Another side effect of the current recession? The dwindling number of charity benefit galas with exorbitant prices per seat/table. The New York Times ran an article about this the other day which gave a small insight as to the reasons why these benefit galas are going the way of the dinosaur (for now).
[Read more…]
Half Billion for Rutgers University Expansion
Sometimes I have to wonder about the decisions that college and universities make in the face of a crumbling economy. In February, Rutgers University announced that it would spend $500 million in the next three years to expand and upgrade its campuses. For those of you who are not from New Jersey, Rutgers essentially has three main campuses throughout New Jersey – one in Camden, one in Newark, and the main campus in the New Brunswick/Piscataway area. Some of the expansions that the university will be undertaking are as follows:
[Read more…]
Student Loans Start to Go Sour…
Well, we were all waiting for this to start and here it comes. In today’s Wall Street Journal there is a report regarding the student loan default rate increasing from 5.2% to 6.9% in the last year. As the Department of Education correctly states:
Robert Shireman, a senior adviser to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, says he expects the default rate, which reflects the early part of the recession, to continue to rise. “When people are facing a job loss, figuring out how to pay their student loan is not No. 1 on their list,” he said.
That’s right. For better or for worse, the last thing on many people’s minds at this time is their student loans. Like Mr. Shireman reports, if you’re losing your job and you’re at risk of going into default on your mortgage, then the last thing that you care about is paying back a student loan that is ten, fifteen, or twenty years old!
But you’ve got to make those payments, folks. Student loans are among the few pieces of debt that cannot be discharged in a bankruptcy filing. Further, the government can (and will) garnish your wages if you default on your student loans.
All of this gets back to a point that I’ve made a few times in the last few weeks on this blog – that one of the best ways to stimulate the economy would be to cancel some, if not all, student loan debt for existing borrowers. And this point is related to something else that I think many of us stunted by student loan debt understand that the rest of the people out there don’t get yet – namely that even with all of the stimulus plans and other money being pumped into the economy, those who have a great deal of student loan debt are not going to be able to contribute to the economic recovery.
Now, if there were only a few of us, then the effect wouldn’t be so bad. But the number of people with out of control student loans is growing and that is not a good thing for the economic recovery…
Quick Thoughts on President Obama’s Press Conference
One thing was blatantly apparent during the President’s speech tonight – the man is definitely not as good of a public speaker as the mass media and swooners made him out to be during the election. The man says “iii, Uhhh, ahhh, iiii, uuuuhhh, iiihh, etc.” more than anyone else that I’ve ever heard during a public speech! Sure, President Bush screwed up simple pronunciation and that was a huge embarrassment for the United States, but those crazies on the far right might be correct in their assessment that President Obama can’t speak clearly without a teleprompter to read!
Any for the brainwashed leftists out there, understand this – just because someone speaks with a definitive tone (which Obama clearly speaks in) doesn’t mean that they are a good speaker! It means that they are confident, yes. But interrupting the free verbal flow of one’s ideas with constant, “iii” and “aaaaahhh” blips is indicative of a speaker who is unsure of the intellectual weight of his words.
As someone who supports this President (and all Presidents, by the way), I really hope that Obama invests some time and resources into practicing how to speak in public. When he stutters and stammers his way through a press conference like he did tonight it does NOT show this country the strong leadership that it voted for during the election.
Oh, and enough of the “I inherited this” crap already. You’ve been President for two months – you’re no longer “inheriting” the initial problem, but you’re now dealing with pieces of the recession that have been created on your watch! And what, exactly, did you create? There is a mess with this AIG thing, right? Hey – didn’t YOUR Treasury Secretary create that mess before you were President? Does that mean that your administration is inheriting its own mistakes? Can you rightly blame that on Bush?
Here’s hoping for more from President Obama and his administration. Where is the change that America voted for?
Lobbying for Smartphones in the Classroom
You have to admire the lengths that certain industries will go through in order to make a buck during a recession – even if those lengths are laughable at best. Monday’s New York Times had a great article that talked about how the cell phone industry is funding research that proves smartphones help student perform better in the classroom.
Imagine that! The cellphone industry is publishing a report that suggests the education industry – one of the largest in the United States – should invest in smartphones for its students. Brilliant.
This reminds me of a situation that came up at my job last year. We were engaging in a contract with a lobbyist to advocate for more dollars to be spent on education facilities. One of the ideas that our boss at the time had was to generate an in-house report showing the need for more facility dollars and how our organization was well positioned to use those dollars most efficiently.
I almost jumped out of my skin.
Can you imagine being a legislator and having ABC Company come up to you and say, “We need more money for Project X. Here is a report showing the need for more money for Project X. Please note that ABC Company is the best organization to utilize extra dollars allocated to Project X.”
Talk about self-serving! Any legislator that is worth their skin would laugh off that report and – if they are really interested in whatever “Project X” happens to be – would commission an independent report. Luckily, through some arguments and some luck, my company partnered with a highly regarded university to create an independent report on the idea of more money for school facilities. It was a much better option than having us do a report in house that essentially says, “Give us money.”
Anyway, you can read the full text of the New York Times article, but trust me – it’s slightly ridiculous.
