“In the coming years, a lot of people will still be paying off their student loans when it’s time for their kids to go to college,” said Mark Kantrowitz, the publisher of FinAid.org and Fastweb.com, who has compiled the estimates of student debt, including federal and private loans.

Two-thirds of bachelor’s degree recipients graduated with debt in 2008, compared with less than half in 1993. Last year, graduates who took out loans left college with an average of $24,000 in debt. Default rates are rising, especially among those who attended for-profit colleges.

The mountain of debt is likely to grow more quickly with the coming round of budget-slashing. Pell grants for low-income students are expected to be cut and tuition at public universities will probably increase as states with pinched budgets cut back on the money they give to colleges.

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At the tender age of just 21, Rory McIlroy stands on the brink of golfing immortality after another nerveless display at the US Masters in Augusta. At 12 under par, McIlroy will take a four shot lead into the final round later today.

Even with Tiger Woods unable to mount the charge he was looking for and defending champion Phil Mickelson remaining in the pack, McIlroy found it tough going for much of the third round.

But then, as the sun went down, the Holywood wonder kid regained control of the season’s opening major in thrilling fashion. After finding the green and two-putting the 13th and 15th, the two par fives on the back nine, McIlroy gave his biggest fist-pump of the week when he rolled in a 25-footer at the 17th.

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The Republican budget released on Tuesday is a daring one in many ways. Above all, it would replace the current Medicare with a system of private health insurance plans subsidized by the government. Whether you like or loathe that idea, it would undeniably reduce Medicare’s long-term funding gap ”” which is by far the biggest source of looming federal deficits.

Yet there is at least one big way in which the plan isn’t daring at all. It asks for a whole lot of sacrifice from everyone under the age of 55 and little from everyone 55 and over. Representative Paul Ryan, the Wisconsin Republican who wrote the plan, calls the budget deficit an “existential threat” to the United States. Then he absolves more than one-third of all adults from responsibility in dealing with that threat.

This decision doesn’t make him unique in Washington. There is nearly a bipartisan consensus that any cuts to Medicare and Social Security should spare the baby boomers and the elderly. And, certainly, retirees or people on the verge of retirement shouldn’t have their benefits changed radically. But the consensus, like Mr. Ryan’s plan, goes too far.

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Painful but important viewing, watch it all and be warned some of the language is disturbing and offensive–KSH.

When C.S. Lewis gathered with his colleagues in The Inklings to discuss their shared faith and latest endeavors, they met at a pub in Oxford called the Eagle and Child.

The parish hall of St. Alban’s Chapel at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge is larger than the Eagle and Child and it’s not serving draft beer, but the premise is similar: Gathering together for a meal and lively discussion of higher things.

The Rev. Andrew S. Rollins uses “Lunch with C.S. Lewis” to make some of the grand concepts of Christianity ”” the goodness of God, suffering, heaven and hell ”” accessible to an audience not limited to scholars.

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Cheating has become more common in recent years. But a recent French case is the most sensational, and the most troubling.

In January, the French Chess Federation accused three of its members, including Sebastien Feller, a 20-year-old grandmaster, of cheating during last year’s Chess Olympiad. Feller, who is ranked No. 4 among French players, played Board 5 for the national Olympiad team and won an individual gold medal for his performance.

But the federation said he had help from Cyril Marzolo, an international master, who watched Feller’s games online and put the positions into a computer, which suggested moves. Marzolo relayed the suggestions to Arnaud Hauchard, a grandmaster and the French team’s captain, who used a code in transmitting the suggestions to Feller, the federation said.

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Educated 20- and 30-somethings are flocking to live downtown in the USA’s largest cities ”” even urban centers that are losing population.

In more than two-thirds of the nation’s 51 largest cities, the young, college-educated population in the past decade grew twice as fast within 3 miles of the urban center as in the rest of the metropolitan area ”” up an average 26% compared with 13% in other parts.

Even in Detroit, where the population shrank by 25% since 2000, downtown added 2,000 young and educated residents during that time, up 59% , according to analysis of Census data by Impresa Inc., an economic consulting firm.

