BY MIKHAIL ZINSHTEYN | CalMatters

Nathan Reyes lives with his family five minutes from Cal State Los Angeles, where he’s paying close to nothing to earn a bachelor’s degree that typically lands graduates a salary of $62,000 within five years of completing college.

He’s one of hundreds of thousands of California low-income students who attend colleges that, because they’re affordable enough, cost the equivalent of a few months of a typical salary that students earn within a few years of graduation.

A new report today compares California’s colleges by analyzing how long it would take low- and moderate-income students to recoup the money they spent to earn a college credential. It shows that many community colleges, Cal States and University of California campuses — all public campuses — have better returns on investment than most nonprofit private colleges and for-profit institutions.

Reyes’ only expenses are car upkeep, gas, a few books and helping his family with some housing costs. The third-year student didn’t need to take out loans.

RELATED: FAFSA relief? Dept. of Education launches $50 million program to boost lagging federal student aid applications

“I feel very lucky,” Reyes, a communications major, said. “In high school, I was always stressing about, ‘Oh, man, I’m gonna have a whole bunch of debt racked up after college’. And now that I’m in my third year, I don’t have to worry about any of that.”

Reyes, who’s 20 years old, receives state grants to cover all his tuition and federal aid for other academic and living expenses. He also works for a state volunteer program that pays students a stipend.

Report calculates time it takes to recoup cost of degree

The report was commissioned by College Futures Foundation, a nonprofit that promotes college completion. The report merges several concepts into one number:

• The net price of a college degree after all financial aid is calculated
• The typical earnings 10 years after a student first enrolls in a school
• How much higher those wages are compared to what young adults earn with just a high school diploma.

It defines low- and moderate-income households as those earning below $75,000 annually.

The data, all from the federal government, show that the time it takes to recoup the net costs of earning a degree at Cal State San Bernardino is less than three months. That’s because low-income students there incur about $5,000 in out-of-pocket expenses if they finish in four years. Within a few years they earn about $53,000 a year — double what young adults with only a high school diploma make.

At Cal State Los Angeles, the time to recoup the net costs of earning a bachelor’s is also less than three months of a typical post-college annual salary.

“​​This is really a first-of-its kind look,” said the report’s author, Michael Itzkowitz, who headed the federal government’s first consumer tool for comparing college costs under the Obama administration. The approach is a mathematical way of demonstrating which colleges confer economic value to students beyond what a high school diploma would.

A CalMatters analysis of Iztkowitz’s data found that the average time needed for a student to recoup their net costs is about two years at public institutions and a little over three years at nonprofit private colleges in California.

Some of those private campuses are as affordable as a Cal State, UC or community college after factoring in financial aid. Stanford University costs low-income students nothing. However, only 4% of students who apply are admitted, while all but three Cal States admit more than 70% of the students who apply. Most undergraduates in California attend a public institution.

Pitzer, Pomona and the University of Southern California and several other highly selective nonprofit private colleges cost students less than a year’s worth of the typical salary they’ll earn within a few years of completing their degree.

Return on investment varies by college

While some for-profit colleges have strong returns on investment, most do not.

And that doesn’t even account for the 22 for-profit institutions that show no return on investment, meaning students from those schools earned no more than what a young adult with just a high school diploma makes. In the report, 24 campuses in total, or 8% of all California colleges, showed no return on investment, including two small nonprofit private colleges.

“There are for-profit institutions that can offer an affordable education and good employment outcomes and they’re recognized within the data,” Itzkowitz said. “But what we also see is that there are a disproportionate amount that show more worrisome outcomes for students in comparison to other sectors.”

Most California for-profit colleges, however, predominantly issue certificates, which are shorter-term credentials that don’t regularly lead to the economic gains associated with bachelor’s degrees.

At 79% of California institutions in the report, low and moderate-income students typically recoup their costs in five years or less. For nearly a third of campuses, it was less than a year.

For many students, the ultimate costs of a degree will be higher than the data published today. That’s because they need more than two years to earn an associate degree or beyond four years to earn a bachelor’s, assuming they graduate at all. The longer they chase a degree, the less time they spend in the workforce earning the higher salaries that come with a college credential. Also, the federal net price data has limits: It only calculates what full-time freshmen pay. Students attending part time will experience different annual costs.

But the basic trend remains the same: State and federal financial aid at public campuses plus typical salaries that far exceed the wages for those with a high school diploma make college worth the investment.

Itzkowitz plans to produce a follow-up report that measures the return on investment by major. His organization, the HEA Group, produced an analysis of typical wages by major last year. Some majors lead to higher wages than others, which can skew school-wide results.

