It is certainly true that higher education in the United States is prohibitively expensive, and that $1.2 trillion in student loans is a scarily high number. There are a lot of people struggling under the burden of high loans with high interest rates, people who are working jobs that they don’t love in order to repay those loans, families that are placed under high levels of stress by that loan bill that keeps coming month after month. 

Outstanding student debt across the United States has reached $1.2 trillion according to Forbes, and is increasing at a faster rate than mortgages and auto loans. Seventy-one percent of 2013 college graduates had student loan debt, with an average of $29,400 per borrower, and more than half of Californians have student debt with an average of $20,000, according to data compiled by the Institute for College Access and Success.

How you deal with that challenging situation is the key factor that employers try to control when accepting new interns. In an interview for an internship, your well-written resume and sterling GPA might not count as much as your personal skills. Employers know that internship jobs are not the glamorous job you were probably expecting to land. They also know that it takes character to not respond negatively when someone asks you to make 200 hundred copies of a booklet then realizes they gave you the wrong document only after you have completed the task.

In order for California’s new Common Core education standards to succeed, districts and the state must address the needs of these students. Common Core is a new set of standards in English language arts and mathematics designed to assess and instruct students, placing greater emphasis on critical thinking and analysis. Instruction is to be more interactive and project-based. Textbooks will have less of an emphasis on rote exercises and more on abstract reasoning. 

A group of the top law professors in the country called the Coalition of Concerned Colleagues met this past March to discuss and publish their concerns over the alarming devaluation of legal education. As the New York Times noted in a January 30, 2013 article, “Law school applications are headed for a 30-year low, reflecting increased concern over soaring tuition, crushing student debt and diminishing prospects of lucrative employment upon graduation.” Faced with this new reality in the legal field, the coalition met to discuss how the law degree is losing its value. 

In the current economic climate, and with the boom of the technology industry, college students may be drawn to fields like computer science, business, and avenues of study that lead into specific career paths. On the other hand, many students who graduate with degrees in the liberal arts and humanities struggle financially after graduation, even to the point of  requiring federal assistance. This struggle is part of an ongoing conversation of the “crisis” in the humanities and a concern for those who are trying to succeed with degrees in English, Art, History, and Philosophy, to name a few.

The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to review Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, a potentially landmark case that could end the use of race-based affirmative action in higher education. The court ruled nine years ago that although quota systems in admissions processes at colleges and universities were unconstitutional, race can be used as a positive factor, just not a decisive factor. With this new case, the court’s previous ruling that race can be considered as part of the admissions process, is in danger of being overturned.