It started with a Twitter message on Sept. 19: “Roommate asked for the room till midnight. I went into molly’s room and turned on my webcam. I saw him making out with a dude. Yay.”

That night, the authorities say, the Rutgers University student who sent the message used a camera in his dormitory room to stream the roommate’s intimate encounter live on the Internet.

And three days later, the roommate who had been surreptitiously broadcast ”” Tyler Clementi, an 18-year-old freshman and an accomplished violinist ”” jumped from the George Washington Bridge into the Hudson River in an apparent suicide.

The Sept. 22 death, details of which the authorities disclosed on Wednesday, was the latest by a young American that followed the online posting of hurtful material. The news came on the same day that Rutgers kicked off a two-year, campuswide project to teach the importance of civility, with special attention to the use and abuse of new technology.

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The week that Army Spc. Thomas K. Doerflinger was killed in Iraq at age 20, a friend in the neighborhood brought his parents a felt banner with a gold star. Tradition holds that a grieving mother hangs it in her window until the war is over. As it turned out, the war outlasted the banner.

Years passed; the red border faded. Repairmen who came to their door on leafy Collingwood Terrace would innocently inquire, then stammer their condolences. The Doerflingers didn’t feel right displaying a kind of grief that was never going to go away, so after a while they put the banner in the hutch.

Endings can be complicated for families of the fallen.

When President Obama announced the conclusion of combat operations in Iraq this month, Lee Ann Doerflinger didn’t feel any closer to that magical “closure” everyone talks about. In some ways, she felt worse.

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“Well I’d love to take you back,” …[my Mom] said. “I’m really trying to figure out what this whole overhaul is going to mean. There have been so many rules, at least with my insurance.”

I told my mom I’d take care of sorting out the rules. I called the benefits office of the University of Southern Maine where my mom works and found out that I can re-enroll in her plan in November and be covered by January. Yeah, it’s not Sept. 23 ”” the date the provision “officially” takes effect. I’m just glad my parents have a plan that qualifies.

Right now, I am completely financially independent of them, something I’ve been working for since graduating from college. It is a strange and kind of demeaning concept to revisit a dependent type of relationship with them. I asked my mom recently if she thought this was awkward, too.

“It is what it is,” she told me. “It’s a stopgap measure. And you will be only covered for a couple of years until you turn 26. My hope would be that you would get a job that pays benefits. As far as it costing extra money for us, it didn’t make a huge difference. It wasn’t a whole lot more because I think in general people your age are healthy. And so it would be peace of mind to me to know that you have health care coverage.”

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News that student loan debt, at $830 billion, exceeded credit card debt for the first time has sparked renewed interest in the financing of college and its implications for students. Largely ignored in the discussion, however, is the shadow debt, which consists of unorthodox methods of borrowing for college, including home equity loans and lines of credit, retirement account loans, credit card debt, and run-of-the-mill bank loans. Because these borrowing instruments often have many alternative uses, we have to rely on surveys to determine how much of the total amount borrowed in each category is devoted to paying for college. The most comprehensive such survey is conducted by Sallie Mae and Gallup. Their findings indicate that shadow debt adds just under $30 billion to the annual borrowing for higher education (see this link for more details on the calculation). As shown in the table below, when this is added to the $96 billion in college specific loans, we can conclude that Americans borrow roughly $126 billion a year to pay for college.

Of course, there are a number of caveats to this number. To begin with, this is at best a back of the envelope calculation, and better data would allow for a more accurate picture to be painted. In addition, some of this may not be borrowing in the normal sense of the term. For instance, some well off families may pay for tuition on a credit card to receive the rewards associated with their card, and then pay off the balance immediately. There is also the fact that some of the education borrowing is not used solely for education. I knew people who used student loan money to purchase a car, or a big screen TV, and even breast implants. At the same time, not counted are informal loans from family and friends. Thus, $126 billion is the best estimate we have for the amount of money that Americans borrow for college.

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Rachel Goldstein and Ben Kuryk try not to let 1,055 miles come between them.

Both 26, they met as freshmen at American University in Washington, D.C. But when they graduated in 2006, Kuryk got a job with a software company in the area, while Goldstein’s job as a commercial real estate broker took her to Miami Beach.

They talk four or five times a day by phone and communicate via text messages, Twitter and Skype. They see each other every three to four weeks.

“We’re professionals at this,” Goldstein says.

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They spoke for the last time on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. It was a quick phone call between father and daughter, with the 9-year-old lamenting that she didn’t want to get out of bed, didn’t want to go to school.

