President Wins Re-election
see pg 11
Forward with four more years of Obama www.dailyhelmsman.com
Independent Student Newspaper of the University of Memphis
Vol. 80 No. 041
Wednesday 11.07.12
Behind the Masks What President Obama supports when it comes to higher education and how Romney would have done it differently By Christopher Whitten
PRESORTED STANDARD U.S. POSTAGE PAID MEMPHIS, TN PERMIT NO. 2O7
cwhitten@dailyhelmsman.com The votes are in. Incumbent Barack Obama will serve as the 44th president of the United States for four more years. The debate season, however, brought out several questions about where Obama and opponent Mitt Romney stand on education.
Obama Obama laid out his future plans and policies on education with s o m e detail via whitehouse.gov. Un d e r O b a m a’s administration, emphasis is placed on helping the middle class afford college and keeping the costs of education down as well as strengthening community colleges and improving transparency and accountability. Following a fiscal cliff faceoff situation, Obama called on Congress during his State of the Union speech in January “to keep interest rates low for the 7.4 million borrowers who take out subsidized Federal student loans for this school year,” according
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to whitehouse.gov. “We cannot just cut our way to prosperity,” he said in April. “Making it harder for our young people to afford higher education and earn their degrees is nothing more than cutting our own future off at the knees. Congress needs to keep interest rates on student loans from doubling, and they need to do it now.” Rates on Federal subsidized
remain at 3.4 percent instead of doubling this past summer. These actions saved Tennessee students an average of $973, based on Department of Education statistics. Student loan debt, however, topped $1 trillion earlier this year. Obama has called on Congress to advance reforms that will promote shared responsibility to
Stafford loans were set to go up July 1. More than 7 million students would have averaged $1,000 each in additional debt. But Congress took action and passed a bill to stop that from happening. With Obama’s leadership, rates on new subsidized Stafford loans
address the challenge of keeping the costs of higher education down. “Of course, it’s not enough for us to increase student aid … States also need to do their part, by making higher education a higher priority
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in their budgets,” Obama said. “And colleges and universities have to do their part by working to keep costs down.” Obama has proposed reforms to federal campus-based air programs to shift aid away from colleges that fail to keep net tuition down, and toward those that do their fair share to keep tuition affordable, provide good value and serve needy students well. Such change in federal aid to campuses will leverage $10 billion annually to keep tuition down. In an interview this su mme r, Universit y of Memphis President S h i r l e y Raines said the University of Memphis is nowhere near the point of losing federal aid despite the fact that tuition increased 18 percent this year from two years ago.
Romney Under a Romney administration, things could have been different. A flood of federal dollars has been a frequent talking point for the former
see MASKS on page 14
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