Education Secretary Linda McMahon to Harvard: Obey the law and you can be eligible for funding
Education Secretary Linda McMahon joined CNBC's Sara Eisen from the Milken Institute's Global Conference 2025 to discuss McMahon's recent letter to Harvard, why Harvard's fighting so hard, and if there's a governance problem at Harvard.
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CNBC
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Europe to follow global markets higher as China-U.S. trade talks continue in London
The City of London is a blend of old and new, with St Paul's Cathedral close to skyscrapers as well as Roman ruins. Shomos Uddin | Moment | Getty Images Good morning from London, welcome to CNBC's live blog covering all the action in European financial markets as well as the latest regional and global business news, data and earnings. Futures data from IG suggests London's FTSE will open 11 points higher at 8,838, Germany's DAX up 62 points at 24,234, France's CAC 40 up 23 points at 7,807 and Italy's FTSE MIB 83 points higher at 40,545. Global markets have been buoyed by trade talks that are taking place between U.S. and Chinese officials in London this week, with hopes rising that both sides can avert large-scale punitive tariffs and a trade war. Global markets will be keeping an eye on the talks, which are set to continue Tuesday. The latest U.K. unemployment figures are also due, but there are no other significant earnings or data reports Tuesday. — Holly Ellyatt Global markets climbed overnight amid hopes that the U.S. and China will find a way to resolve their trade dispute, with talks between trade officials set to continue in London on Tuesday. Asia-Pacific markets and U.S. stock futures rose Monday night as investors waited for more insights into trade discussions between the U.S. and China. Traders are looking for signs of a deal that doesn't involve the world's two largest economies slapping extravagant tariffs on each other. A car with U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent leaves a residence where trade talks between Chinese and U.S. delegations take place in Geneva, Switzerland, May 10, 2025. REUTERS/Denis Balibouse Denis Balibouse | Reuters President Donald Trump's top trade officials met their Chinese counterparts in London on Monday, with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Trade Representative Jamieson Greer negotiating on behalf of the U.S. Trump has authorized Bessent's team to potentially remove U.S. restrictions on the sales of chipmaking software, jet engine parts and ethane, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing sources familiar with the matter. Trump said Monday that the talks were going well and he was "only getting good reports," according to Reuters. — Holly Ellyatt
Yahoo
4 hours ago
- Yahoo
Colleges losing the blame game as D.C. aims to solve the student loan crisis
If the student loan crisis is our dreadful result, the rising cost of college is at least the chief cause. And it's easy to point the finger at those who set sticker prices. That's the position of Secretary of Education Linda McMahon. 'Colleges and universities call themselves nonprofits, but for years they have profited massively off the federal subsidy of loans, hiking tuition and piling up multibillion-dollar endowments while students graduate six figures in the red,' McMahon wrote in The Wall Street Journal in April. 'A widely cited 2015 study found that for every dollar of increased federal caps on subsidized loans, colleges raised tuition by 60 cents.' Yes, higher education institutions have played a role in a crisis that can't seem to get worse, yet does: We could see about a quarter of federal student loan borrowers — 10 to 11 million or more — in default this summer. Being in default means facing severe consequences like wage garnishment, federal benefit seizures, debt collections and credit harm. Besides a federal government that has, over the years, given borrowers whiplash with the amount of repayment programs that have appeared and disappeared, the schools themselves bear responsibility. The question is to what degree, and what comes next. The role of colleges in America's student loan debt If you think of the Education Department's federal student aid system as a spigot, it has been dispensing billions of dollars in aid to students via their schools over the last six decades, since at least the Higher Education Act of 1965. As federal loan limits have increased, the spigot has gradually turned into a firehose. The more money that's flowed from it, the more families can access, the more schools can raise their price tags. More, more, more and around and around we go. Skip ahead to today. It's difficult to square an apparent contradiction: One minute, you hear institutions of higher education express (cue a highfalutin voice) their noble mission of educating society writ large. The next minute, you realize some schools (enter the always-be-closing Glengarry Glen Ross guys) charge as much as they can get away with to families pursuing that education. But experts of varying ideologies worry that that's exactly what's happening. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) Student Loan Ombudsman Julia Barnard told Bankrate in March that, before she was fired by the Trump Administration, 'literally 98 percent of colleges in the country were using data to do differential pricing for students.' Barnard has referred to this continuing trend as the 'financialization' of colleges. School-hired consulting firms also call it 'financial aid optimization,' as The New York Times reported in May. The firms' work boils down to algorithms that balance merit-based tuition discounts with a family's ability to pay — and use vast amounts of data to do it. 