The data in today’s report show variation within public universities, too, even in the same city. UCLA’s net price-to-earnings ratio is about seven months and its students tend to earn more than those from Cal State LA after graduating. But the typical cost of a degree after four years for low-income students is roughly $31,000 — far higher than the $5,500 at Cal State LA, which is 20 miles away.

“I wanted to go to UCLA, but it was too expensive for me,” Reyes said. “I did get accepted.”

Like he did at Cal State LA, he would have probably qualified for the Cal Grant, which waives tuition at public universities. But the distance from home would have forced him to either live in a UCLA dorm or commute about two hours daily between home and the crosstown campus. Housing, not tuition, is usually the largest expense for students at public universities. Borrowing money was out of the question for him.

So was a long drive to UCLA. “If I ended up missing a class or something, I’d beat myself up over it,” he said.

For the record: College Futures is a funder of CalMatters. Our news judgments are made independently and not on the basis of donor support.

For some ninth-graders near Fresno, California, the invitation — years before they’ll don a cap and gown — comes out of the blue: You’ve been accepted to Fresno State, the letter says.

Public universities across the country increasingly are sending such acceptance letters even before students apply to college. In more than a third of states, at least one public university now uses “direct admission” programs that automatically admit high school students if they meet certain academic criteria.

The programs seek to help fill college and university rosters in a time of declining high school populations. They entice high school students by allowing them to avoid the stressful college application process for a guaranteed spot. And they are likely to grow in the wake of a U.S. Supreme Court decision outlawing race-based admissions, as a new way for schools to increase diversity in their applicant pools.

Some states, such as California and Texas, have long used guaranteed admission programs, under which high school students who graduate in a top percentage of their class are automatically admitted to certain public universities. Direct admissions programs, though, typically go a step further, proactively reaching out to students and providing information on options, requirements and application steps.

“For us to be able to say to our ninth-graders, you can go to college, and you are conditionally accepted into Fresno State, I cannot tell you the way the kids light up,” said Misty Her, deputy superintendent of the Fresno Unified School District. She said 95% of the students in her district qualify for free and reduced-price meals.

Under Fresno State’s “Bulldog Bound” program, ninth graders from partnering school districts in four counties who meet minimum California State University requirements are automatically accepted, as long as they maintain their grades and fulfill high school graduation requirements. Gone are the complicated applications and fees, standardized tests, and the pressure to stack up extracurricular activities, Fresno State officials said. And the college will make early financial aid estimates.

In the meantime, the students get Fresno State IDs, a college email address and access to campus libraries.

“I believe in my heart that this is the gold standard on how to recruit, how to retain and how to graduate students,” said Fresno State President Saúl Jiménez-Sandoval, in announcing the program.

“I’m excited that states and institutions are thinking about ways to streamline the pipeline into college,” said Taylor Odle, assistant professor of educational policy studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who has studied college admission policy extensively.

With direct admissions, “the dinner table conversation can be: ‘Do I go or not go?’ Not ‘Did you fill out that form, did you write that essay?’” Odle said.

For high school students whose families may not have attended college, being able to skip the lengthy admissions process is a “real game changer,” said Mary Churchill, director of the higher education administration program at Boston University, and an expert in college admissions.

“If you’re offering direct admission to ninth graders, you actually know them and can prepare for them,” she said. She said that when colleges know incoming students, the schools can better prepare to serve them and make a seamless educational journey from kindergarten to college’s senior year.

However, the programs can have some drawbacks. They can be limiting for students who already plan to go to college but might stop striving for a more selective university once they have received a direct admission offer. That’s called “undermatching,” Churchill said.

Other potential drawbacks include students overlooking the importance of evaluating whether the school would be a good fit, experts said.

State programs

In South Dakota, where fewer students are graduating high school and fewer of them are enrolling in higher education, a pilot project will begin this fall to inform some high school juniors in Aberdeen, Sioux Falls and Spearfish that they have been proactively admitted to one or more of the state’s universities. They include Black Hills State, Northern State, South Dakota State and the University of South Dakota, according to the South Dakota Searchlight.

In Georgia, a program called Georgia Match, championed last year by Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, sent letters to 120,000 high school seniors, saying they are eligible to enroll in one of up to 23 public universities or 22 technical schools without an application fee. The marquee state schools — University of Georgia, Georgia Tech and Georgia College & State University — are not participating.

In a dozen states, at least one public university uses the Common App direct admissions program: Illinois, Massachusetts, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, New Jersey, Nevada, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Virginia.

The Common App allows students to apply to multiple colleges using one online application, and is widely used among high school seniors.

Idaho was the first state to have a statewide direct admissions program, which started in 2015. It offers admission to all Idaho high school graduates. A study published in January 2022, by Odle, found the Idaho program increased in-state undergraduate enrollments by between 8% and 15%, depending on the campus. But the gains were concentrated on two-year campuses, the study said.

