The Scrapbook’s expectations of student journalists are not super high (we were one once ourselves, and we had a lot to learn). So we’re always pleased when they rise to the occasion. One who did was Bryan Stascavage, a staff writer for the Wesleyan Argus, who published a column last month mildly…
Amy Kass was a great reader of George Eliot; she also had the sympathetic imagination so prized by the author of Middlemarch. Even in the difficult, yet beautiful, final weeks in hospice care, Amy found the generous strength to study the novel’s opening pages with her oldest granddaughter, raising…
Nearly everyone recognizes that student debt has risen to a level that will be difficult to sustain, given the nation’s slow-growing economy and the sagging incomes of too many college-educated Americans. Nearly 40 million Americans carry some form of student debt; more than 7 million are in…
President Obama did a rare thing today at the White House: he admitted to a shortcoming.
First Lady Michelle Obama spoke today to graduates of Oberlin College. She encouraged the graduating class to "rise above the noise and shape the revolutions of your time."
Kasia Klimasinska of Bloomberg reports that:
New York governor Andrew Cuomo, not content with President Obama’s proposal to make junior colleges free, recently introduced his own plan for New York to essentially waive the first two years of student debt payments for college graduates living in the state.
Know a college student interested in political philosophy, economic policy, or the study of war? Encourage them to apply to the Hertog Foundation's summer fellowships where they can learn from an outstanding faculty, including some names that will be familiar to WEEKLY STANDARD readers -- Bill…
With the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Beijing safely over and regional leaders departed, China’s new strongman Xi Jinping decided to lower the boom on Hong Kong. Police there began clearing the barricades last week from the city’s main thoroughfare with the students in…
Hong Kong
Hillary Clinton will be getting $225,000 to speak at a university fundraiser later this year. Students at the same school, the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, have recently been outraged that the institution is raising tuition by a staggering 17 percent.
More signs that the dynamism that once characterized the American economy is waning:
This is not a good time to be young in America, and soon it will be less so. The generation that elected President Obama will see the price of that college education which was supposed to open so many doors go up. As Janet Lorin of Bloomberg reports:
As Paul M. Barrett at Businessweek writes:
According to the University of Maryland student newspaper The Diamondback, the university’s student health insurance plan is considering requiring coverage of sex change operations.
It was only 10:30 a.m., and already, we were too cold to move, let alone get out of our SUV to tailgate. We’d been parked outside Notre Dame’s football stadium in South Bend, Indiana, in the alumni lot for more than two and half hours, ahead of the university’s last home game of the year against…
There is much to lament about the rise of social media and the damage it has done to ordinary human activities and interactions. And now we learn that it is leeching away the loyalty of American college students for their football teams. Attendance in the student section is down in, of all…
On Tuesday night, a small bipartisan group of senators met at the White House to discuss plans to fix the interest rates on student loans. The exact details of the plan are still being drafted, but a formal release is expected soon.
Hofstra University Law School has released a press release celebrating a settlement its "Occupy Wall Street Clinic" reached with the City of New York over "a protester who sustained injuries while being arrested at an Occupy Wall Street demonstration."
Reprising the "Don't Double My Rate" theme used during the 2012 presidential campaign, the White House is pushing a plan by President Obama this week to prevent interest rates on some student loans from doubling effective July 1. However, the savings for most borrowers is rather less significant…
Student loan debt runs to about $30,000 per graduate of the class of 2013, as Phil Izzo writes in the Wall Street Journal. And the total amount of student loans outstanding runs to almost a trillion dollars: more than either credit card balances or automobile loans. More than any form of consumer…
Household debt jumped once again to $2.7 trillion, according to the New York Fed. "[T]he Federal Reserve Bank of New York announced that in the third quarter, non-real estate household debt jumped 2.3 percent to $2.7 trillion," reports the fed. "The increase was due to a boost in student loans ($42…
A reader sends along this picture of a 9/11 memorial set up by the Young Conservatives of Texas at the University of Texas:
Yesterday, three American students were arrested in Cairo for participating in riots that have to date killed 38. A spokesman at the justice ministry claims that the three were throwing Molotov cocktails from the top of an American University in Cairo building near Tahrir Square. The three are…