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One of the hottest college campuses in the U.S. for Jewish students is also one of the unlikeliest: a small Lutheran school erected around a soaring stone chapel with a cross on top.

In what is being called a testament to word of mouth in the Jewish community, approximately 34 percent of Muhlenberg College’s 2,200 students are Jewish. And the biggest gains have come in the past five years or so.

Perhaps equally noteworthy is how Muhlenberg has responded, by offering a kosher menu at the student union, creating a partnership with the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, and expanding its Hillel House, a social hub for Jews.

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The relationship game among college-age adults today is a muddle of seemingly contradictory trends. Recent studies indicate that traditional dating on campuses has taken a back seat to no-strings relationships in which bonds between young men and women are increasingly brief and sexual. (A new website to arrange these encounters that began at the University of Chicago last month now is expanding to other campuses.)

But even as casual sex ”” often called “hookups” or “friends with benefits” ”” is a dominant part of campus life, a new report by the National Center for Health Statistics indicates the percentages of men and women 18-24 who say they are virgins also are increasing.

It all reflects an emerging paradigm that is altering the nature of sex and relationships among young adults: fewer men than women on campuses, a more openly sexual society that often takes cues from media, and a declining desire to make relationship commitments early in life.

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According to data gathered by the Pension Fund for the Episcopal Church, in 2002 there were 13,616 clergy. Of those, thirty were under the age of 30, 195 were under the age of 35, and 399 were under the age of 40. Today, the average age at ordination is 44 and the average age of active Episcopal clergy is 54.

The age demographics in the pew are no better. In 1965, the Episcopal Church had 3.6 million members and Episcopalians constituted 1.9 percent of the U.S. population. Since 1965, however, membership has declined precipitously. The net result is a graying church.

The average Episcopalian is 57 years old. If that benchmark does not change, roughly half of the church’s membership will die in the next eighteen years. And that is as good as it gets. Since 60 percent of Episcopal congregations have a membership of 100 or less, the rate of decline will probably pick up speed.

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The Archbishop said:

“I am delighted that the Government has finally reached the right decision and will now opt in to the EU Directive on Human Trafficking. For some time I have been raising the matter with the Home Secretary calling on her to opt in to the EU Directive to ensure we have a united front across Europe tackling the evil of human trafficking.

“I am pleased the Government now acknowledges that ‘opting in would send a powerful message to traffickers that Britain is not a soft touch’. Our Government should be ensuring Britain leads the way on tackling slavery, just like it did in the days of William Wilberforce. Sex trafficking is nothing more than modern day slavery.

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What advice can you give readers of TIME?

We talk about love in a way that’s very unrealistic: “If you’re in love, you’re not going to want to have sex with anyone else but that person.” That’s not true. We need to acknowledge that truth so that people don’t have to spend 40 years of marriage lying to and policing each other.

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I will take comments on this submitted by email only to at KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com.

Call it a buzz kill, but anyone younger than 21 who brings alcohol to the Carolina Cup next month in Camden will find it harder to slip in and party.

Kershaw County deputies will be cracking down at the April 2 event by checking coolers and IDs. They will confiscate booze and arrest violators. And those particularly wily kids will find they no longer can hire a local adult to carry their booze onto the site.

Kershaw County officers are focusing on “College Park,” an area where thousands of young people ”” high school through young adults ”” have met for years to overindulge during the horse races, said newly elected Sheriff Jim Matthews.

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Téa Obreht is just 25, and “The Tiger’s Wife” is her first book. It is also the first book ever sold by her agent, Seth Fishman, who is 30, and the second book bought by her editor, Noah Eaker, who was 26 when he acquired it and, strictly speaking, still an editorial assistant.

“We were all very new,” Ms. Obreht said recently, “and we were excited to find each other.” They might want to consider retirement, quitting while they’re ahead, because the kind of good fortune they are enjoying right now may never come their way again.

Ms. Obreht was included in The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40” list of young fiction authors last summer and “The Tiger’s Wife” was subsequently excerpted in the magazine. On Sunday, the book made the cover of The New York Times Book Review. Just about everywhere, it has received the sort of reviews that many writers wait an entire career for. In The Times on Friday, Michiko Kakutani called it ”˜“hugely ambitious, audaciously written.”

