As students at public institutions around the nation are crippled by student debt, why should anyone care about the introduction of fees for a small number of graduates at a prestigious, privately funded East Village school? I have, of course, begged my own question here: the only reason to care about the Cooper Union occupation is if it is about more than that. There's good reason to say that it is.

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It's not incongruent.

The Rolling Jubilee -- borne of Occupy offshoot group Strike Debt -- is best considered one among many Occupy tactics that aim to challenge or disrupt our current socio-political economic conditions. And as far as tactics go, this one is pretty clever. The idea is this: Occupy plans to buy up distressed debt -- debt which is in default -- and then forgive it (or, "abolish" it, as the ever-dramatic Occupy parlance puts it). Banks sell on distressed debts at pennies on the dollar (since the debts are in default, they're not making money off them and prefer to get rid of them). There are a number of websites where anyone can go and then buy this discharged, cheap debt. So, you or I or Occupy could buy $16,000 worth of debt for just $500 and then either make a profit by recovering the difference or just cancel it. Occupy and Strike Debt plan to do the latter on a large scale.

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The New York Times reported:

As the negative publicity about for-profits mounted — including many charges that the schools enrolled students who had almost no chance of succeeding, to get their federal student aid — both Kaplan and the University of Phoenix announced new programs, offering some form of free trial, to ensure that they enrolled only students who had a reasonable likelihood of success. Those programs cut substantially into their enrollment numbers.

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According to the government watchdog's annual report, "Student loan borrower stories of detours and dead ends with their servicers bear an uncanny resemblance to problematic practices uncovered in the mortgage servicing business."

The student lending practices directly mimic the risky lending underpinning the housing crisis: private lenders giving out loans without considering whether borrowers would repay, then bundling and reselling the loans to investors to avoid losing money when students default. The private student loan market grew from less than $7 billion in 2001 to more than $20 billion in 2008, according to the CFPB. Now, 30 percent of the 2,857 complaints related to private student loans filed in CFPB's database relate to inabilities in paying back loans.

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Strike Debt grew out of a series of assemblies in New York's Washington Square Park where individuals would share stories about struggling with crushing debt -- be it student, medical, housing or credit cards. Just four months later, in time for the Occuversary, an anonymous collective from Strike Debt and Occupy have concrete projects underway. On the weekend, 5,000 hard copies of a text, the Debt Resistor's Operation Manual, were handed out in New York. The 100-plus page booklet offers practical advice to defaulters and those struggling in debt. The manual gives a plain language explanation of how various debt structures work -- including housing, student and credit card -- while detailing the debt system's history. It also offers tips on how to challenge debt collectors, errors on credit ratings, and bankruptcy laws.

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Rice told Raw Story that he in fact dropped out of the University of Texas, but lied to Fox News about being a graduate just to see if they’d do their homework.

“The first thing that shocked me is that they were that desperate to find someone that fit that category,” he added. “What they were seeking is someone who voted for Obama in 2008, then somewhere in the last four years got disenfranchised and now is a huge Romney supporter. But I feel like anyone who fits that mold would also dis Romney at the same time. So, they just couldn’t find anyone. They’re in New York City, so they had to go find a kid in Chicago.”

On the show, awkwardness ensued for about two minutes, until Rice got kicked off. Watch the full clip via YouTube:

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The government records and documents student loans as a form of aid. Here's a list of the "amount of financial aid awarded to full-time, full-year undergraduates, by type and source of aid," and loans are listed right next to grants. When pundits say that "student aid" has exploded over the past decade and argue that aid is driving increases in tuition, it disguises that the "aid" which has exploded is a signficant amount of debt for young people.

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"Not that it's not a good idea to give students loans," Bartlett said. "It certainly is a good idea to give them loans. But if you can ignore the Constitution to do something good today, tomorrow you will be ignoring the Constitution to do something bad. You could. There are more people in our, in America today of German ancestry than any other [inaudible]. The Holocaust that occurred in Germany -- how in the heck could that happen? And when you start down the wrong road, it can be a very slippery slope."

When asked about his comments, Bartlett's office didn't back down: “Congressman Bartlett has always been a strong believer in limited government,” Bartlett campaign spokesman Ted Dacey said. “He is also a strong supporter of making college accessible to all Americans."

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Although Corinthian College Inc. offers primarily Certificates and 2-year degrees, the company’s tuition prices are among the highest the committee examined. This forces many students to both borrow the maximum available Federal financial aid and to take on additional private debt. The student withdrawal rates for the Associate programs are among the highest analyzed by the committee staff and the withdrawal rates for the Certificate programs are above the sector average. The company also had unusually high rates of students defaulting on student loans during the period examined. It is unclear that Corinthian delivers an educational product worth the rapidly growing Federal investment taxpayers and students are making in the company.

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Which leads us to the first distressing tidbit revealed in the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's new report on the private student loan market: Starting in the mid-2000s, students increasingly began turning to private loans before they had exhausted all the federal loans available to them.

