In the past decade student debt has surged as tuition and enrollment climbed. At the same time, college graduates’ earnings have declined. The average debt load of all new graduates rose 24%, adjusted for inflation, from 2000 through 2010, to $16,932, says the Progressive Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank in Washington. Over the same period, the average earnings of full-time workers ages 25 to 34 with no more than a bachelor’s degree fell by 15% to $53,539.

Terri Reynolds-Rogers, a 57-year-old health-program manager from Palmer, Alaska, declared bankruptcy in 2007, but still has $152,000 in student debt. She said she dropped out of medical school in 1999 to care for her two children after her husband died of brain cancer.

Read it all.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Watch it all.

As the president of N.Y.U., Dr. Sexton could certainly teach any course he wanted. And as the former dean of its law school and clerk to a chief justice of the United States, he might have been expected to hold forth on jurisprudence. However, as a child of Brooklyn, as a scholar whose academic robe bears the number 42 in homage to Jackie Robinson, and as a practicing Catholic with a doctoral degree in religion, Dr. Sexton has for more than a dozen years chosen baseball and God as his professorial focus.

“The real idea of the course,” he put it in an interview, “is to develop heightened sensitivity and a noticing capacity. So baseball’s not ”˜the’ road to God. For most of us, it isn’t ”˜a’ road to God. But it’s a way to notice, to cause us to live more slowly and to watch more keenly and thereby to discover the specialness of our life and our being, and, for some of us, something more than our being.”

Read it all.

Prelate of the Methodist Church, Dr. Sunday Ola Makinde, has described as ”˜careless and unguarded statement’ the comment made by American government that years of neglect and poverty led to the insurgence of Boko Haram sect in Nigeria.

Speaking at the weekend during the launch of a book titled “Women as Teachers and Character Moulders” written by Mrs. Ezinne Elizabeth Abimbola Makinde at Hoare’s Memorial Methodist Cathedral, Yaba, Lagos, the prelate declared the premises on which such a statement was based as poor research that lacks every credibility.

Read it all.

Last weekend, the ballyhooed documentary Bully opened in Dallas. A few weeks earlier, a less elaborate film on the same topic premiered in every third-period classroom at Richardson High School.

The school video tells a secret kept for 20 years ”” about a desperately unhappy teen and one night with a pistol. It’s a secret that has inspired some students to reach outside themselves in ways they might have never considered.

While experts say any one event is just a drop in the bucket in the effort to mold a school’s culture, there’s some evidence that this kind of video may be a larger drop.

Read it all.

State Rep. Bill Dunn, R-Knoxville, and other lawmakers sent the Board of Trust a letter with legislation attached, threatening to block the policy because Vanderbilt receives state funds.

Wednesday morning, Vanderbilt students from 11 Christian organizations began handing out 4,000 MP4 players loaded with a seven-minute video outlining their objections. The video, also on YouTube, features alumnus Tom Singleton, a retired health-care executive, who said later he won’t so much as renew his football season tickets until the school backs off.

The university’s provost said Vanderbilt stands by the policy.

Read it all.

Cornwall Council confirmed this week that teaching about Paganism has been a religious-education option in the Duchy’s schools since a revision of the locally agreed RE syllabus last year. After claims of “witchcraft lessons” made in a Sunday newspaper last weekend, a spokeswoman said that Paganism was just one option avail­able to schools that were within sight of standing stones, or where some pupils had Pagan parents.

But the RE adviser for Cornwall, David Hampshire, said that the intention was wider. The option was developed after the Agreed Syllabus Conference decided to produce a specifically local element, “Cur­riculum Kernewek” (Cornish cur­ricu­lum), for the county, which has more Neolithic sites than anywhere else in Britain. “This includes in­formation about Cornwall’s many local saints and historic Christian associations, as well as Paganism,” Mr Hampshire said.

Read it all.

Ah, ah, ah–no looking or googling. Guess first please, then read it all.

“The University should be thinking about what its heart is,” [Sam] Wells said. “If you don’t have a heart, you simply commit yourself to a commodity culture where you are only here to get an investment, a degree…. It’s an impoverished notion of what a university can truly be.” For the Chapel to effectively operate as a church, Wells said that it is important to interact with the people Jesus spent most of his life with””the poor. He tried to accomplish this through outreach to Durham’s more impoverished areas.