Connecticut, Hawaii and Minnesota also have begun some state-run direct admission programs.

“It’s more than admissions — it’s a commitment to supporting dreams and building futures,” said Phong Yang, associate vice president for strategic enrollment management at Fresno State.

Pros and cons

The college application process can be a barrier, said Odle, who found in a 2023 working paper studying 1.2 million high schoolers that a quarter of students who start a Common App application to college never finish it.

The biggest indicator of whether a student ultimately submitted a college application was whether they completed the essay on their Common App, the paper found. It showed that 94% of students who provided a valid essay response submitted an application, compared with only 43% of non-submitters.

The number of completed applications varied widely by student ethnicity and career aspirations, parents’ educational attainment, school type, and community educational attainment and household income, the paper said.

David Hawkins, chief education and policy officer at the National Association for College Admission Counseling, said direct admissions programs can be beneficial both to students and colleges, especially in firing up students to seek the college experience.

But he cautioned that students should be careful in evaluating the direct admission offers to see if the college is the right fit. Students with disabilities, for example, need to look into the campus’s accommodations, he said. And any student needs to be comfortable with the university.

“Not all students are going to be the best fit for every school,” Hawkins said. “A large state university may not be right for a student who doesn’t love large crowds.” Those students should check out other schools, he said. Counselors could say to them: “Have you considered XYZ college? Look elsewhere.”

Joan Koven, an educational consultant in the Philadelphia area who guides students through college applications and essays, said direct admission programs also help colleges attract a diverse student body.

“Everybody is looking for ways, after the SCOTUS decision [ending race-based admissions], to help round out the student body,” she said in a phone interview.

She said the only downside she sees in direct admission is if students get to college “and it’s not what you expect, or you can’t do the work and you drop out.”

“You want to find the right blend of getting people eager for a college education and [knowing] what that might look like,” she said.

Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a national nonprofit news organization focused on state policy.

©2024 States Newsroom. Visit at stateline.org. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Dazhon Darien, 31, is charged with disrupting school activities after Baltimore County Police say he created the falsified audio recording of Eric Eiswert in January. The audio clip using the principal’s voice went viral and was swiftly condemned by the Baltimore County community. The school was inundated with outraged calls and needed an increased police presence and additional counselors.

Maryland Transportation Authority Police arrested Darien as he was boarding a plane to Houston from BWI Marshall Airport. Law enforcement officers flagged Darien’s bag for the way he packaged a gun in his checked luggage and discovered he had an active arrest warrant.

Baltimore County Police Chief Robert McCullough said police intended to serve the warrant Thursday. He didn’t know whether Darien was trying to flee or had travel plans.

Darien is also charged with theft, retaliating against a witness and stalking. He was released on a $5,000 bond from the Baltimore County Detention Center. He doesn’t have an attorney listed in online court records and did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Scott Shellenberger, Baltimore County’s state’s attorney, said this is the first time his office has prosecuted a case related to AI, and one of the first his office could find in the country . State lawmakers will need to update criminal statutes to include the new technology next legislative session, he said.

“In this particular case, we obviously had some statutes that were right on point, but we do in fact need to take a look at some others,” Shellenberger said at a Thursday news conference. “[We] also need to take a broader look at how this technology can be used and abused to harm other people.” He added that the charge of disrupting school activities carries a sentence of only six months.

The recording included offensive statements made about Black teachers, Black students’ test scores and Jewish parents. Eiswert was removed from the school and required a police presence at his house due to online threats. He maintained his innocence through a union spokesperson, who did not respond to a request for comment.

Eiswert remains employed by Baltimore County Public Schools but will not return to Pikesville High this school year, Superintendent Myriam Rogers said at the news conference. She was joined by Shellenberger, McCullough, Baltimore County Executive Johnny Olszewski Jr. and other county officials.

Baltimore County Police wrote in a 17-page charging document that Darien created the fake recording in retaliation for Eiswert investigating him for allegedly misusing school funds and theft. Eiswert also believed Darien had a grievance over his contract not being renewed and Eiswert reprimanding him for firing a long-term coach without approval, he told police.

In the recording, a man’s voice sounds as if he’s talking to someone named Kathy, whom many listeners interpreted to be Vice Principal Kathy Albert. She told police she never had the conversation in the clip.

The man’s voice in the recording says he has to “put up” with “ungrateful Black kids who can’t test their way out of a paper bag” and Black teachers who “should have never been hired.” The recording continues with the man saying he’s “sick of the inadequacies of these people” and if he “has to get one more complaint from one more Jew in this community, I’m going to join the other side.”

Three Pikesville High employees — Darien and two physical education teachers who police said were friends with him — received an email from an unfamiliar email address with the MP3 recording around 10 p.m. Jan. 16, about a half-hour before the clip went viral on social media, police wrote.