'Some of the things that we were learning about related to a kind of surveillance of [college] applicants — like what websites they were visiting and for how long,' Barnard says. 'We saw examples where was giving information about whether a person was a victim of domestic violence or even their documentation status, the education level of their parents, disciplinary records, religious activities. They had that information and were sharing it with colleges who were then using it to make admissions and pricing decisions.' So, the contention goes, it's the colleges and universities themselves that have figured out ways to game the system for the benefit of their bottom line. Learn more: Average cost of college for 2024-2025 Project 2025 — Republicans' widely-shared manifesto leading up to the 2024 election cycle — spends a chapter on the Department of Education and uses the words 'skin in the game' to describe the need for college accountability. McMahon also spent a paragraph of her op-ed in The Wall Street Journal on this very topic. 'Many of the degree-granting programs that qualify for student loans are worthless on the job market, but colleges continue to accept students to these programs and encourage them to borrow to pay for them,' McMahon wrote. 'Accountability is a two-way street. As we push to hold student borrowers to account, we will also push colleges to be responsible and transparent.' The good news: Like bipartisan understanding of consumer debt, holding schools accountable is something we can all agree on. Dr. Lindsey M. Burke, the author of the education chapter of Project 2025, among other conservative voices, is on board: In her keynote at the 16th Annual Education Finance & Loan Symposium in Alexandria, Va. in May, Burke said, 'A lot of the reforms [under consideration] are — I would argue, I think a lot of people would agree — fairly common sense reforms. When it comes to skin in the game; when it comes to universities being allowed to cap lending on their own.' Meanwhile, James Kvaal, the Biden Administration's top higher education official, used the words 'cutting off programs that leave most of their students unable to repay their loans' in a March interview with Bankrate. And Colleen Campbell, a former Federal Student Aid executive, wrote on her 'On Detail' Substack, 'I will be the first to tell you that accountability for colleges is SORELY [sic] needed.' Of course, the devil — and potential disagreement — lurks in the details. The Student Success and Taxpayer Savings Plan within Congress's progressing budget reconciliation bill puts an emphasis on risk-sharing. In certain cases, it would force colleges to reimburse the Education Department for their former students' unpaid balances. The bill features a carrot-and-the-stick approach, however. In addition to penalizing schools for their borrowers' unpaid loans, it would also award PROMISE grants to schools that improve access, affordability and student success. While it awaits passage of Congress's student loan repayment-reshaping budget reconciliation bill, the Trump Administration is making the most of what it has at its disposal. In a May letter, it reminded schools of the 'core default rates' policy and pushed them to remind their former students to resume federal loan repayment. 'Part of the problem here is that we don't do accountability at all in our higher education system,' Campbell says. Core default rates is the Education Department's lone mechanism at present, Campbell adds, and it's '90s-era' or in desperate need of a makeover. In fact, many have significantly increased their spending on lobbying Congress, according to an Inside Higher Ed analysis. And as Campbell told Bankrate in April for a story about the potential demise of Direct PLUS Loans, if schools are banging on the doors of their representative in the House or the Senate, 'This is really when the rubber hits the road in higher ed.' I spoke with multiple financial aid representatives large and small at the May symposium (who weren't authorized to speak on behalf of their schools). A common refrain: Charging more to students who can afford it helps the schools charge less to those who can't. But schools' calls for self-policing are likely to be ignored, given that history isn't on their side. At this point, it may be safer to judge colleges and universities on their actions rather than their words. Since we now know that merit-based aid can be manipulated for a given school's bottom-dollar benefit, a renewed emphasis on need-based funding would seem to be a big step in the right direction. Already, more than a 100 colleges and universities nationwide offer tuition-free attendance — a discounted net price — to low- and middle-income families, according to Appily's tracking. They do so by replacing student loans in financial aid packages with institutional, state and federal grants and scholarships. (Just be mindful that tuition is one piece of your cost of attendance, alongside secondary but significant expenses like room and board). 'This is one place I can speak for my employer in that it's really clear for us because we have specific need-based aid funding, and that's how you can do it morally,' said Charles Pruett, Georgetown University Law Center's assistant dean for financial aid, during a symposium panel. 