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Last June, writer and political scientist Peter Beinart launched a broadside at the American Jewish community, accusing it of forsaking its own liberal democratic values in blind support of Israel’s rightward lurch, and in the process creating a generation of young Jews who feel no attachment to the Jewish state.

“The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment,” published in the New York Review of Books, made a lot of waves and fueled a wider argument about when, and whether, American Jews should speak out against Israel’s policies in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The discussion will continue 7 p.m. Thursday [in the Pittsburgh area]…His topic: “Is the love affair over? Young American Jews and Israel.”

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The Archbishops of Canterbury and York and more than 30 bishops committed themselves to making young people a priority in the Church of England, when they attended a conference held in Sheffield last week.

The Regeneration Youth Summit took place at St Thomas’s, Phila­delphia Campus, on Thursday of last week, and was organised by the Church Army, the Archbishop of York Youth Trust, and a group of young people, including Sam Follett, aged 20, the youngest member of the General Synod.

More than 120 people aged from 15 to 21, and about 30 youth workers, discussed ways of better equipping the Church to reach out to young people. All delegates were invited to sign a pledge committing to the work of the Church and young people.

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Leaders from the Church of England have gathered in Sheffield to meet over 150 young people.

The Bishop of Sheffield, Right Reverend Dr Steven Croft attended the event at St Thomas’ Church in Hillsborough alongside Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams and the Archbishop of York, John Sentamu.

The event, called ‘Regeneration’ was a summit led by young people aged between 15 and 21-years-old, giving them an opportunity to talk about how young people feature in the churches agenda.

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More than 100 young people are preparing to meet with Church of England bishops at a national summit in Sheffield where the future of the church will be discussed.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, and the Archbishop of York, John Sentamu, will be attending the Regeneration Youth Summit on March 3rd along with more than 25 bishops and 30 youth leaders.

Regeneration is being led by young people, aged between 15 and 21 years old, and offers them a unique opportunity to meet with bishops on their terms. Throughout the day they will seek to make the future generation a priority for the Church of England and discuss in small groups how the church can better equip, resource and reach young people in the UK.

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Check their website here; I will post more on this tomorrow.

Libyan unrest is fueling a sharp boost in U.S. pump prices. But beyond that immediate cause for concern lies a far more extended — and ominous — trend: Oil costs appear likely to keep rising over the coming decades as demand outpaces supply across the planet.

Consider this recent alarming statistic from Exxon’s annual report: For every 100 barrels of oil it pumps above ground, it can now only find 95 to replenish the supply below ground.

Exxon’s not the only “Big Oil” enterprise sounding the alarm about this big problem. As The Wall Street Journal reported last week: “It’s a conundrum shared by most of the other large Western oil-producing companies, which are finding most accessible oil fields were tapped long ago, while promising new regions are proving technologically and politically challenging.”

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In a move likely to reverberate among America’s top-tier private colleges, the University of the South said Wednesday it will slash tuition and fees for the coming school year by 10%, or about $4,600….

If not the first, Sewanee is the largest private school to institute such price cuts in recent years, said Tony Pals, director of communications for the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities.

“It’s a bold move that will have the potential to put competitive pressure on Sewanee’s peer institutions,” said Mr. Pals.

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Recently, I was blessed to be a speaker at a couple of the regional gatherings of the Fellowship of Catholic University Students. As always, I was very impressed with what I saw ”“ 1200 young adults at one gathering and 1500 at another. These are serious seekers, looking for truth and faith. In the evening, a very long line stood patiently waiting for the Sacrament of Reconciliation or to be prayed with….

Many of them have shared with me their profound experiences of conversion ”“ growing up in families without much faith experience or being raised nominally Catholic, and only later discovering the richness of faith and truth.

