.

When Obama said this, I immediately turned to my girlfriend and started complaining. It’s part and parcel of a thread of social policy nationalism that runs through a lot of Obama’s rhetoric and that I don’t particularly care for. Mark Kleiman and Andrew Sabl debate it a bit here. I don’t, personally, like the implication that the problem with our stagnating college completion rate is that Norwegians are doing better. After all, given the actual capabilities and social structure of the United States, it would be a lot easier for us to just bomb Norway into oblivion than to undertake systematic improvements in high school seniors’ level of preparation for higher education. More generally, it’s actually good for us that Canada, Japan, and Korea have such well-educated populations. It’s even better for them, but ultimately it’s good for everyone. The positive-sum nature of the global community is an important strand in Obama’s rhetoric about foreign policy, but it tends to go missing on social policy.

At the same time, if invoking the spirit of competition is what it takes to get Americans excited about better schools and new investments in clean energy, I’m not sure that’s all that terrible.

College: Most Go, Only a Minority Graduate

In a post this morning, I said that only a minority of Americans go to college. That’s wrong. According to Census data, 42.4% of adults 25 to 64 report their highest level education as high school or less while 17.3% report their highest level of education as “some college, no degree.” Consequently, a majority of Americans attend college, but only about 40 percent of Americans graduate from a four-year institution. I’m reliably informed that only a minority of Americans attend a four-year institution at all.

Making Money in Higher Education

After describing some shameful behavior by the University of Phoenix reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Kevin Carey says:

I’m not among those who think that for-profit colleges and universities are necessarily bad. It’s a free country and some institutions have put together a package of services that students want to buy. For-profits often seem to be focused on meeting the needs of their customers, particularly working and non-traditional students, in ways that traditional non-profits do not. But they also tend to be expensive and highly dependent on students borrowing a great deal of money to attend. Dropout rates at for-profits are often quite high. And if more than a quarter or a third of your students are defaulting on their loans within a few years of leaving, then pretty much by definition they weren’t getting a sufficiently valuable service in exchange for their money.

It is, indeed, a free country. But there’s good reason to be pretty instinctively suspicious of an outfit like the University of Phoenix and other major for-profits. These are publicly traded firms. The managers of a traditional university may or may not take and opportunity to screw over their students for money, but the managers of a for-profit are obliged to screw you over. That could be counteracted by a desire to build a good reputation, but the nature of the higher education market is such that there’s no way these for-profits can ever be anything other than low-end options.

I think the main lesson here is that traditional universities need to do a better job of getting into the niche that’s currently dominated by these poorly performing for-profits. In part, state governments would do well to shift emphasis away from trying to burnish the sheen on their “flagship” traditional universities and toward doing more in the way of providing community college services for working and non-traditional students. But given the nature of the American system, perhaps the bigger part of this is that social and intellectual pressure needs to be brought to bear on rich people to stop donating to already-wealthy universities with huge endowments and to instead focus their efforts where they’ll do more good. Harvard and Yale have plenty of money, and their students aren’t coming from needy families. But plenty of students on the low end of the higher education system are genuinely in need, and they simply don’t have much in the way of decent educational services available to him. Finding ways to target private giving where the need actually exists would do a great deal of good.

Performance Bonuses

I think there are definitely some obvious problems with Texas A&M’s plan to offer cash bonuses to professors who get good student evaluation scores. Most notably, you could imagine a lot of profs gaming the system. But a lot of the very hostile reaction to this idea among academics with blogs strikes me as less about the flaws with the process than about the inevitable human tendency to want to avoid being held accountable to impersonal quantitative metrics. You can see that from the nature of Dave Noon’s counterproposal:

If the administration at A&M were serious about improving classroom performance, they’d invest quite a bit more money in pedagogical training for their graduate students; hiring more professors and reducing class sizes; offering release-time for professors to design new courses; and so on and so forth. But since they’re clearly not serious, this is what they’re offering instead.

These are fine ideas, but they’re talking right past the problem A&M is trying to address, namely that professors at large research-oriented universities have little incentive to focus on the quality of undergraduate education. These are all proposals that would assist a properly motivated professor to improve the quality of his or her instruction. But the do little to change the behavior of either the jaded older faculty member or the harried junior faculty member. Adding a direct financial payoff to effective instruction is a perfectly reasonable idea. But you need a much better measure of “effective instruction.”

For some courses, I’m not sure how you do that. I took a small seminar on Vichy France in college and it seems to me that it would be hard to develop a metric of how well Professor Higonnet did with that—though if you ask me he did extremely well. But I also took a lecture course on optics. The professor was extremely dull and the TA had a questionable command of English. Consequently, both got poor evaluations from me. Also consequently, I missed many more lectures from this class than from any other. And my sections with the TA weren’t very helpful. So my scores on problem sets and exams were consistently bad. And for my meager efforts I was rewarded with not-so-hot grades.