But United Airlines co-pilot Mike Horrocks had a way of getting his daughter, Christa, going. After a few kind encouragements, she decided school wouldn’t be so bad. Then came the last words they would ever share: “I love you up to the moon and back,” he told her.

Sixty minutes later, terrorists would take over United Airlines Flight 175, diverting it off its course from Boston to Los Angeles and making it the second plane flown into the World Trade Center.

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Caught this on the morning run–definitely a subject I would rather not think about, but one that has to be faced. Watch it all–KSH.

Three years ago, I saw a television program about a new breed of youngster: the nonconsumer. Japanese in their late teens and early 20s, it said, did not have cars. They didn’t drink alcohol. They didn’t spend Christmas Eve with their boyfriends or girlfriends at fancy hotels downtown the way earlier generations did. I have taught many students who fit this mold. They work hard at part-time jobs, spend hours at McDonald’s sipping cheap coffee, eat fast food lunches at Yoshinoya. They save their money for the future.

These are the Japanese who came of age after the bubble, never having known Japan as a flourishing economy. They are accustomed to being frugal. Today’s youths, living in a society older than any in the world, are the first since the late 19th century to feel so uneasy about the future.

I saw young Japanese in Paris, of course, vacationing or studying, but statistics show that they don’t travel the way we used to. Perhaps it’s a reaction against their globalizing elders who are still zealously pushing English-language education and overseas employment. Young people have grown less interested in studying foreign languages. They seem not to feel the urge to grow outward. Look, they say, Japan is a small country. And we’re O.K. with small.

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This question pops up everywhere, underlying concerns about “failure to launch” and “boomerang kids.” Two new sitcoms feature grown children moving back in with their parents ”” “$#*! My Dad Says,” starring William Shatner as a divorced curmudgeon whose 20-something son can’t make it on his own as a blogger, and “Big Lake,” in which a financial whiz kid loses his Wall Street job and moves back home to rural Pennsylvania. A cover of The New Yorker last spring picked up on the zeitgeist: a young man hangs up his new Ph.D. in his boyhood bedroom, the cardboard box at his feet signaling his plans to move back home now that he’s officially overqualified for a job. In the doorway stand his parents, their expressions a mix of resignation, worry, annoyance and perplexity: how exactly did this happen?

It’s happening all over, in all sorts of families, not just young people moving back home but also young people taking longer to reach adulthood overall. It’s a development that predates the current economic doldrums, and no one knows yet what the impact will be ”” on the prospects of the young men and women; on the parents on whom so many of them depend; on society, built on the expectation of an orderly progression in which kids finish school, grow up, start careers, make a family and eventually retire to live on pensions supported by the next crop of kids who finish school, grow up, start careers, make a family and on and on. The traditional cycle seems to have gone off course, as young people remain un­tethered to romantic partners or to permanent homes, going back to school for lack of better options, traveling, avoiding commitments, competing ferociously for unpaid internships or temporary (and often grueling) Teach for America jobs, forestalling the beginning of adult life.

The 20s are a black box, and there is a lot of churning in there….

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It is generally true that you get what you pay for, but not necessarily when it comes to higher education.

A study scheduled for release Monday about the value of a college education, at least when it comes to the basics, has found the opposite to be true in most cases. Forget Harvard and think Lamar.

Indeed, the Texas university, where tuition runs about $7,000 per year (Harvard’s is $38,000) earns an A to Harvard’s D based on an analysis of the universities’ commitment to core subjects deemed essential to a well-rounded, competitive education.

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A new Bank for International Settlements working paper by economist Elod Takats looks at the interaction of demographics and asset prices and finds not a meltdown but a long hard slog for house prices and, by extension, for other assets like stocks.

“If you look at the U.S., or most English-speaking countries, the next 40 years is substantially different from the last 40,” Takats said.

“We had demographic tailwinds over the past forty years and will have headwinds over the next forty.”

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With the cost of private universities now topping $35,000 for tuition, fees, room and board each year, Americans are tapping retirement accounts, asking extended family members to help out with college costs and keeping kids at home for the first few years of school to cut down on living expenses. One worrisome trend: Parents who took money from their retirement accounts withdrew an average of $8,554 in 2010 compared to $5,318 in 2009.

To pay for college, families are also borrowing more heavily from traditional sources including financial aid. And usage of 529 college savings plans is on the rise. ”Families are digging deeper and taking a number of measures to make college more affordable,” says Bill Diggins, senior consultant with Gallup. “They see great value in college. It’s an investment in the future. Most strongly agree that a college degree is more important now than ever.”

