Commentary: Refunds of Federal Loan Overpayments Leave Student Borrowers with Your Money to Burn

For many college students, one of the most exciting events in a new semester is not listed on their school’s calendar: Refund Day.   

Although the day differs on various campuses, the windfall result is the same: That’s when the millions of students currently taking out federal college loans find out how much of their approved amount is left over after the school has taken its share for tuition and other charges. Students can reject the refund and reduce their debt, or accept the money. Although they are technically required to spend it on education-related expenses, administrators acknowledged there’s no mechanism in place to monitor their expenditures. 

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Survey Shows Inflation Affecting College Students’ Ability to Take Classes

A new survey shows that 1 in 4 college students have to drop classes due to high tuition rates and rising inflation. 

The survey of over 1,000 college students was done by Intelligent.com and showed that nearly 1 in 4 students would be forced to drop some or all of their classes if their tuition costs increased by 5%. 

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War Room Pandemic: Steve Bannon Talks to The Star News Network CEO and Editor in Chief, Michael Patrick Leahy About OhioHealth’s Distribution of Not Fully Approved COVID-19 Vaccine

  Stephen K. Bannon welcomed The Star News Network’s CEO and Editor in Chief Michael Patrick Leahy on Thursday’s War Room: Pandemic to discuss The Ohio Star’s breaking story by Peter D’Abrasco regarding the unapproved COVID-19 vaccines being distributed by OhioHealth. Bannon: Michael Patrick Leahy from The Ohio Star, you’ve…

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37 Percent of Democrats in College Say They Refuse to be Friends with a Republican Voter

A man with a track backpack walks across the BYU campus in autumn.

New polling from Axios and Generation Lab shows that Democrat college students are far more likely than their Republican classmates to refuse to date, work for, or even be friends with someone who voted for the other party’s presidential candidate.

71 percent of Democrats in college said they would not go on a date with someone who voted for the GOP presidential candidate. 41 percent would not shop at a business owned by the same. 37 percent would not be friends with someone who voted for that candidate, and 30 percent would not work for that person.

Republicans in college were far more tolerant of those with differing views. Though 31 percent said they would not go on a date with someone who voted for the opposing presidential candidate, only 7 percent said they would not work for or support a business owned by the same. 5 percent of Republicans in college said they would not be friends with someone who voted for the Democratic presidential ticket.

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Commentary: Ground Zero of Woke

Many of our once revered and most hallowed institutions are failing us. To mention only the most significant ones: our top-ranking military echelon, the leadership of our federal investigatory and intelligence agencies, the government medical establishment—and of course the universities.

For too long American higher education’s reputation of global academic superiority has rested mostly on the sciences, mathematics, physics, technology, medicine, and engineering—in other words, not because of the humanities and social sciences, but despite them. The humanities have become too often anti-humanistic. And the social sciences are deductively anti-scientific. Both quasi-religious woke disciplines have eroded confidence in colleges and universities, infected even the STEM disciplines and professional schools, and torn apart the civic unity of the United States. Indeed, much of the current Jacobin revolution was birthed and fueled by American universities, despite their manifest hypocrisies and derelictions.

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Gov. Whitmer Signs Bill Guaranteeing Vaccine Exemptions for College Students

The state of Michigan’s most recent budget includes robust protections for college students seeking exemptions from the COVID-19 vaccine.

House Bill 4400 — signed by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI) on September 29 — requires that all universities receiving a state appropriation must ensure that students can receive religious and medical exemptions from the vaccine, provided that they obtain a letter from a physician or draft a statement articulating their religious beliefs.

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New Study Sounds the Alarm on Students’ ‘Self-Reported Cognitive Distortions,’ Support of ‘Trigger Warnings,’ and ‘Safetyism’

College student studying

A recent study examined the association between college students’ “self-reported prevalence of cognitive distortions and their endorsement of safetyism-inspired beliefs, the belief that words can harm, and the broad use of trigger warnings.”

Published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, the article utilizes the definition of “safetyism” found in the book The Coddling of the American Mind, intending the term to mean a “culture that treats safety – including emotional safety – as a sacred value, which results in adherents diminished willingness to sacrifice safety for other moral or practical considerations.”