The recording named one of the PE teachers as someone who shouldn’t have been hired. When she received the email with the audio clip, she sent it to a student and emailed it to several media outlets, she told police. The student then “rapidly spread the message around various social media outlets and throughout the school,” police wrote.

The teacher told detectives she was having professional issues with Eiswert and was not renewing her contract to work at Pikesville High. Baltimore County’s school board last week received Darien’s and the two teachers’ resignations from Pikesville High.

In an interview with detectives, Darien denied involvement in the recording or its release. He said he was unfamiliar with the email that sent the recording to him. Over two months, detectives subpoenaed documents from Google, AT&T and T-Mobile that led to an internet provider address registered to Darien’s grandmother, police wrote in charging documents.

The recovery cellphone number associated with the Google account was registered to Darien, police wrote. The number has since been disabled. Detectives also consulted an FBI contractor and a forensic analyst, who said the recording “contained traces of AI-generated content with human editing after the fact,” such as background noise for realism.

A BCPS information technology employee searched Darien’s access to the system’s network and found that he used language tools and accessed OpenAI tools and Microsoft Bing Chat services that are similar to OpenAI three times — Dec. 18, Dec. 19 and Jan. 15, the last being a day before the audio clip was released.

A second expert opinion from a forensic analyst said the recording was manipulated with multiple recordings placed together, police wrote.

Rogers said the school system filed a recommendation to terminate Darien. School officials are investigating the two PE teachers, who are on leave. McCullough said the criminal investigation is ongoing.

The theft accusation, which Rogers says is ongoing, entails Darien allegedly paying his roommate, a junior varsity coach, $1,910 to be an assistant coach with the girls soccer team, something the roommate didn’t do.  

In the wake of the recording, teachers feared that recording devices were planted in the school, which created a rift in trust between teachers and administrators, according to police.

Cindy Sexton, president of the Teachers Association of Baltimore County, which represents athletic directors, said the union is waiting for the criminal investigation to unfold. TABCO and the National Education Association are troubled by AI being manipulated and used against educators, she said.

“As a society, we need to get in front of and get a handle on AI because of, unfortunately, situations like this are going to continue to happen,” Sexton said. “Our students are tech-savvy; lots of people are. It opens up a whole new world of concern for all of us. We all have our voices out there.”

Their app, Aletheia, is a real-time, browser-integrated fact-checker that allows users to validate news statements. While reading any article, users can highlight and right-click a passage to have Aletheia fact-check it. Aletheia’s research emulates the many steps that journalists would go through to fact-check a statement.

Both Aletheia and SpeakEasy are available in the Chrome App Store.

Established by the U.S. House of Representatives in 2013, the Congressional App Challenge  is designed to promote innovation and engagement in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) education fields. Apps are judged on the quality of the idea, including creativity and originality; implementation of the idea, including user experience and design; and demonstrated excellence of coding and programming skills.

Each winner of the Congressional App Challenge is invited to a #HouseofCode Capitol Hill reception, and their app will be displayed in the U.S. Capitol Building and on House.gov for a year. For more information, visit CongressionalAppChallenge.us.

That would be a generational mistake.

Each generation of students, it seems, is faced with some newly discovered technology that threatens to destroy the education system as we know it. At one point it was the handheld Texas Instruments calculator, a wonder of 1970s digitization, that many mathematics instructors initially forbade students from using. Mathematics was considered too important for personal development to hand off to a machine. It was pencil and eraser or nothing.

Of course, it turns out calculators didn’t upend math education as many feared. Educators adapted the new technology into the curriculum and pivoted to teaching broader concepts than simple addition and subtraction.

Similarly, AI holds the promise of simplifying the learning process. Granted AI is a far more powerful piece of technology than a passive desktop calculator. But history tells us it would be equally naïve and unforgiveable to shut AI out of the classroom out of fear of its disruptive potential.

Colleges have an obligation to prepare students for a world in which AI is as much a part of everyday life as the smartphone — or the calculator. Rather than running scared out of fear of its misuse, they should embrace its potential optimistically. AI is bound to make some post-college jobs obsolete, but those that remain will be the ones that require capabilities that are uniquely human. Developing and enhancing those capabilities will be key.

Despite rapid advancements, generative AI in its current form is far from a polished product. It does not (yet) have the ability to discern fact from fiction in all instances. The models don’t react well in different contexts. They often lack common sense, and sometimes respond in ways that are awkward and outside the norm.

And no matter how far it advances, AI will never fully supplant the classroom experience, or generate the kind of creative understanding that is at the heart of a well-rounded education. At the University of San Francisco, for instance, undergrads are taught the rules of rhetoric, a cornerstone of Jesuit education for 450 years. Students learn to construct a thesis, craft an argument and then write an essay or a lab report that backs up their ideas. Underlying this effort is the responsibility to say something that is true, good and perhaps even beautiful.

