The law will fix student loan interest rates to the 10-year U.S. Treasury note instead of using the current arbitrary formula. It will also establish interest rate ceilings and lock interest rates for the loan’s lifetime. In the process, interest rates will be slashed for the upcoming 2013-14 academic year, with undergraduate rates reduced from 6.8 percent to 3.86 percent.

The law will also retroactively apply to loans taken out after July 1, when interest rates on federal Stafford loans doubled after Congress failed to prevent the expiration of subsidies. Stafford loan interest rates subsequently doubled from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent. The legislation is projected to provide $25 billion in debt relief for students in the next five years.

During the past month, legislators from both parties have tried to address both short-term problems stemming from the expiration of the subsidies and long-term problems such as the national trend of increasing student debt and its effects on the economy.

The final bill passed focuses mainly on the short-term problem of interest rates, and some leaders of the U.S. House of Representatives have questioned the long-term effectiveness of this solution.

“The bill helps reduce costs to students and families, but it does not solve the long-term student debt crisis,” said bill proponent Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., in a press release.

UC officials and students also worry that loan debt may become unsustainable when economic conditions improve and Treasury bill rates start to increase.

“In the long term, accounting for inflation, loans will become more expensive for prospective Berkeley students,” said Rachelle Feldman, director of the UC Berkeley Financial Aid and Scholarships Office.

She suggested variable interest-rate loans and income-sensitive repayment programs as changes to the student aid program, as they would better adapt to changing economic conditions.

Alex Lee, a senior at UC Berkeley, has relied heavily on federal Stafford loans since he started college and will continue to do so. He said that he has no way of paying for college other than loans.

“I’m essentially at the mercy of the student loan system,” Lee said. “Once I get out, I’m pretty much screwed.”

Undergraduate loans for the coming year will drop to 3.86 percent, and graduate student rates will be 5.41 percent. PLUS loans, which are offered to graduate students and the parents of undergraduates, will drop to 6.41 percent. All of these rates will be lower than the current fixed rates of 6.8 percent for Stafford loans and 7.9 percent for PLUS loans.

The bill will also establish rate caps to prevent student loans from becoming too expensive — 8.25 percent for undergraduates, 9.5 percent for graduate students and 10.5 percent for PLUS loans.

Contact Dennis Vidal at dvidal@dailycal.org.

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Taking bracketology to brackenomics, PayScale.com recently put UC Berkeley’s basketball team in the championship game if pairings were accorded to median alumni salary. Using language like “fat wallet four,” “top earning 8” and “salary 16” to denominate bracket tiers, the infographic puts a zingy twist on an American pastime. The Golden Bears, it seems, are more apt than we thought. UC Berkeley’s average salary of $89,400 sails through the competition, only to be trumped, at last, to a Crimson tide.

The findings put a sobering spin on March Madness, especially considering how President Obama did not think Cal’s men’s team would advance past its first game (he did place the women’s team in the final four). According to Business Insider, this year’s two favorites, Louisville and Indiana, do relatively poorly. Indiana does not win its opening round and Louisville barely scrapes into the Sweet Sixteen. Outside the arena, the ball stays in their court.

As for Cal, the infographic serves as another reminder of what the university is doing right. Be it heading the class of global higher education to fostering one of the country’s most attractive student populations, UC Berkeley’s example is testament to winning where it really matters.

Image source: 401(K) 2013 under Creative Commons.

Contact Alex Mabanta at amabanta@dailycal.org.

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Project Degree Completion, which was created by the American Association of State Colleges and Universities and the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, aims to increase the nation’s overall graduation rate by three percent annually and seeks to graduate 3.8 million additional students by 2025. By its launch, approximately 500 public college and universities had signed on to the effort.

“This century will see America face a myriad of challenges — economically, socially, culturally, and civically,” said Susan Chilcott, vice president for communications for the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, in an email. “We will not meet those challenges without an educated citizenry.”

To meet the goal, the project staff recommends that campuses re-evaluate educational methods in order to encourage more students to complete their degrees. The methods include offering more courses, reaching out to former students who left prematurely and reducing the time frame in which a student is required to complete a degree, according to the APLU website.

Rosemarie Nassif, special adviser at the U.S. Department of Education, said postponed graduation lessens the chance that a student will get a degree.

“The longer it takes, for many students life issues get in the way; they all diminish of motivation,” Nassif said. “Time is the enemy here.”

APLU President M. Peter McPherson said because UC Berkeley already practices several recommended methods, it has high degree-completion rates. According to a March ranking by The Chronicle of Higher Education, the campus had a six-year graduation rate of 91.1 percent in 2010, the second-highest rate of any public university nationwide.

“Berkeley is a leader in graduating its students and a leader in educating lower-income students,” McPherson said. “We’re particularly proud that Berkeley is a part of our organization.”
The campus has seen an overall upward trend in graduation rates since 2000 — a contrast to the graduation rate trajectory of the United States as a whole.

The United States has slipped to 14th in graduation rates out of 37 surveyed countries, according to Nassif. This trend prompted the launch of Project Degree Completion.

This project’s goals are analogous to those outlined in President Obama’s 2020 College Completion plan. Under the plan, which aims to increase national employment levels, the country would have the highest proportion of college graduates  worldwide by 2020.

According to the Center on Education and the Workforce at Georgetown University, by 2018, 62 percent of  jobs in the United States will require some amount of college education.

“America cannot lead in the 21st century unless we have the best-educated, most competitive workforce in the world.” Obama said in 2009.

Contact Virgie Hoban at vhoban@dailycal.org.