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College students who download music and movies from peer-to-peer file-sharing programs such as LimeWire and KaZaA will find themselves cut off when they return to campus this fall.

Every college across the country must either have installed software to block illegal file-sharing or have created some other procedure for preventing it. The requirement is part of the 2008 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which took effect July 1.

Some schools have been working to comply with the provisions for several years.

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I got the idea to start Amazon 16 years ago. I came across the fact that Web usage was growing at 2,300 percent per year. I’d never seen or heard of anything that grew that fast, and the idea of building an online bookstore with millions of titles — something that simply couldn’t exist in the physical world — was very exciting to me. I had just turned 30 years old, and I’d been married for a year. I told my wife MacKenzie that I wanted to quit my job and go do this crazy thing that probably wouldn’t work since most startups don’t, and I wasn’t sure what would happen after that. MacKenzie (also a Princeton grad and sitting here in the second row) told me I should go for it. As a young boy, I’d been a garage inventor. I’d invented an automatic gate closer out of cement-filled tires, a solar cooker that didn’t work very well out of an umbrella and tinfoil, baking-pan alarms to entrap my siblings. I’d always wanted to be an inventor, and she wanted me to follow my passion.

I was working at a financial firm in New York City with a bunch of very smart people, and I had a brilliant boss that I much admired. I went to my boss and told him I wanted to start a company selling books on the Internet. He took me on a long walk in Central Park, listened carefully to me, and finally said, “That sounds like a really good idea, but it would be an even better idea for someone who didn’t already have a good job.” That logic made some sense to me, and he convinced me to think about it for 48 hours before making a final decision. Seen in that light, it really was a difficult choice, but ultimately, I decided I had to give it a shot. I didn’t think I’d regret trying and failing. And I suspected I would always be haunted by a decision to not try at all. After much consideration, I took the less safe path to follow my passion, and I’m proud of that choice.

Tomorrow, in a very real sense, your life — the life you author from scratch on your own — begins….

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The share of borrowers who default on their student loans is bigger than the federal government’s short-term data suggest, with thousands more facing damaged credit histories and millions more tax dollars being lost in the long run.

According to unpublished data obtained by The Chronicle, one in every five government loans that entered repayment in 1995 has gone into default. The default rate is higher for loans made to students from two-year colleges, and higher still, reaching 40 percent, for those who attended for-profit institutions.

The numbers represent thousands of students like Lourdes Samedy, of Boston, who ended up defaulting on about $7,000 in student loans after completing a nine-month-long medical-assistant program at Corinthian Colleges Inc. Everest College, and now cannot get a job.

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Federal data from 2007 says 40 percent of births in America are to unwed mothers, a trend experts say is especially common in middle-class America. In one St. Louis community, the notion of getting married and having children ”” in that order ”” seems quaint.

For most of their relationship, Nathan Garland and Brianne Zimmerman have marked their anniversary by New Year’s Eve, 2001. They say that was the day they both knew they had found the one.

“It seemed obvious to me the first time we kissed,” Garland says. “Just kind of connected, right then. It really was that obvious.”

They moved in together shortly afterward. They decided to have a baby a few years later, but had no interest in getting married.

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Chrystal Johnson didn’t think there was anything unhealthy about her all-consuming fixation with “The Twilight Saga” ”” until she discovered it was sucking the life out of her marriage.

“I found poems my husband had written in his journal about how I had fallen for a ‘golden-eyed vampire,’ ” says Johnson, a 31-year-old accountant from Mesa, Ariz., who became so enthralled by the blockbuster series of young adult novels and movies that she found herself staying up all night, re-reading juicy chapters and chatting about casting news and the are-they-or-aren’t-they romance between the stars of the films, Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson.

” ‘Twilight’ was always on my mind, to the point where I couldn’t function,” Johnson says.

Anyone who has ever peeked inside a comic-book convention or gone to a late-night screening of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” knows that some pop-culture fans aren’t exactly known for their moderation. But there are some key differences distinguishing “Twilight” groupies and their seemingly bottomless obsession from that of other entertainment junkies.

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Supposedly, young adults don’t have much of an attention span ”” except when it comes to love.

That’s when it seems this generation of young people is giving new meaning to the words “long-term relationship.” Many are “a couple” for years, and some approach a decade of dating. They’re just shy of the altar for so long that parents and grandparents are a bit bewildered.