Students, in other words, are taught to think beyond mere concepts and apply what they learned to real-world experiences in a way that is unique, creative — and human.

Similarly, AI could perpetuate a return to active classrooms, where students are graded on their ability to demonstrate oral mastery of the subject and the rules of interpretation. In-class writing assignments, using pen and paper, will be another means of assessing learning; some faculty never stopped giving bluebook in-class finals.

None of these older forms of assessment preclude the use of AI as a useful educational device.

With or without AI, the purpose of education remains the same — to acquire knowledge, develop the ability to reason, make refined judgments, imagine new realities and become an ethical adult. Ultimately, AI can be a helpful servant or a hurtful master. Our choice.

Paul J. Fitzgerald, a Jesuit priest, is president of the University of San Francisco.

Child care is infrastructure. If we don’t have child care, parents can’t work – especially women, and especially women of color. As importantly, child care supports human infrastructure – the crucial brain development in the early years, when children build skills and connections that help them thrive in school and beyond.

However, a recent report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation found that most Californians can’t afford child care – and 15% of children up to age five live in families where someone had to quit a job to care for their child. Nationally, the report said our “lack of afford­able and acces­si­ble child care shortchanges chil­dren, costs the Amer­i­can econ­o­my bil­lions of dol­lars a year, stymies women pro­fes­sion­al­ly and is push­ing fam­i­lies to the break­ing point.”

The lack of quality child care creates economic problems on multiple levels. In the short term, disruptions for working parents and employers are obvious – some parents can’t return to the office. Other parents can’t work at all.

The longer-term economic damage may be harder to see, but it has more impact. Without quality child care, many young children don’t get the nurturing and support they need in the early years. They won’t be as well prepared (socially, emotionally, and cognitively) when they get to kindergarten, and that creates more challenges – for children, teachers, and schools.

Considering everything we know about brain development in the early years, child care should be a top priority. Instead, child care programs and services are often the first thing cut during budget fights.

Even when funding is approved, millions of dollars in stipends and grants are delayed for months and longer. For small businesses, like family child cares on tight budgets, delayed payments can be a death sentence. As more child care providers shut down, wait lists grow longer for families. When they can’t find or afford child care, parents end up quitting or cutting back hours to care for their children – causing more disruption for employers, and limiting their own economic prospects. Like many things, this disproportionately impacts low income moms of color.

Every segment of our workforce – including our future workforce – relies on child care. When we fail to support child care providers, we make life even harder for working parents, and we deny too many children the enriching opportunities they need during an important stage of development.

Like all infrastructure, child care only really works when it works for everyone. Roads, trains, bridges and child care are all vital to the operation of business and the country at large.

California and Bay Area counties need to invest in all forms of child care – not just centers and home-based child care, but also the Family, Friend and Neighbor (FFN) care that is essential for parents working multiple jobs and early and late hours.

Child care is infrastructure. Improving every type of child care will help all our young children get a great start on learning, support our teachers and schools, and ensure that working parents can get back to work.

Whitney Evans is California Director of ParentChild+, connecting child care providers, toddlers and their families with equal opportunities from the start.

This year’s high school graduates could take on $37,300 in student loan debt in pursuit of a bachelor’s degree, according to NerdWallet analysis of data from the Department of Education. These graduates-turned-freshmen may not see alarming tuition increases, but any improvements won’t compensate for the doubling of higher education costs over the past 30 years.

Costs are down, but potential student loan debt is still excessive

The average tuition, fees, room and board at public four-year colleges was $23,250 in the 2022-2023 school year, down 5.4% from the year prior after adjusting for inflation, according to the latest data from the College Board. College costs have been growing more slowly for a decade now, and decreasing for the past few years.

These lower costs are reflected in how much students are borrowing. New college freshmen may take on less debt than those who began their college careers just a few years ago, but not by much.

Using the latest data available on college costs and average loans, 2023 high school graduates could borrow as much as $37,300 over a five-year undergraduate career. This is down slightly from 2022 graduates, who were looking at a possible $39,500 in student loan debt.

New student tip: Costs should always be a consideration in deciding whether or where to attend college, but finding those numbers can seem difficult. Colleges and universities should publish the cost of attendance on their websites. This number includes tuition, fees, room and board (meals), books and even some personal expenses. It doesn’t include financial aid. For that, look for the school’s net price calculator, and reach out to its financial aid office or an admissions counselor if you can’t find it. This will help you get a more precise estimate on how much you can expect to pay out of pocket at a school and makes comparing somewhat easier.