The four-person research team included three members from the University of California, Irvine, including the lead author, and one investigator from St. Edward’s University in Texas. 

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Marijuana Use Soaring Among College Students While Alcohol Use Drops, Study Finds

two people passing a blunt

Marijuana use among college students has surged while alcohol use dropped, according to a recent National Institute of Health and National Institute of Drug Abuse study.

The “Monitoring the Future” study found that 44% of college students said they used marijuana in 2020, an increase from 38% in 2015. More, “daily” or “near daily” marijuana use among college students increased from 5% to 8% over the last five years.

The number of college students who said they consumed alcohol, on the other hand, dipped from over 62% in 2019 to 56% in 2020, according to the report. Binge drinking among college students, defined as having five or more drinks in one outing, decreased from 32% in 2019 to 24% in 2020.

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Majority of Liberal College Students Not Proud to Be American, Favor Socialism, North Dakota State University Survey Finds

Findings from a new North Dakota State University survey reveal that the majority of students identifying as liberal or liberal-leaning are not proud of America.

In response to the question “Are you proud to be American?” 57 percent of liberal identifying students answered ‘no’. This is in contrast to the 73 percent majority of conservatives who answered ‘yes’ to the same question.

This response was generated from a nationwide survey which asked over 400,000 students from more than 1,000 American college campuses questions about their feelings on a number of social and political issues. NDSU publicly announced the survey on Thursday.

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Commentary: Can We Save Our College Students from the Woke Left?

Recent college graduate Davis Soderberg of St. Charles, MO is sounding the alarm about the extent to which the Left has a stranglehold on college campuses across the country.

“If you were to walk into a college classroom, you could quickly identify which students were the liberals and which students were the conservatives,” explained Soderberg, who recently graduated from a public university in Virginia. “The liberals are always the most outspoken because they know their viewpoint is protected and is always favored. It was favored by a majority of their classmates and the professors, which is really scary because students look to the professor as sort of an intellectual higher being.”

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Commentary: Thirty Percent of Young Liberals Now Identify as LGBT

Gallup survey published last week reveals that LGBT identification among Americans has grown, increasing to 5.6 percent of the population from 4.5 percent in Gallup’s previous update in 2017.

But LGBT identification across groups is not constant, with liberals, young people, and women skewing more heavily towards LGBT identity.

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More Than 20,000 Coronavirus Cases Have Been Counted at Colleges Since Late July: Report

Colleges across the United States have reported more than 20,000 coronavirus cases since late July, according to The New York Times.

At least 26,000 cases and 64 deaths have been reported from more than 1,500 colleges since the pandemic started, according to the Times survey of reported cases at U.S. universities.

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Two Colleges Suspend Students for Gatherings That Broke Coronavirus Restrictions

Syracuse University and Purdue University have suspended dozens of students for attending gatherings that violated coronavirus restrictions before classes have begun, the schools announced this week.

Both universities had policies and pledges implemented in order to reduce the spread of COVID-19, including face mask wearing, social distancing guidelines and restrictions on event sizes, according to statements from the schools.

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One in Five Students May Defer Upcoming Academic Year, Axios Poll Shows

Over 20 percent of college students may defer the upcoming academic year, according to a recent Axios poll.

The deferment data comes as prominent universities across the country move from in-person to online classes in response to campus-wide outbreaks of the coronavirus. Of the 21% of students who may not return, most are working full-time in the interim, Axios reported. The statistic comes as 27% of students lost their summer internship, according to the poll.

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Poll: Young, College-Educated Americans Most Likely to Favor Removing Confederate Statues

As confederate statues nationwide are being vandalized and toppled, while other are being peaceably removed, a new poll shows young, college-educated Americans are the most likely age demographic to agree that these monuments no longer have a place in society. 

The National Tracking Poll by Morning Consult and Politico, conducted June 6-7, found that 43 percent of Americans between the ages of 18-34 believe that statues of confederate leaders should be taken down, while 26 percent think they should remain standing. The other 31 percent did not know or had no opinion on the statues.

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