“It’s good to get to know your partner before marrying, but one wonders how long you need?” says sociologist Andrew Cherlin, 61, of Johns Hopkins University.

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For a generation growing up with digital media, the written word printed on paper has little appeal ”” even if it’s the word of God. It’s for them that an Orlando, Fla., company has come up with the multimedia digital Glo Bible.

“You have entire generations of people that don’t engage with paper very well,” says Nelson Saba, founder of Immersion Digital. “If you look at Bible literacy among younger generations, it’s dismal.” The Glo Bible “is designed to be a digital alternative to the paper Bible.”

A Gallup poll in 2000 found that about one-quarter of people ages 18 through 29 read the Bible weekly ”” about half the rate of those 65 or older. Part of that, Saba contends, is the younger generation’s aversion to the printed word.

“There is nothing wrong with paper. I have lots of paper Bibles, but it’s just not the media they engage,” he says.

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Baby boomers have long been considered the generation that did not want to grow up, perpetual adolescents even as they become eligible for Social Security. Now, a growing body of research shows that the real Peter Pans are not the boomers, but the generations that have followed. For many, by choice or circumstance, independence no longer begins at 21.

From the Obama administration’s new rule that allows children up to age 26 to remain on their parents’ health insurance to the large increase in the number of women older than 35 who have become first-time mothers, social scientists say young adulthood has undergone a profound shift.

People between 20 and 34 are taking longer to finish their educations, establish themselves in careers, marry, have children and become financially independent, said Frank F. Furstenberg, who leads the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Transitions to Adulthood, a team of scholars who have been studying this transformation.

“A new period of life is emerging in which young people are no longer adolescents but not yet adults,” Mr. Furstenberg said.

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In light of the current financial crises, many banks are starting to turn down students’ requests for loans. In some cases, before a degree is even earned. Without a job and without a degree to, presumably, get a higher paying job, these people are left without a way to repay their debts. And, it gets worse”¦.

Whereas the homeowners who defaulted on their loans were able to declare bankruptcy in many cases, student loans cannot be discharged by bankruptcy. In turn, these young people are left with very few options for repayment and are burdened by a debt that is not going away any time soon. The balance will increase through interest, fees, service charges, etc. until it extinguishes their chances to get a home loan or even find a life partner (i.e. many people would rather not take on a $2,000/month payment just to be married to someone).

In reality, many of these new graduates are left with a singular option ”“ the federal Income-Based Repayment plan, or IBR, if they qualify….

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Yesterday was my 58th birthday. If I were a Greek worker I could retire. Although pension payments in Greece normally start around 61, special provisions allow anyone to retire at 58 if they have been in employment for 35 years. That, as it happens, is how long I have been at work. My index-linked pensions from the Greek Government would be worth 75 to 90 per cent of the average salary in the country, guaranteed for the rest of my life by the State.

If you want to know why Greece is going bankrupt and why the euro seems to be on the verge of disintegration, look no farther. The best argument I have ever heard for a break-up of the euro was this observation in a German newspaper: “The Greeks go on to the streets to protest against an increase of the pension age from 61 to 63. Does this mean that Germans should extend the working age from 67 to 69, so Greeks can enjoy their retirement?”

This, however, is not another article about self-indulgent Greeks and self-righteous Germans. The battle over bailouts in Europe is only a sideshow compared with the great social conflict that lies ahead all over the world in the next 20 years. This will not be a struggle between nations or social classes, but between generations ”” and it is a conflict that, in Britain, begins in earnest this year. The end of the Second World War in May 1945 marked the start of the baby boom, which lasted until the mid-1960s. Now, 65 years later, the corresponding retirement revolution is about to shake up our society, economy and political institutions.

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This spring’s college graduates face better job prospects than the dismal environment encountered by last year’s grads. But that doesn’t mean the job market is thriving.

Average starting salaries are down, and employers plan to make only 5 percent more job offers to new graduates this spring compared to last spring, when job offers were down 20 percent from 2008 levels, according to a survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, which tracks recruitment data.

Liam O’Reilly, who just graduated from the University of Maryland with a bachelor’s degree in history, said he had applied to 50 employers ”” to be a paralegal, a researcher for a policy organization, an administrative assistant ”” but he had gotten hardly any interviews. While continuing to search for something he truly wants, he has taken a minimum-wage job selling software that includes an occasional commission.

“Had I realized it would be this bad, I would have applied to grad school,” Mr. O’Reilly said.

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The U.S. economy faces major problems while Europe’s is “teetering,” the head of General Electric Co (GE.N) told a class of graduating college students on Monday.