Repayment plans add thousands in interest

Students who borrow the maximum amount of federal student loan dollars — $31,000 for dependent undergraduates — would pay $387 in monthly payments on a 10-year repayment schedule. After 10 years, they’d wind up paying $46,453 including interest to whittle that debt down to zero. This is a modest payment estimate that assumes the current 4.99% interest rate throughout. However, that interest rate is expected to rise. While there are other repayment options available for federal student loans, the 10-year plan is considered the standard, and it generally results in the lowest total paid.

This analysis assumes the student is paying on unsubsidized loans. But the federal government also subsidizes some qualifying loans, meaning it covers the interest while the student is attending classes half time or more, potentially saving thousands of dollars.

New student tip: Students are not required to make payments on federal student loans while attending school and for a six-month grace period after. But if you’re taking on unsubsidized federal student loan debt while in school, you have the option of making interest-only payments during these periods. Because the interest is compounding, paying it as it accrues can save you considerably over the life of your loans.

Increased grant disbursements are a relief valve

If there’s good news, it’s that grant disbursements are up. Students may be able to lessen how much of their tuition bill is covered with borrowed money by qualifying for institutional, state and federal grants.

The largest source of federal grant aid, the Pell Grant, is no longer enough to cover all higher education costs of the most at-need students, but institutional grants have been picking up a greater share of total grant coverage in recent years. In fact, institutional grants now make up more of total undergraduate student aid than federal loans, a change that occurred in the 2019-2020 school year, according to College Board data.

New student tip: Grants are “free money” and don’t have to be repaid. Your best bet to get the maximum amount you’re entitled to is to fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, when it opens each year. Grants may be need-based, but they can also be awarded based on merit or even demographics. Like scholarships, every dollar of grant money you get is a dollar you don’t have to borrow and pay interest on.

Parents borrow to pick up where federal loans leave off

Because federal loans are capped at $31,000 for undergraduate students, those relying wholly on loans or attending more expensive institutions may need additional loans to cover their costs. Parents have been increasingly picking up this debt, which could impact their own long-term financial goals.

A 2021 NerdWallet survey found that 26% of parents who took out parent PLUS loans to help fund their child’s education would be “unable to retire as expected” because of the debt. One in 5 of parents with these loans regretted taking them out.

New student (and parent) tip: It’s tempting to help your child pay their school bill even when you don’t have the cash to do it. But if it involves borrowing, think twice. Unless you’re assured your child will graduate and support you in retirement, taking out loans to cover their education could do more harm than good. Paying for college often involves cobbling together money from multiple sources, but parent loans should remain a last resort.

Analysis methodology and additional data available in the original article, published at NerdWallet.

More From NerdWallet

Elizabeth Renter writes for NerdWallet. Email: elizabeth@nerdwallet.com. Twitter: @elizabethrenter.

One of them is apparently not striking the other with enough force. Fick interrupts.

“Don’t be afraid!” he says, like a character going into battle in “Lord of the Rings.”

Fick jabs a finger at the other man’s headgear and neck guard — called a gorget, French for “throat” — and turns to his opponent. “That’s what that’s for!”

The click-clacking of swords resumes.

Fick is no stranger to these swords. He started practicing Historical European martial arts (HEMA) more than three decades ago in his backyard in San Jose. Now, like the prodigal son so often mythologized in medieval art, he’s returning to the city after 14 years at various locations throughout Santa Clara County.

On March 4, Fick’s Davenriche European Martial Artes School had a grand opening in the city’s Japantown neighborhood; it expands his footprint to 14,244 square feet, a fourth the size of a football field. It’s a far cry from his first school in 2000, which was located in the back room of a packaging plant that smelled like onions and pineapple and was home to a family of bats.

“We’ve been working our tails off,” Fick says.

The enormous warehouse at 395 East Taylor Street is an emporium for the medieval-minded. A dragon figurine adorns the ceiling, European paintings and tapestries hang on the brick walls and there’s enough space to house an entire armory and library — plus a replica trebuchet catapult. At the foot of the stairs leading up to the school is a large suit of armor that Fick once wore in France at a reenactment of Henry V’s Battle of Agincourt in 1415.

“This is a very famous battle,” Fick says while his finger tinks against the armor’s metal. The Polish-made helmet is mild steel, which helps disperse the energy if something impacts it. There’s a two-inch dent on the left side of it above the eye hole where Fick got hit. “I was on the field with two squires fighting against the French. English longbowmen (were) shooting arrows over my head. It was a good time.”

Fick was a kid when he got his first chance to wrap his hands around a sword, albeit a plastic one that his parents bought him.

“I loved that sword, ” he says fondly. “I carried it everywhere.”

By the time he exited high school, he went to his first Renaissance Fair. “I made my own costume,” he recalls. “It was garbage.” In the late nineties, as Fick was looking for a way to pay the bills, he was thinking about a career as a firefighter — but ultimately chose the path of a swordsman.