Which is fine. The grading process was an imperfect assessment of my understanding of the subject, but it wasn’t a totally useless one. I clearly deserved a worse grade than some other people in that class, and also deserved a worse grade in that class than I got in some other courses. I got what I deserved. By the same token, if we compare two low-level science lecture courses, and see that one course has consistently higher attendance and students get higher scores on their problem sets and tests and the professor and TAs are getting higher evaluation scores then there are really only two things we can conclude. Maybe one class is offering better instruction, in which case it makes sense to reward the instructors and do something to bring about improvement in the other class. Or maybe one class is offering inappropriately easy tests and problem sets and thereby gaining praise from students without really helping them learn, in which case the curriculum should be made more rigorous. I don’t think it’s obvious exactly what the best way to do this would be, or how you would apply it to all different kinds of coursework. But there are definitely steps in this direction that can and should be taken at the higher education level, just as they should in K-12 education.

The Importance of Refundability

To provide some context related to Third Way’s proposal for a college tuition tax credit it’s worth looking at Barack Obama’s proposals in this regard:

According to Obama’s Web site, the Democratic presidential candidate wants to eliminate federal subsidized private loans and instate a $4,000 student tax credit to make college more affordable to students. [...] Obama’s other solution to the college affordability issue is a $4,000 tax credit. The fully refundable credit would be available to students who complete 100 hours of community service. Castellblanch sees the tax credit as Obama picking up the students’ tab. But Kevin Carey, a policy director for Washington D.C.-based think tank Education Sector, said he’d rather see the money come in the form of a grant.

Carey said the problem with Obama’s tax credit is that the money won’t be available when tuition is due. Carey’s observation raises the question: Will students be forced to swallow tuition costs while they wait for their tax refund?

That’s an okay idea. It would help some people. Back in 2006, the DLC had a somewhat similar proposal:

To make college as universal as high school, college aid needs to be simpler and more generous. We should simplify the tax code by replacing the HOPE tax credit, the Lifetime Learning Tax Credit, and the higher education deduction with a single, refundable $3,000 college tuition tax credit to help offset undergraduate and graduate costs for all families. This new credit will cover up to 4 years of college, graduate school, and training. Net cost: $70-80 billion over 10 years.

Third Way’s new proposal, by contrast, is a repackaging of this old idea from their outfit:

Families earning up to $200,000 should receive a generous new college tuition tax cut in the form of a $5,000 credit toward the costs of college tuition, fees and books.

Compared to proposals from Obama and from the DLC, this is more generous to relatively prosperous families, but does nothing for more economically struggling families. The political rationale for the switch I understand—Third Way does more for people who are more likely to be swing voters. The policy rationale escapes me. It seems to me that the marginal dollar of tuition assistance should be directed at at poorer people rather than richer people. But that’s just my shrill left-wing blogger perspective. And the DLC’s.

UPDATE: NB, a higher ed buddy writes it to warn against conflating the student loan issue and the tax credit issue the way that first article I linked to does. These are separate proposals that don’t need to go together. The point about refundability versus non-refundability stands.

Colleges And Credit Card Companies

Via Kevin Carey, Jonathan Glazer exposes a really outrageous story for The New York Times about the covert relationships between colleges and credit card companies:

Bank of America’s relationship with the university extends well beyond marketing at sports events. The bank has an $8.4 million, seven-year contract with Michigan State giving it access to students’ names and addresses and use of the university’s logo. The more students who take the banks’ credit cards, the more money the university gets. Under certain circumstances, Michigan State even stands to receive more money if students carry a balance on these cards.

As you’ll see if you read the whole thing, Michigan State is far from the only school doing this. And it’s wildly inappropriate. Colleges and universities are supposed to be serving the interests of their students and the public and encouraging young people to take on credit card debt does neither. What’ll be next — university administrators forming joint partnerships with campus drug dealers? If they stick to pot, it might do less harm.

Skills Slowdown

Americans aren’t generally aware of this fact, but overall educational attainment in the United States is slipping slightly at the same time that other rich countries are improving. Thus “While the U.S. ranks second internationally in the percentage of adults over age 55 with a bachelor’s degree, we rank 11th among the percentage of younger workers who do so.” The slippage tends to be masked by the fact that, for now, our substantial lead in those older cohorts outweighs our smallish disadvantage in the youngest cohort, but obviously that’s not going to last forever.

The College Board has a report on turning this around that correctly observes that addressing the decline requires us to start long all the way back in early childhood, with better preschooling, as well as addressing direct college access issues related to affordability and so forth.