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Aside from calling for the closure of Guantanamo and denouncing the U.S. government’s continued detainment of inmates who have been cleared of all charges, the resolution — submitted by the Peace and Justice Commission — also declares that one or more of those detainees would be welcome in Berkeley once Congressional bans on their relocation have been lifted. The commission voted to submit the recommendation to the City Council at its July 11 meeting.

Commissioner Rita Maran, who authored the resolution, said she hopes Berkeley can bring this issue back into the spotlight.

According to Maran, there are approximately 30 to 40 prisoners still being held at Guantanamo who have been cleared of all charges, but have yet to be released. It is these detainees that her resolution addresses.

Shortly after he was elected, Obama said he planned to close Guantanamo by 2010. One year later, this still has not happened.

“It is to our shame that the government has failed to release them,” Maran said. “They have never been charged and they never will be. Under the current conditions they cannot be moved to the U.S. either. There is no place to send them.”

Maran added that many of these prisoners have been at Guantanamo for up to 10 years, and some were detained when they were still children. Maran said that, in many cases, their mental health has deteriorated as a result of their incarceration and the interrogation conditions they have been subjected to.

Berkeley has designated itself as a “city of refuge” in the past, beginning with a resolution passed in 1971. The city has reaffirmed this status several times since then in resolutions passed regarding Central American refugees, illegal immigrants at risk of deportation and conscientious objectors to war.

According to the resolution, two other cities — both in Massachusetts — have also passed resolutions calling for the federal government to lift the ban on resettling cleared detainees, and have both offered to accept former prisoners.

If the resolution is passed, the city plans to notify Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder, Senators Dianne Feinstein, D-California and Barbara Boxer, D-California. Maran said that congressional Representative Barbara Lee, D-California already sent Maran a letter deploring the continued existence of Guantanamo as a detention center.

“I hope that it will make some headlines by reminding everyone that the people living in the dark and forgotten are still there,” Maran said. “What’s happening there is contrary to the precepts of our country, and we’re trying to put a spotlight on it.”

Adelyn Baxter covers city government.

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The resolution, submitted by the Peace and Justice Commission, honors Geronimo — also called Goyathlay or Goyaale in traditional Chiricahua Apache culture — by encouraging schools across the nation to adopt his autobiography into their curriculum, and calls upon Obama to issue a formal apology to Native Americans for using the indigenous hero’s name for a military mission waged against a terrorist leader.

The resolution also demands that the mission henceforth be referred to by another name, such as Operation bin Laden.

“The use of the name Geronimo for the country’s most wanted terrorist is offensive particularly to Native Americans and negatively impacts the identity and social position of Native American youth,” the resolution reads.

In popular culture, the chief’s name exists as an exclamation used before engaging in acts of bravery. Shouting “Geronimo!” as a war cry began with paratroopers jumping from planes in World War II, according to resolution.

The code name used for the military operation that led to the death of bin Laden last May offended many Native American tribes, who resented the comparison between a leader viewed as a freedom fighter in their culture and a noted international terrorist.

Some have argued that the mission’s name merely resulted from the fact that bin Laden managed to remain hidden for many years while the United States continued to search for him in vain, just as Geronimo was able to evade capture by the U.S. government for some time prior to his eventual imprisonment.

The commission voted at its June 6 meeting to submit the resolution to promote peace and justice on the local level, as well as nationally and internationally.

Adelyn Baxter covers city government.

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Today, the fight over how to resolve the debt and deficit problem relates precisely to this point. Thus far the debate has been rhetorically framed by the following question: should we seek an extreme or a balanced approach? In concrete terms, the central point of contention is whether there should be a reasonable ratio of three to one in spending cuts to tax increases, or simply draconian cuts without any revenue enhancements?

Interestingly, while few were paying attention to the language, Republicans have voluntarily ceded what are undoubtedly skewed terms. With the debate having been shrewdly framed by Democrats as a choice between a moderate and a radical solution, analogous to that of a grown-up and child, one would rightly expect Republicans to reject this premise. That is, deny that their solution is radical, as they have clearly been placed in a disadvantaged position. Mysteriously, however, this has not occurred.

One could argue that the reluctance by Republicans to deny out of hand the notion that their solution is truly “radical,” in turn, reveals something crucial about the party’s current constituency. Namely, that it is lead by extremists, or those on the fringe who demand radical solutions to today’s problems.

But this line of thought represents just mere speculation. What if there was a subtler ploy here? Specifically, could the Republican partly have, without anyone noticing, written off the debt debate as a loss?

By accepting the characterization as radicals, a description not typically sought in national politics, perhaps their bizarre behavior relates to their primary objective: the presidency.

Going out on the limb here, it is possible that Republicans intend to propose that we have gotten so far off course that moderate, time-tested solutions will no longer do.

In other words, they could seek to frame the upcoming 2012 election as one of those rare moments in history where only the party who is willing to offer up extreme solutions can successfully turn things around and get the economy moving again.

With this odd thought in mind, Republican behavior in the debt-ceiling negotiations starts to make more sense: later on they can point back and say, “See, we tried to do something radical, but President Obama simply refused.” If true, then the Democrats may have won only a pyrrhic victory in the debt debate.

The gamble Republicans would be making is that our ordinary intuition towards balance does not apply in 2012. The basic rationale here being that the slow economic recovery and high level of unemployment both merits and demands a uniquely radical solution. Alas, the famous proverb “desperate times call for desperate measures” ought to ring a bell.

With both parties having placed their bets, the stage has been set for 2012 as a sharp contrast between the status quo (the current administration) and the extreme (the Republican party). There is an aphorism that winning the battle is not the same as winning the war. Having seemingly come out ahead on the debt-ceiling debate, the key question is whether Democrats can win both.

Brit Moller is a UC Berkeley alumnus.

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