“I made the decision,” he said. “I (initially) started my school in my backyard.”

Standing stout with a barrel chest and a silvery beard that could easily get him cast in a “Game of Thrones” episode, Fick looks the part of a HEMA guru.

Looped through his brown belt are a sword and dagger of German design. A 3,000-year-old dagger that was discovered in modern-day Iran and “used sometime between the Trojan War and King David of the Bible” is displayed in his office. On the inside of Fick’s right forearm is a tattoo, “Gladi meus pro ceter,” Latin for “My sword for others.”

The ink adds to the quirky yet confident air that surrounds Fick. He’s someone you’d probably want to call if you ever got yourself in some sort of pickle.

The school itself is a plethora of Medieval martial arts weaponry training. Fick teaches grappling and dagger work, archery, axe and knife throwing. Other activities are more lighthearted. This month, Fick helped host a Make-A-Wish event for a 7-year-old. Fick and six others dressed up as pirates and let the child, James, sit atop a 1700s-era cannon that was hauled up from the Mediterranean Ocean.

“A very good friend of mine, her son was diagnosed with childhood leukemia and Make-a-Wish sent their family to Hobbiton in New Zealand. He beat the leukemia and he’s even done classes here with me. I’ve always wanted to be a part of Make-a-Wish because it’s such a big thing for these kids.”

For some of Fick’s students, the weapons training is therapeutic. Roughly the length of a wrapping paper roll and weighing up to 4 pounds, the swords feel light at first, but arms can tire quickly after a couple of minutes of swinging.

“There’s no better way to live in the moment than defending against somebody hitting you in the head with a sword,” says 50-year-old Niall Doherty. “We’ve all got our busy lives going on. But when you’re here, you’re 100 percent living in the moment.”

For others, like 23-year-old Kevin Ryan, the school offers important life skills.

As the class on a Thursday in March comes to an end, Fick and his four students gather around, putting their swords together in a circle and then individually saluting one another. At one point, one of Fick’s students extends an arm for a handshake, but he’s quickly reprimanded and told that he must first take off his protective gloves.

“It’s not big, dumb thugs swinging tight irons,” Fick explains about his school. “‘Conan the Barbarian’ lied to us. There’s so much more than just swinging a big, heavy stick at people.”

STOCKHOLM — Three scientists jointly won this year’s Nobel Prize in physics on Tuesday for their work on quantum information science that has significant applications, for example in the field of encryption.

Frenchman Alain Aspect, American John F. Clauser and Austrian Anton Zeilinger were cited by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for discovering the way that unseen particles, such as photons or tiny bits of matter, can be linked, or “entangled,” with each other even when they are separated by large distances.

“Being a little bit entangled is sort of like being a little bit pregnant. The effect grows on you,” Clauser said in a Tuesday morning phone interview with The Associated Press.

It all goes back to a feature of the universe that even baffled Albert Einstein and connects matter and light in a tangled, chaotic way.

Clauser, 79, was awarded his prize for a 1972 experiment that helped settle a famous debate about quantum mechanics between Einstein and famed physicist Niels Bohr. Einstein described “a spooky action at a distance” that he thought would eventually be disproved.

“I was betting on Einstein,” Clauser said. “But unfortunately I was wrong and Einstein was wrong and Bohr was right.”

Clauser, who from 1969 to 1996 worked at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and the University of California, Berkeley, said his work on quantum mechanics shows that you can’t confine information to a closed volume, “like a little box that sits on your desk” — though even he can’t say why.

“Most people would assume that nature is made out of stuff distributed throughout space and time,” Clauser said. “And that appears not to be the case.”

Quantum entanglement “has to do with taking these two photons and then measuring one over here and knowing immediately something about the other one over here,” said David Haviland, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics. “And if we have this property of entanglement between the two photons, we can establish a common information between two different observers of these quantum objects. And this allows us to do things like secret communication, in ways which weren’t possible to do before.”

That’s why quantum information is not an esoteric thought experiment, said Eva Olsson, a member of the Nobel committee. She called it a “vibrant and developing field.”

“It has broad and potential implications in areas such as secure information transfer, quantum computing and sensing technology,” Olsson said. “Its predictions have opened doors to another world, and it has also shaken the very foundations of how we interpret measurements.”

Everything in the universe could be entangled but “usually the entanglement just kind of washes off. It’s so chaotic and random that when you look at it … we don’t see anything,” said Harvard professor Subir Sachdev, who has worked on experiments that look at quantum entangled material consisting of up to 200 atoms. But sometimes scientists can unsnarl just enough to make sense and be useful in everything from encryption to superconductors, he said.

Speaking by phone to a news conference after the announcement, Zeilinger said he was “still kind of shocked” at hearing he had received the award.