Why would students be so imprudent? The answer to that question tells us yet again why Wall Street and the private sector can't be trusted to behave responsibly.

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And indeed, he’s correct. The White House, Congress and the Romney campaign were all keen to keep the student loan rates capped at 3.4 percent for now (just 34 times higher than the rate at which banks can borrow from the Fed), rather than doubling them to 6.8 percent. But student debt – now a ticked box on 2012 campaign agendas -- looms as a growing focus for political activism and organized dissent around the country. Congress may have managed to strike a deal, but students, activists and allies are starting to talk seriously about a debt strike.

“Emerging out of social movements of the past year or so, we’re starting to realize that the only way to get action on debt is to start to talk about refusal,” Nick Mirzoeff, New York University professor of media, culture and communication and longtime Occupy participant, told Salon.

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Congressional leaders anticipated voting on the package, which also would financially shore up the federal flood insurance program, by early Friday afternoon. Two deadlines are looming: Federal highway and transit aid programs and the government's authority to levy federal fuel taxes expire on Saturday, and interest rates on new student loans are set to double on Sunday. Lawmakers also were anxious to begin a weeklong recess.

The burst of legislating comes just four months before the November elections, giving lawmakers achievements to show off to voters who have increasingly held Congress in low esteem.

"It's a jobs bill," said Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., who led Senate negotiations on the transportation portion of the package. She estimated the bill would save about 1.8 million jobs by keeping aid for highway and transit construction flowing to states and create another 1 million jobs by using federal loan guarantees to leverage private sector investment in infrastructure projects.

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So how was the main obstacle to an agreement reached? If readers recall, Republicans wanted to strip some funding out of healthcare reform to pay for interest rate extension, while Democrats proposed higher taxes for the rich. But both sides were mainly trying to score political points. The ultimate deal is a piece of classic Washington accounting tinkering.

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Make no mistake, Hagan's bill, if it becomes law, would cut for-profit schools off at their knees. The top 15 publicly traded for-profit colleges derive 85 percent of their revenue from federal financial aid. If they can't spend that money on marketing, recruiting and advertising, then they effectively can't market, recruit or advertise -- or at least not at anywhere near the scale they currently do.

I reported last month that Corinthian, one of the biggest for-profit colleges, spends a quarter of its $1 billion-plus revenue on marketing and recruiting. But in the course of answering a question I asked Sen. Hagan about the assertion by for-profit school lobbyists that more regulation would decrease educational opportunities for low-income Americans, minorities and military veterans, the senator delivered an even more eye-popping statistic. Hagan serves on the Senate Health, Education and Labor and Pension Committee that has been leading the government's investigation into the for-profit sector. One of the schools the committee looked at, said Hagan, had 1,700 recruiters and only one counselor.

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Let's stop and think about that for a second. For-profit colleges generate the vast majority of their revenue from taxpayer dollars in the form of government-backed student loans. Therefore, our taxpayer dollars are being used to pay for closed-door training sessions in which for-profit administrators are getting tips on how to evade federal regulations.

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Vedder supports his argument with data showing that colleges are graduating too many students for whom there are no appropriate jobs -- too many bartenders with bachelor's degrees -- while claiming that loans are driving up tuition costs. Weissmann supports his own argument with data showing that students who borrow are much more likely to graduate.

Both of these theses can be true at the same time, of course. It seems intuitively likely that if you borrow a lot of money to pay for your education, you feel a certain amount of investment in seeing the process through. Similarly, it is pretty well known that the U.S. isn't producing enough graduates with marketable vocational skills.

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I have only read a fraction of the thousands of comments submitted to the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau in response to the government agency's request for information about the general public's experience with private-sector student loans. But I think I can safely identify a few main themes.

1) Dealing with Sallie Mae, the nation's largest provider of private student loans, seems to be an unpleasant experience for many people.

2) The most common adjective used to describe how it feels to watch one's outstanding amount of debt rise even as one scrimps and saves and hustles to make payments is "hopeless."

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Will needs to go back to school. The single most important factor forcing tuition hikes at public universities and community colleges -- which accounts for about 70 percent of the nation's post-secondary school enrollment -- is cuts in direct funding from local and state governments.

The sorry truth is that even the exorbitant tuition hikes of the last 11 years -- since 2001, the cost of college has risen 5.6 percent annually -- doesn't match the cuts to education budgets. Students at public universities have been driven to take out loans because government is no longer capable of paying the bills directly.

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The news attracted relatively little attention from the community of higher education watchers at the time, perhaps because the events at issue took place five years ago, during the crazy days of the housing bust and credit crunch. But the suit merits a close look, because it provides a window into the core issue at the heart of the ballooning student lending crisis: how best to increase access to higher education for those without the means to pay for it. The federal government's efforts to help students pay for college have resulted in the accumulation of a trillion dollars of student loan debt and a constant political struggle over the proper role of the public and private sector. Sallie Mae -- created by the government but now fully private -- is at the heart of the struggle; a deep-pocketed corporation with powerful political connections and its fingers stuck deeply in every part of the student lending pie.

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