Endownment

I remember when I was at Harvard hearing a lot about how the endowment there wasn’t just big, it was exceedingly well-managed. You know, by people so smart they impressed Harvard smartypantses with their smarts. But not smart enough to dodge a downturn, it seems:

Harvard officials say the university’s largest-in-the-nation endowment lost about 22 percent of its value, or $8 billion, in the four months since the end of the last fiscal year. [...] They say the university should plan for a 30 percent drop in endowment value by the end of next June.

[Executive Vice President Edward] Forst tells The Harvard Crimson student newspaper that the 22 percent estimate may be conservative because some university money is handled by external managers that have yet to report figures.

Of course a 30 percent loss isn’t actually so bad given the current market climate, especially if the university really did get larger-than-normal returns during the upswing years. So maybe these guys really do know what they’re doing.

Meanwhile, giving money to wealthy elite universities still doesn’t make much sense. If you want to donate to something in the educational field, find a small, un-famous school that seems to be doing a decent job and could really put money to good use and help them out. Or find a local charter school (or my friend Komal’s school in Boston) that’s getting good results with disadvantaged kids and help them.

Productivity in Higher Education

One story you hear about college tuition, one I’ve often told myself, is that rates go up because it’s a Baumol’s Cost Disease situation. The faculty are highly skilled workers. And technological improvements in the broader economy drive up the productivity and wages of skilled workers. But the actual productivity of college professors is not encountering any technology-driven enhancements in productivity — you’ve still got men and women standing in lecture halls or sitting around seminar tables talking to people. So costs rise.

In a very interesting Washington Monthly article, Kevin Carey argues this isn’t really true and cites a whole host of technological innovations that colleges have put to use lowering the price of undergraduate education. But rather than those improvements being passed along to students in the form of lower tuition, they’ve just made undergraduate education more profitable at the institutions in question. The resulting situation is no good for society at large. More productive educational models, and more affordable education, would be a big plus. But it doesn’t happen because, for the reasons Carey outlines, the higher education marketplace is pretty dysfunctional — students and parents have almost no accurate information about the quality of the product being offered, and in some respects a high price or lavish spending on things that aren’t educationally useful, can be used to signal quality. And it’s extremely difficult for an institution to demonstrate that it’s offering a relatively cheap, but still high-quality, educational offering.

Endowments Down

Catching up on stuff I’d been ignoring, I see Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust sent a letter to the community on a subject I’d been wondering about — what’s happened to all these university endowments:

Consider, first, the endowment. As a result of strong returns and the generosity of our alumni and friends, endowment income has come to fund more than a third of the University’s annual operating budget. Our investments have often outperformed familiar market indexes, thanks to skillful management and broad diversification across asset classes. But given the breadth and the depth of the present downturn, even well-diversified portfolios are experiencing major losses. Moody’s, a leading financial research and ratings service, recently projected a 30 percent decline in the value of college and university endowments in the current fiscal year. While we can hope that markets will improve, we need to be prepared to absorb unprecedented endowment losses and plan for a period of greater financial constraint.

She doesn’t include any specific details, but it’s strange to toss that “30 percent decline” figure out there without saying anything further. You would think that if they’ve lost less than 30 percent they would say so.

Classy

One thing to say on the subject of trying to do affirmative action on the basis of a comprehensive assessment of socioeconomic class is that people aren’t going to agree on who counts where.

Kid number one grew up in the suburbs of Albuquerque, New Mexico. His dad was a charismatic college football star at Texas Tech but not good enough to play in the pros and eventually made millions of dollars as one of the most successful fast food franchisers in the Southwest. Mom is dad’s high school sweetheart who was a couple of years younger and stopped going to community college soon after she and dad got married.

Kid number two grew up in the suburbs of Boston. Dad’s a professor at, and graduate of, the Berklee College of Music and mom did her undegrad at Columbia and her PhD work at Harvard and now she’s on the faculty at Boston University.

Kid number one’s family is going to have a lot more money. I think kid number two’s family has more “class” in a common sense way. Which kid is inheriting more advantage from his family is a bit hard to say — it probably depends on exactly what you’re talking about in a pretty nuanced way. I don’t think this is by any means an insurmountable objection to trying for some affirmative action on the basis of a broad class metric, but I do think it’s a real stumbling block. By contrast, a straightforward attack on privilege in the form of efforts to dismantle legacy preferences and the like would have a similar effect and it’s easier to get a clear sense of what the target is. And of course if you reduce the level of inequality, you reduce the scope of inherited advantage directly.

Blogging Scholarship

When I first started blogging back in 2002, I was in college and nobody knew what a blog was. Eventually, some people found out and I think the Crimson even did a story about how there was this blogger on campus. Now, though, the world has changed so much that it seems you can win a scholarship for blogging — “Do you maintain a weblog and attend college? Would you like $10,000 to help pay for books, tuition, or other living costs? If so, read on. We’re giving away $10,000 this year to a college student who blogs. The Blogging Scholarship is awarded annually.”

Submission deadline is at the end of the month, so get cracking.