“We are at an unprecedented moment in the history of our country. There is economic and social anxiety,” said Jeff Immelt, chairman and chief executive of the largest U.S. conglomerate. “Europe appears to be teetering.”

Still, the risk that the Greek debt crisis could drag down other European economies does not appear to be enough to derail the world’s overall economic recovery, he told reporters after addressing Boston College’s commencement.

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When President O’Donnell asked me to give this address, I expressed one concern: “Will there be a protest? And will you prosecute the protestors? Or at least 88 of them?” He made no commitment. I accepted anyway.

So what can I tell you? This is a time of crises. The economy is a mess, the culture is a mess, the government is out of control. And, in the last three years, Notre Dame lost 21 football games. But this is a great time for us to be here, especially you graduates of this superbly Catholic college. This is so because the remedy for the general meltdown today is found only in Christ and in the teachings of the Catholic Church. Let’s talk bluntly about our situation and what you can do about it.

Read it all but please note: I would be grateful to readers if there could be no comments about the historical reference to Germany but instead to the larger argument–thank you; KSH.

ERIN ROY: One day I came home from class, walked in my house, and my housemates were huddled around the computer, and they said that they had heard of and found this Web site. So I went over, checked it out and just saw terrible, terrible things written. Initially it definitely affected a lot of girls I know. I think they were just devastated, embarrassed, upset. Marist is a very small school, so one person hears something, and it spreads like wildfire even if it holds no truth.

[BETTY] ROLLIN: The Web site that was spreading the malicious gossip at Marist and 500 other colleges and universities was called JuicyCampus. Incredibly, the students had no way to stop it since the messages were all anonymously written, and the Web site was under no legal obligation to remove it.

ROY: Some of them definitely, probably were written by men who maybe left off on the wrong foot with a girl. Maybe something happened, and you know he didn’t think of her in the highest regards, and for girls””jealousy. They know this site is anonymous, so they are just so willing to jump on their computer and write comments about people, because they know they will never be caught….

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Follow up: There is more on this important subject there.

This past Sunday, hundreds of Siena College graduates donned lightweight black gowns and placed tasseled caps on their heads for their 9:45 a.m. commencement.

Given the bleak national outlook for post-collegiate hiring, perhaps they should have suited up in sturdier combat attire: They and their fellow graduates nationwide face a fierce battle just to secure a job interview, let alone full-time employment.

About 2.4 million students will graduate with bachelor’s and associates degrees as part of the Class of 2010, says the National Center for Education Statistics.

Those job-seekers will go head-to-head not only with fellow classmates but also with laid-off workers, financially strapped retirees and still-unemployed 2009 and 2008 grads. There are more than five job seekers for every opening, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics figures analyzed by outplacement firm Challenger Gray & Christmas.

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The tattoo on Christian Berrios’ right forearm says “Knowledge is Power.” For a high school dropout in a city with shuttered textile plants and 18% unemployment, he needs all the knowledge he can get.

Berrios will graduate in June from YouthBuild, one of many national service programs that got an infusion of federal aid under last year’s economic stimulus law. He’ll get his high school equivalency degree as well as “green” construction skills to help him navigate a difficult job market.

“It’s tough out there,” says Berrios, 22, who wants a college degree in psychology. “I feel we got a better chance at scoring a better job.”

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Min Liu, a 21-year-old liberal arts student at the New School in New York City, got a Facebook account at 17 and chronicled her college life in detail, from rooftop drinks with friends to dancing at a downtown club. Recently, though, she has had second thoughts.

Concerned about her career prospects, she asked a friend to take down a photograph of her drinking and wearing a tight dress. When the woman overseeing her internship asked to join her Facebook circle, Ms. Liu agreed, but limited access to her Facebook page. “I want people to take me seriously,” she said.

The conventional wisdom suggests that everyone under 30 is comfortable revealing every facet of their lives online, from their favorite pizza to most frequent sexual partners. But many members of the tell-all generation are rethinking what it means to live out loud.

While participation in social networks is still strong, a survey released last month by the University of California, Berkeley, found that more than half the young adults questioned had become more concerned about privacy than they were five years ago ”” mirroring the number of people their parent’s age or older with that worry.

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Students applying to colleges are advised to do a lot: Make good grades; get good recommendations; play a sport; edit the yearbook; invent a simple, hand-held device that would run on solar energy and would provide a simple solution to climate change.

But those students are also being advised not to do one important thing: Leave a cyber trail that admissions offices can follow directly to their Facebook pages.

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