“Success is seeing people’s lives change and not just saying so but actually seeing the differences,” he said. “Poverty is a mask we sometimes put on people to [conceal] their real wealth… [but it is important for] a rich person to see how poor they are or for a person coming out of prison to see how rich he is…. That’s what the kingdom of God is about, those kinds of transformations.”

Read it all.

What does it mean to be a Catholic university? This well-worn question emerges even more than usual these days in the face of budget cuts and increasing competition in higher education, as these universities have to identify what unique feature they offer prospective students that justifies their higher tuition costs. Alasdair MacIntyre, perhaps the most influential living philosopher, believes the answer to this question involves a significant place for the Catholic philosophical tradition.

MacIntyre begins his excellent book by raising a paradox for the Catholic Christian: her faith requires her to give unqualified trust to God but she simultaneously poses systematic questions about the God she claims to trust. These questions take the form of traditional philosophical problems for theists, such as the problem of evil, the relationship of body and soul, and how to speak meaningfully of a transcendent being. Thus MacIntyre identifies an apparent tension between faith and reason, a tension that the Catholic philosophical tradition wishes to dissolve.

Read it all.

For all who favour high standards, and who also believe that moderate religious affiliation benefits children and those involved in their education, the Secretary of State’s support for the expansion of publicly funded Anglican schools can only seem a cause of celebration.

But I’m not so sure. There’s a risk that educational standards, and even Anglicanism itself, might be endangered by the expansion of church schools. My fear is that Anglican schools may be forced, for the sake of becoming more inclusive, to dilute their distinctively religious character, and even to turn away applicants from genuine Anglican backgrounds, to accommodate those who are not.

Read it all.

Oxford University’s Bodleian Library is working with the Vatican’s library to open up their treasures to millions of readers across the world.

It will see two of the world’s oldest libraries putting their repositories of ancient texts on line.

The Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, in the headquarters of the Catholic Church, is one of the few libraries in the world with historical collections to rival those held by the Bodleian.

Read it all and you may also find a piece of interest here on Vatican Radio.

Arkansas fired football Coach Bobby Petrino on Tuesday, saying he engaged in reckless behavior that included hiring his mistress and then intentionally misleading his bosses about their relationship and her presence at the motorcycle accident that ultimately cost him his job.

“He made the decision to mislead the public, [and it] adversely affected the university and the football program,” Athletic Director Jeff Long said at an evening news conference, choking up at one point as he discussed telling players the news. There was a “pattern of misleading and manipulative behavior to deceive me.”

Read it all.

Hearkening back to Cold War anxieties, growing signs of spying on U.S. universities are alarming national security officials. As schools become more global in their locations and student populations, their culture of openness and international collaboration makes them increasingly vulnerable to theft of research conducted for the government and industry.

“We have intelligence and cases indicating that U.S. universities are indeed a target of foreign intelligence services,” Frank Figliuzzi, Federal Bureau of Investigation assistant director for counterintelligence, said in a February interview in the bureau’s Washington headquarters.

Read it all.

In 1956, [William] Shockley won the Nobel Prize for co-inventing the transistor. His next dream was to make transistors out of silicon; he decided to set up his lab in Mountain View ”” near Palo Alto ”” largely for personal reasons.

“He’d grown up in Palo Alto,” Berlin says. Most importantly, she says, “his mother was still living in Palo Alto.”

Of course, it helped that nearby Stanford University was also doing federally funded electronics research. Shockley was a magnet who drew more brilliant scientists to the valley. Among them was Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel and the man who would come up with Moore’s Law ”” the observation that the number of transistors on a chip doubles about every two years.

Read or listen to it all.

As the total amount of student debt topples over $1 trillion, many have begun to question just how expensive a college degree is. The Student Loan Forgiveness Act was proposed in Congress at the beginning of March, but in spite of the large number of students facing debt, the bill has received much opposition.

When a bill to forgive student debt was proposed, some complained that students who had less money should have attended a public University, assuming that the large debts were the result of a private education. That is not necessarily the case, however. USA Today revealed that at the end of 2011, the cost of public universities and colleges had increased by more than 8 percent.

In 2004, tuition at public schools increased a shocking 11 percent. One couple commented on Forbes that the cost of their son’s tuition nearly doubled during his 4-year tenure….

