Without Congressional action, interest rates on subsidized Stafford loans are set to double from 3.4% to 6.8% this July 1. Legislation to maintain the federal student loan interest rate at 3.4% for an additional school year is currently under consideration. Both Democrats and Republicans have acknowledged the need to keep rates from rising. The issue [...]

View all photos The sound of thousands of plastic clappers on the south lawn of the Capitol earlier today was like rainfall. It heralded the coming storm from state workers who are angry at the governor’s threats of another 9,800 layoffs. The rally was led by Public Employees Federation. PEF president Ken Brynien said 15,000 [...]

Among the hundreds of peaceful demonstrators at Wednesday’s Capitol Camp-in were students, parents and graduates of the state’s senior and community public colleges. They included Caitlin Kempf and Steve Moss, both students at Adirondack Community College. “It was supposed to be my senior year, but because of SUNY, I’m back at my sophomore year,” Kempf [...]

The Professional Staff Congress, which is rallying at the Capitol in Albany today to protest proposed state budget cuts to the university, has launched a targeted ad campaign telling lawmakers that they should make education a priority rather than giving tax breaks to the rich. PSC represents 22,000 instructional faculty at CUNY.

Update: Photo Gallery Update 3:24 p.m. SUNY student assembly is leading chants of “Stop the Cuts” and “No tuition hikes.” 3:15 p.m. Nancy Zimpher is speaking. She calls for a national tuition policy. 3:10 p.m A group of downstate students have to catch their bus. They are chanting. “We’ll be back. We’ll be back” as [...]

What a week! Rallies, rallies everywhere. Over 400, including folk singer Pete Seeger, at the mid-Hudson rally and between 200-400 in Syracuse depending who you read. WOW! We’re putting up photo galleries as fast as we can. We see the support for public employees at rallies and in the polls. There are now four national polls [...]

NYSUT’s higher education leaders Tuesday cast the plight of New York’s public colleges and universities in terms usually reserved for natural disasters as they described the effects of years of systematic budget cuts on SUNY, CUNY and the community colleges.

So what a week! Busy doesn’t begin to describe the workload, plus we only finally had a killing frost, so I’ve still been dealing with the garden in Schenectady County. I haven’t gotten up a full flickr site from the Community College conference last weekend, but had to share this one of Juliette Romano of [...]