Sarah Randazzo
Appearances
WSJ What’s News
How a Secret Mortgage Blacklist Is Making It Hard for Condo Owners to Sell
There's a few factors. One is just the squeeze that middle-income families, those making above six figures, face. They don't qualify for the typical financial aid that those who have very low salaries can pretty much go to many colleges for free, but they don't make enough to comfortably be able to pay $50,000, $60,000, $70,000, $80,000 a year to send their children to a private school.
WSJ What’s News
How a Secret Mortgage Blacklist Is Making It Hard for Condo Owners to Sell
And so a lot of schools like Harvard have been
WSJ What’s News
How a Secret Mortgage Blacklist Is Making It Hard for Condo Owners to Sell
increasing the aid for this group of families over time and then secondly we are in this climate right now of political strife around a lot of elite universities and so I don't know if the timing is just a coincidence but there is public pressure on Harvard and others around some of the Israel Hamas war protests and so this is a bit of good publicity for them in that climate as well.
WSJ What’s News
Grocers Try to Hold Prices Steady as Tariffs Threaten Produce
Universities are really facing headwinds on a few different fronts here. And so one of them is around a lot of the Trump administration's directives around DEI and getting rid of DEI programs. Schools are also reacting to changes in federal funding to research the National Institutes for Health.
WSJ What’s News
Grocers Try to Hold Prices Steady as Tariffs Threaten Produce
There's a big formula change potentially coming that would cost universities potentially hundreds of millions of dollars. And then there's also a task force project into antisemitism at the federal level that schools are responding to. And so there's really a lot of different fronts at this point that they're responding to. So what are universities doing?
WSJ What’s News
Grocers Try to Hold Prices Steady as Tariffs Threaten Produce
A lot of schools are preemptively doing hiring freezes, for instance. We've seen dozens of universities across the country from elite ones on down. saying that they're having temporary hiring freezes because they need to figure out whether that money for research grants is coming or not.
WSJ What’s News
Grocers Try to Hold Prices Steady as Tariffs Threaten Produce
And as part of that, PhD students are also having some offers withdrawn because they just don't know if they can support those PhD students for the next five years. So those ones are a little in the preemptive bucket around the DEI. You know, there was a letter that the education department put out that didn't have the force of law, but gave a kind of deadline of the end of February deadline.
WSJ What’s News
Grocers Try to Hold Prices Steady as Tariffs Threaten Produce
to get rid of a lot of dei related things and so some schools were worried about that and didn't want to get in the crosshairs so again it didn't totally have legal bearing but it was kind of a big scary letter that went out from the education department and then obviously there are some schools facing immediate backlash like columbia
WSJ What’s News
Grocers Try to Hold Prices Steady as Tariffs Threaten Produce
It permeates across campuses. The research grants themselves are mostly focused on the sciences, but it's interesting because schools are saying that even if there's cuts... To the science research grants, that's going to have trickle effects because they'll have to maybe move money from elsewhere to accommodate.
WSJ What’s News
Grocers Try to Hold Prices Steady as Tariffs Threaten Produce
And culture-wise, if you do things like some of the schools we found that canceled a Black student alumni event or are no longer going to have graduation ceremonies for different ethnic or affinity groups, it's going to be smaller changes that impact the overall culture of a place and then also some larger changes when it comes to, say, employment or opportunities for graduate programs that are more tangible.