Read it all.

Books on the decline of America are coming thick and fast. The latest, Time to Start Thinking: America and the Spectre of Descent, by The Financial Times’s chief US commentator Edward Luce, is published this week….In summary, he concludes that global economic dominance, having quit Europe around the end of last century, moved west to the United States and now, after another hundred years, is relocating to Asia. Nothing can be done about this, he says. It is just the way it is. China and India (and he throws in Indonesia for good measure) are simply too big and too industrious not to fight it out for the soon-to-be vacated Number One slot.
But ”“ and this is where it gets interesting ”“ Luce is frustrated by the way in which the US, outside of rhetoric, is capitulating to the inevitable, giving up almost without a fight. Were its leaders to defy history, he suggests, they would quickly regain the world’s respect and write a new and valuable interpretation of the American dream.

Read it all.

The burden of paying for college is wreaking havoc on the finances of an unexpected demographic: people 60 and over.

New research from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York shows that Americans in that age bracket still owe about $36 billion in student loans, providing a rare window into the dynamics of student debt. More than 10 percent of those loans are delinquent. As a result, consumer advocates say, it is not uncommon for Social Security checks to be garnished or for debt collectors to harass borrowers in their 80s over student loans that are decades old.

Read it all.

So how do Melbourne, London and Montreal maintain economically affordable, academically excellent Jewish schools? Simple: The government picks up part of the tab, often by covering the cost of the school’s secular subjects. If American Jews want our Jewish schools to flourish, we must push our government to do the same.
Doing so would constitute a radical shift. Outside the Orthodox community, American Jewish organizations have for decades opposed government funding for religious schools. The most common objection is that by intertwining church and state, such funding threatens religious liberty, a deep concern for a religious group that comprises roughly 2% of the U.S. population.

But that fear is overblown. Government aid to Jewish schools in Australia, Britain and Canada doesn’t mean that Jews in those countries enjoy less religious liberty than their American counterparts. Even in America, state and local governments already pay for the cost of special education in religious schools.

Read it all.

Shortly after she enrolled her 3-year-old son in a prestigious, $21,000-a-year Upper East Side preschool, Rachael Combe, an editor at Elle, received an invitation from the head of the school to come by for a visit. She assumed the meeting was to discuss how her son was adapting to the school’s curriculum.

Instead, the head of school explained that he was laying the groundwork for a new capital campaign, and that he had already received commitments from various families ”” some up to $1 million. Would Ms. Combe and her husband consider a gift of “even $25,000 to $50,000?”

Relentless fund-raising, be it for the annual fund, the spring benefit or the latest capital campaign, is as much a feature of private schools as small classes and diverse offerings. But with schools hitting the upper limits of what they can charge for tuition, consultants, parents and school heads say the race for donations has become notably more intense and aggressive.

Read it all.

You’ve written often about the importance of storytelling, even to the point of suggesting that first-year divinity students should read a diet entirely of fiction — Flannery O’Connor, the Russian novelists, Faulkner. Wonderful idea. How are people transformed by fiction?

I think that their imaginations are transformed. When you’re reading a novel, you’re following a plot and character development. The best writers leave a lot to your imagination. The task of a writer is to get participation from the reader, and you can’t do that by telling them everything. The Bible is that kind of literature. There’s very little explanation””almost no explanation, no definitions. And the writers of Scripture were also, as they were telling these stories, aware of all the other voices that were in the air””Moses, Isaiah, Daniel, Jesus, Paul.

Our school curriculum teaches you how to study. You learn facts. But they don’t do much to help you read in an imaginative way to help you enter the story. That’s what novelists do. So I think a basic immersion in fiction is almost a prerequisite to reading the Bible, to preaching sermons, to teaching classes. Poetry does the same thing, but it takes a different route to do it.

Read it all.

This spring semester, California’s Biola University, among the nation’s largest evangelical institutions, opens the doors of its ambitious new Center for Christian Thought. Resembling institutions such as Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, Biola’s center seeks to bring a mix of senior and postdoctoral fellows to campus to collaborate with internal fellows and faculty.

