Today I present two wildly divergent things from two vastly different regions of the world.
First, American higher education.
Years ago, I had an argument with my father. I had graduated high school and had been admitted to the University of North Texas. We were standing in the kitchen and it went something like this:
The school says I am required to live on campus until I have completed 30 credit hours.
But for what room and board cost, I could buy you a decent car and put gas in it and you could still live here.
But they say I have to live in the dorm.
But the dorm costs $X and that’s more than a Hyundai costs.
But they won’t let me enroll without living in the dorm.
You get the idea. I have no idea how long this went back and forth. The short version is I didn’t go to UNT. Even though I could have afforded tuition, I couldn’t afford tuition and room and board.* I went to another local school, which I could only afford due to some grants and a merit based scholarship. It was the sort of school that considers things beyond an SAT score.
College expenses have gone up since then. Tuition isn’t the only culprit, as the average college student spends $900 per year on textbooks. And Pell Grants have gone down. And there have been many changes to the student loan system since then, none of them particularly good for students. And changes in the bankruptcy code makes matters worse for those who got buried under student loans, following the Pied Piper who sang “education is the key to good paying jobs.” Oh, and that was before the FBI started poking through student financial aid records looking for terrorists.
And as if that isn’t bad enough, many American teens have unrealistic life goals. Sorry, Harvard only has so many slots, and American Idol only has one winner per season. And thankfully, the job of being Paris Hilton has been filled by Paris Hilton.
Meanwhile on the other side of the world, getting to college can be the least of kids’ concerns.
The Associated Press summarizes it nicely: “The good news is that child labor in Asia is decreasing. The bad news? It’s not declining fast enough.” And solving the problem is not as simple as “just say no to products built with child labor,” because “a crucial problem was that there were too many people who, despite wanting their children in school, either could not afford fees or related costs like transportation and uniforms or would find it hard to get by without the extra income.” In other words, putting kids out of factories merely moves them into worse occupations.
As bad as this sounds, it gets worse! About 1,200,000 children are trafficked each year. These kids are sold, kidnapped, or just plain tricked. Some get involved in illegal adoptions, some become slave laborers, some become part of crime or begging rings, some become prostitutes. It is a huge problem.
I stumbled across some figures on this yesterday and was horrified. In some areas of the world, a child’s chance of being trafficked by age 16 can be as high as 30-40%. That in turn led me to RiverKids. They are trying to prevent trafficking on a small scale by making sure the kids they sponsor stay in school, have the resources to continue their education, and have safe places to go after school. If you like what you see, check out their financial statements (posted regularly) and click the “make a donation” button.
In closing, we are getting fatter; the good news is household income is (slightly) up, but that’s only because “more family members were taking jobs to make ends meet, and some people made more money from investments and other sources beyond wages”; once again Japan has learned to take the best from the West; the DNC says The Bush Administration Has Made America Less Safe (how dare guys like Limbaugh say the Democratic Party wants America to loose the War on Terror!); and two items from the Christian Science Monitor, “Legal landmines emerge in ‘dirty bomber’ case; The Jose Padilla trial is a test: Can US avoid legal tangles of its ‘war on terror’ tactics?” and “Opposite ends of the labor market face opposite problems: Rising efficiency and technology are adding work for highly paid professionals while taking it away from low-skill employees”.
* My problem was hardly a new one. And I can see why colleges might want to make sure their (theoretically) youngest students are semi-supervised in a dorm environment. But there should be an automatic exemption for students who are either a) over 21, b) married, c) formerly married, d) have kids, e) have served in the military, or f) can prove they will be living with a close blood relative in the same or adjacent county. There’s nothing more pitiful than a college freshman living in the dorms with his wife and kids.