“But it’s a very positive shock,” said Zeilinger, 77, who is based at the University of Vienna.

Clauser, Aspect, and Zeilinger have figured in Nobel speculation for more than a decade. In 2010 they won the Wolf Prize in Israel, seen as a possible precursor to the Nobel.

While physicists often tackle problems that appear at first glance to be far removed from everyday concerns — tiny particles and the vast mysteries of space and time — their research provides the foundations for many practical applications of science.

The Nobel committee said Clauser developed quantum theories first put forward in the 1960s into a practical experiment. Aspect, 75, was able to close a loophole in those theories, while Zeilinger demonstrated a phenomenon called quantum teleportation that effectively allows information to be transmitted over distances.

“Using entanglement you can transfer all the information which is carried by an object over to some other place where the object is, so to speak, reconstituted,” said Zeilinger. He added that this only works for tiny particles.

“It is not like in the Star Trek films (where one is) transporting something, certainly not the person, over some distance,” he said.

When he began his research, Zeilinger said the experiments were “completely philosophical without any possible use or application.”

Since then, the laureates’ work has been used to develop the fields of quantum computers, quantum networks and secure quantum encrypted communication.

A week of Nobel Prize announcements kicked off Monday with Swedish scientist Svante Paabo receiving the award in medicine Monday for unlocking secrets of Neanderthal DNA that provided key insights into our immune system.

They continue with chemistry on Wednesday and literature on Thursday. The 2022 Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday and the economics award on Oct. 10.

The prizes carry a cash award of 10 million Swedish kronor (nearly $900,000) and will be handed out on Dec. 10. The money comes from a bequest left by the prize’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel, who died in 1895.

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Jordans reported from Berlin. Seth Borenstein contributed from Kensington, Maryland, and Maddie Burakoff contributed from New York.

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Follow all AP stories about the Nobel Prizes at https://apnews.com/hub/nobel-prizes

The California State Board of Education has the job of adopting K-12 curriculum frameworks in accordance with state education code, which calls for “broad minimum standards and guidelines for educational programs.” The last math curriculum framework was adopted in 2013. Now the latest effort to rewrite the framework, close the learning gap between student groups and prepare more underrepresented minority students for STEM careers could end up having the opposite effect by reducing access to rigorous courses needed to succeed in science and engineering fields.

Right now, the state’s Board of Education is considering adopting an advisory K-12 California Math Framework. Finding a way to improve math performance is critical. However, the framework’s authors are wrong to suggest that the achievements of computing and wider access to data have made some advanced math courses irrelevant.

This rationale is no more valid than saying that grammar- and spell-checking tools have eliminated the need for students to learn how to write. If anything, the pervasiveness of computers means that we should focus more on mathematical reasoning, not less. As science and engineering educators, we have seen firsthand how students lacking a strong foundation in math struggle to learn both data science and engineering at the college level.

The proposed framework prioritizes providing students with multiple pathways in their math education and the option to choose their courses. But the efficacy of this approach is not supported by data and reflects a poor understanding of how fundamental math skills build on one another. The proposed choose-your-own-adventure approach to math pathways for high school juniors and seniors is fundamentally flawed.

Students with significant learning gaps in a topic will have difficulty succeeding in more advanced courses that assume mastery of that topic. You can’t succeed in a college calculus or statistics course, for example, if you didn’t explore logarithms or exponential functions during high school.

This proposed framework also favors allowing students to choose data science, which might appear more inviting, in lieu of advanced algebra and precalculus courses that are designed to prepare them for college-level math courses. This sets up a false trade-off between content and vibrant teaching. The result would be students missing out on math courses necessary to succeed in STEM programs in college and beyond.

These flaws in the proposal have prompted more than 2,000 STEM professionals and academics — including many in the field of data science — across the country to sign open letters raising concerns about the California Math Framework. The signatories include seven Nobel Prize winners, five Fields medalists and three Turing Award winners, as well as more than 200 professors from the University of California system, USC and Stanford University. Their concerns should be addressed.

A better solution is for California to work with textbook publishers on improving content to engage and motivate students, and to increase accountability in our educational system to ensure that students have access to advanced math courses — and actually learn in them.

With more than 10% of the country’s population living in California, it is imperative to get math education right and not rush a decision that could jeopardize student success and the future STEM workforce. The proposed framework simply won’t prepare all students to develop the skills they’ll need — nor will it allow California to grow the talent needed to remain a global economic engine.

Jennifer Chayes is associate provost for UC Berkeley’s Division of Computing, Data Science, and Society. Tsu-Jae King Liu is dean of UC Berkeley’s College of Engineering. They are both professors in the department of electrical engineering and computer sciences. ©2022 Los Angeles Times. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.