'If you're looking at a situation where it's just merit, that is who asks [for aid] the best, right?' First of all, get good at asking. It's a negotiation, and the financial aid award letter you receive is merely an opening salvo. Your school is sharing their desired numbers. Go ahead and proffer yours (perhaps via an appeal letter). A statistic to remember The average discount for first-year students at private, nonprofit colleges and universities for the 2023-2024 academic year was 56 percent, according to the National Association of of College and University Business Officers. Yes, there are ways to attend college for free (or at least try), but for many families, you might have to pay out of pocket or borrow for college. If you have a long runway, consider different college fund investment options. If college attendance is right around the corner, however, it can be helpful to lean on your prospective school's financial aid office. Just don't trust that whatever they say goes. As the CFPB's Barnard says: 'I hope that the public, student loan borrowers and families applying for college will look at what's going on and perhaps reach out about their discomfort if they feel uncomfortable with [speaking] directly to their college.' Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
CNBC
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CNBC Daily Open: If U.S.-China talks go well, analysts think the S&P 500 could hit new high
Trade negotiators from the U.S. and China have met in London, and talks are expected to continue Tuesday, a source familiar with the situation told CNBC's Megan Casella. At the top of the agenda for America appears to be a relaxation of China's rare earths export curbs, according to a CNBC interview with U.S. National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett. If China's actions late last week — when it seemingly gave Western automakers concessions regarding those minerals — are any indication, Beijing could be willing to accede to the U.S. request. But the world's second-biggest economy would demand reciprocity. On June 2, Beijing bristled at Washington's tighter grip on exports of chip design software to China. But it appears that Washington is also in a conciliatory mood. "Our expectation is that … immediately after the handshake, any export controls from the U.S. will be eased," Hassett said on CNBC's "Squawk Box." If the U.S.-China talks go well, there's a chance the S&P 500, only around 2% off its February high as of Tuesday morning Singapore time, could reach a new peak, noted the JPMorgan trading desk. That'd be something to cheer, of course. But it's slightly upsetting to realize that the S&P could have continued scaling heights from February, or at least broken its closing high much earlier in the year, if not for truculent trade policy from the White House — which, as is evident from the meeting between U.S. and China, governments now are still trying to undo. U.S.-China talks set to go into Day 2U.S. President Donald Trump's top trade officials met Chinese counterparts in London on Monday for talks aimed at resolving their trade dispute — particularly with regard to mineral exports. Discussions are set to continue Tuesday. Late last week, in an apparent olive branch, China seemed to offer U.S. and European auto giants something of a reprieve regarding its exports of rare earth elements. Stocks in the U.S. rose marginallyU.S. stocks edged up Monday. The S&P 500 added 0.09%, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was mostly flat, and the Nasdaq Composite rose 0.31%. Europe's Stoxx 600 index dipped 0.07%. Shares of chip designer Alphawave jumped 20% on a takeover by U.S. semiconductor giant Qualcomm, while Spectris soared 60% after confirming it is in talks over a takeover deal with private equity group Advent International. A new 'Liquid Glass' look for Apple's iOSApple held its annual Worldwide Developers Conference keynote on Monday. At the event, the company announced a redesign to its iOS system called "Liquid Glass," a virtual glass look that was inspired by the Vision Pro; real-time translation to calls, texts and FaceTime; new gaming, video and enterprise features for its augmented reality device Vision Pro; a new version of its Mac operating system, named Tahoe. UK in a 'Goldilocks' moment: Nvidia CEO "The U.K. is in a Goldilocks circumstance," Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said Monday on a panel with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Investment Minister Poppy Gustafsson. "You can't do machine learning without a machine — and so the ability to build these AI supercomputers here in the U.K. will naturally attract more startups," Huang said, though he added that the country lacks homegrown AI infrastructure. [PRO] New record for S&P soon?The S&P 500 ticked higher on Monday and continues to chip away at the gap to a new record high. The broad-based index is just 2% below its record close set in February. Several events in the days ahead could prove to be the catalyst that vaults it over the top, according to the JPMorgan trading desk. 'Bitcoin Family' hides crypto codes etched onto metal cards on four continents after recent kidnappings Didi Taihuttu, patriarch of the so-called Bitcoin Family, said he overhauled the family's entire security setup after a wave of high-profile kidnappings targeting cryptocurrency executives. The Taihuttus — who sold everything they owned in 2017, from their house to their shoes, to go all in on bitcoin when it was trading around $900 — have long lived on the outer edge of crypto ideology. They travel full-time with their three daughters and remain entirely unbanked. Over the past eight months, he said, the family ditched hardware wallets in favor of a hybrid system: Part analog, part digital, with seed phrases encrypted, split and stored either through blockchain-based encryption services or hidden across four continents.