One young man shared how he was raised going to Mass on Sunday but left the Church and God behind in college. Yet an encounter with an evangelical group recaptured his search for God, and he eventually became a Protestant pastor of a thriving community. Finally, through the friendship of a Catholic bishop, who invited him for coffee and conversation, he rediscovered the richness of Catholicism and came back to the Church of his birth. Now he works with young adults who are seeking the Lord.

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The Tahrir Square uprising “has nothing to do with left or right,” said Dina Shehata, a researcher at Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies. “It is about young people rebelling against a regime that has stifled all channels for their upward mobility. They want to shape their own destiny, and they want social justice” from a system in which a few people have gotten fantastically rich, in giant villas, and everyone else has stagnated. Any ideological group that tries to hijack these young people today will lose.

One of the best insights into what is happening here is provided by a 2009 book called “Generation in Waiting,” edited by Navtej Dhillon and Tarik Yousef, which examined how young people are coming of age in eight Arab countries. It contends that the great game that is unfolding in the Arab world today is not related to political Islam but is a “generational game” in which more than 100 million young Arabs are pressing against stifling economic and political structures that have stripped all their freedoms and given them in return one of the poorest education systems in the world, highest unemployment rates and biggest income gaps. China deprives its people of political rights, but at least it gives them a rising standard of living. Egypt deprived its people of political rights and gave them a declining standard of living.

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Read it all (an 8 page pdf).

A professor at Notre Dame once lamented to me that the parents he encounters don’t worry that their kids will engage in sexual activity during their undergraduate career. Rather, they fret that students will come home engaged to be married. Forty years ago, who could have imagined that parents would want their children to prolong their “wild” years and put off the responsibilities of grown-up life?

–Naomi Schaefer Riley in a review of Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecke’s new book “Premarital Sex in America,” Commentary (February 2011), p.59

Anyone who’s long followed the Middle East knows that the six most dangerous words after any cataclysmic event in this region are: “Things will never be the same.” After all, this region absorbed the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of Google without a ripple.

But traveling through Israel, the West Bank and Jordan to measure the shock waves from Egypt, I’m convinced that the forces that were upholding the status quo here for so long ”” oil, autocracy, the distraction of Israel, and a fear of the chaos that could come with change ”” have finally met an engine of change that is even more powerful: China, Twitter and 20-year-olds.

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The emotional health of college freshmen ”” who feel buffeted by the recession and stressed by the pressures of high school ”” has declined to the lowest level since an annual survey of incoming students started collecting data 25 years ago.

In the survey, “The American Freshman: National Norms Fall 2010,” involving more than 200,000 incoming full-time students at four-year colleges, the percentage of students rating themselves as “below average” in emotional health rose. Meanwhile, the percentage of students who said their emotional health was above average fell to 52 percent. It was 64 percent in 1985.

Every year, women had a less positive view of their emotional health than men, and that gap has widened.

Read it all from the front page of yesterday’s paper.

So why is it that the young folk revolted by contemporary excess don’t simply make for the local CofE, or Catholic church, and rediscover the religion of their grandmothers, rather than getting their spirituality via Islam? It is, I think, something to do with the real malaise of contemporary Britain which I wrote about in a little essay in The Spectator concerning the film Eat, Pray, Love. It is the notion that what exists abroad, or what is foreign to your own background, is somehow superior to what you’ve grown up with, what’s under your nose. In the case of EPL, the heroine finds her spiritual identity in Buddhism. It would have been a good deal more interesting if she could have discovered it in her local Episcopalian church.

It may be that the British young don’t embrace Christianity because they simply don’t encounter it, at least not through the kind of religious education-as-anthropology they get in state school, which is about as opposite as it is possible to be from the Sunday School teaching which their grandmothers would have got. Actually, the death of the Sunday School pretty well marked the end of any practical instruction in Christianity for most children. No wonder they’re susceptible to the certainties of Islam, when they encounter it.

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Unemployment in Britain has surged by 49,000 to nearly 2.5 million, including one in every five young people ”“ putting the number of 16- to 24-year-olds out of work at close to a million, the highest since records of youth unemployment were first kept in 1992.

The rate of joblessness among 16-to 24-year-olds is now 20.3 per cent, which is two-and-a-half times therate among the population as a whole.

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