The center is unusual in operating from a distinctly Christian vantage point. The mission statement is forthright: “The Center offers scholars from a variety of Christian perspectives a unique opportunity to work collaboratively on a selected theme…. Ultimately, the collaborative work will result in scholarly and popular-level materials, providing the broader culture with thoughtful Christian perspectives on current events, ethical concerns, and social trends.”

If the idea of Christian perspectives raises your eyebrows, it might be time to brush up on Augustine, Aquinas, Dante, Pascal, Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, Karl Barth, Martin Luther King, Edith Stein, Reinhold Niebuhr, and many others….

Read it all.

The insurgent violence stalking northern Nigeria has struck a long list of official targets, killing police and army officers, elected officials, high-ranking civil servants, United Nations workers and other perceived supporters of the Nigerian government.

Now it has an ominous new front: a war against schools.

Public and private schools here have been doused with gasoline at night and set on fire. Crude homemade bombs ”” soda bottles filled with gasoline ”” have been hurled at the bare-bones concrete classrooms Nigeria offers its children.

Read it all.

Speaking at ASCL’s annual conference in Birmingham, general secretary Brian Lightman said: ”Children are faced with a lot of different role models these days, not all of which are the most positive. They see examples on TV, in celebrity culture, of people not speaking the right way and not interacting in a way we would expect people to.

”In many ways schools are the last bastions of those traditional values.

”We do assert old fashioned standards of discipline and we do that unashamedly because we do see it as our job to educate children in that way.”

Read it all.

The Church of England, it is often said, is a broad church. You can’t get broader than John Pritchard, Bishop of Oxford and chair of the church’s board of education since January 2011. When he went up to Oxford University, he joined the Conservative and Labour parties simultaneously, though today, he admits, quietly and a little grudgingly, to being “on the left”. In ecclesiastical terms, he is said to be an “open evangelical” which would mean, very loosely, that he is traditional in doctrine but liberal in political and social matters, including the ordination of women as bishops. He prefers, however, to resist even that label, perhaps understandably, since one clergyman described an open evangelical to me as “a bigot who wants a nicer title”. Pritchard says: “I am a Christian of the centre, the generous centre”.

The right man, you may think, to negotiate the turbulent currents of the education system, in which Pritchard plays a key role.

Read it all.

Due to the requirements that the HHS Mandate imposes on Catholic institutions, the Obama administration has been widely criticized over the question of religious freedom. “The real issue in political life,” explained [Professor William] Luckey, “is not contraception: it’s the First Amendment. That’s the real issue because the Constitution says that there’s not going to be a national religion. [”¦] But it also says, ‘Congress shall make no law restricting the freedom of religion.'”

The federal government’s attempt to involve itself in the religious beliefs of people, explains Professor [Bernard] Way, associate professor of political science, goes against the Constitution in a very fundamental way. “On the surface,” Way said, “the biggest issue has to do with First Amendment concerns, and freedom of religion. No religious institution should be forced by the government to do anything against their conscience or their beliefs. [”¦] People, and other associations in society, should be left free, especially on matters of conscience, which the founders always understood was a matter of religion.”

Read it all.

French police are linking the shootings of four people at a Jewish school in Toulouse to the killings of three soldiers of North African descent in two separate incidents last week.

The same gun and the same stolen scooter were used in all three attacks, sources close to the investigation say.

A teacher and three children were shot dead at the Ozar Hatorah school, and a teenage boy was seriously injured.

Read it all.

Show an empty tournament bracket to a random sample of Americans and they’re likely to make the same instant association: NCAA basketball.

This simple design, which is used whenever a competition needs to winnow a large group of contestants to a single winner, has become a much-admired cultural meme. If there were a hall of fame for sports graphics, the bracket would be the first inductee.

But as ubiquitous as brackets have become, they’re also the center of a surprising mystery: Nobody knows for sure where the idea came from.

Read it all.

The Church of England is still bitterly divided over the issue of gay clergy and gay marriage, while the general synod has rejected his compromise formula for the introduction of women bishops, which would have installed male co-bishops to appease traditionalists. Repeatedly, over the years, Dr Williams’s attempts to mediate between disputing factions of his church have been rebuffed. Hardline evangelicals have at times treated his leadership with barely concealed contempt; liberals have despaired over his refusal to risk church unity by standing with them.

But when he has managed to break free from ecclesiastical firefighting, Dr Williams has contributed much to the quality and tone of public debate….

Read it all.