Higher Ed Watch

Santa has some tough decisions to make this Christmas. We've decided to help him out with our own list of who's been naughty and who's been nice this year in higher education.

Let us know who, if anyone, you think should be added to the list by posting a comment below. Happy Holidays to all! We look forward to adding many more names to the "nice" list in 2008.

NAUGHTY

• The leaders of Student Loan Xpress, for trying to curry favor with key financial aid administrators, as well as with a top Education Department official, by providing them with cut-rate insider shares of company stock. The student loan scandals wouldnt have been the same without them.

• Sallie Mae CEO Al Lord, for his insatiable drive for profits, and for his company's efforts to monopolize the student loan industry. Federal investigators are investigating whether he engaged in insider trading when he sold 400,000 shares of his companys stock just days before President Bush proposed slashing lender subsidies in his budget request. His companys cozy relations with colleges, often to the detriment of students, are also under scrutiny. But at least investors may finally be tiring of his antics and arrogance their frustration over his intemperate remarks during a conference call sent the companys stock plunging.

• Loan to Learn CEO Catherine Reynolds, for abusing her student loan companys non-profit status to enrich herself and her family and to raise her social standing. It takes a real philanthropist to try to persuade students to take out high-cost private loans before exhausting their eligibility for federal loans.

• Nebraska Attorney General Jon Bruning, for his genuflection to Nelnet. Waiving the $1 million fine he issued against the loan provider who just happens to be a sizeable campaign contributor is bad, but then calling a company that bilked U.S. taxpayers out of millions of dollars "ethical," "decent," and "honest"? Sounds to us like someone drank too much of Michael Dunlaps Kool-Aid.

• The Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Authority (PHEAA), a non-profit student loan agency, for showering its board members and their wives with extravagant gifts, such as falconry lessons and facials, all on the taxpayers dime. We hope at least some of the more than $35 million in taxpayer money that PHEAA improperly claimed on 9.5 percent loans is going to good use.

• Florida States football players, at least 20 of whom were suspended from playing in the Music City Bowl and several games next season, for cheating on an online music history exam. And lets not forget the two teams participating in the National Championship gameOhio State and LSUwho ended up at the bottom of Higher Ed Watchs Academic BCS poll with abysmal graduation rates of 48 percent and 38 percent respectively, and around 20 percentage point gaps between the graduation rates of their white and black players.

NICE

• New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, for working tirelessly to expose widespread abuses that have occurred in the federal and private student loan programs that have left financially-needy students vulnerable to predatory lenders. In so doing, he has put the leadership of the U.S. Education Department to shame for turning a blind eye to problems that have long been obvious to observers of the loan industry. He could have given Higher Ed Watch more credit for our role in exposing malfeasance, but he is a New York politician after all.

• Student journalists at the University of Texas and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, for taking the initiative to investigate the relationships between their financial aid offices and student loan companies, and uncovering lists of "lender treats" and lender stock held by a university-affiliated foundation.

• Representatives Thomas Petri (R-WI) and George Miller (D-CA) and Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA). Not for the fact that we love having to run disclosures every time we mention their names, but for their hard work on New Americas student loan auction proposal, damning reports of improprieties in the student loan industry, and most important, developing and passing crucial legislation cutting excess lender subsidies and increasing the maximum Pell Grant award. It's the largest increase in financial aid since the GI Bill, and these three legislators deserve heaps of praise for the accomplishment. [Disclosure: the Editor of Higher Ed Watch used to work for Kennedy and one of our writers used to work for Petri.]

• Amherst, Arizona State, Columbia, Davidson, Duke, Emory, Louisville, Miami (Ohio), Pomona, South Texas, Swarthmore, Tufts, UPenn, Wesleyan, and Williams for their announcement of policies that make it easier financially for low-income students to attend their respective institutions. Sorry Harvard, but in our book, $180,000 a year is not middle-income. But dont worry, you still get a gold star for spending some of your endowment.

• The financial aid offices at Colorado State University and Barnard College, for proactively counseling their students on private loan options and exhausting federal loan eligibilityand at Barnard, for reducing private loan volume by a shocking 73 percent.

• Boston Colleges football teamfor winning Higher Ed Watchs Academic BCS poll after graduating 87 percent of its playersonly four percentage points lower than the schools overall graduation rateand posting a very high Academic Progress Rate of 976, 42 points above the Division I-A median. Even if they hate us for criticizing their (and other schools') strategic use of redshirting. No hard feelings, right?

Editor's Note: Higher Ed Watch is going on a Holiday vacation for the next two weeks. We'll be back blogging away come Tuesday, January 8th.