Must Reads: 03/17/10

Dan Lips of the Heritage Foundation argues that public college be required to post much of their course content online for the public to access, describing technology as an integral part in bursting the tuition bubble.

Tim Ranzetta of Student Lending Analytics suggests:

make public the accreditation reports with job placement and wage data. Instead of schools just getting students to sign disclosures that there are "no guarantees," how about getting them to sign a disclosure that they were made aware of placement rates and wage rates (and let's throw in completion rates, average debt and default rates too). Heck, if I had a school with data to brag about, wouldn't I voluntarily provide it to applicants anyway? Wouldn't this disclosure be a good way to avoid the he said/she said class action lawsuits which seem to be popping up with increasing frequency.

People Capital extends its first peer-to-peer loans that:

matches students looking for loans directly with potential lenders, including individual lenders, and takes financial institution brokers out of the loan-finding equation.

Here’s how it works: Students sign up on the site and put in their loan requests. Lenders, meanwhile, sign up on the site and put up at least $1,000 for loans in a People Capital account. They then can bid on the various loan requests from students and assess various students’ risk and ability to repay with the help of People Capital’s proprietary “Human Capital” score, which combines variables like SAT scores and grade point averages to determine a student’s future income potential and ability to repay.