He's just happy to see you.
"Students’ efforts put campus sex assaults into spotlight" by Marcella Bombardieri | Globe Staff May 03, 2014
Dana Bolger, who graduated from Amherst College in January, says she was raped and stalked by a fellow student in 2011, during her sophomore year. She says a dean advised her to take time off and wait for her rapist to graduate. While she found that advice “shady,” she didn’t know her legal rights at the time and ended up taking a semester off.
But then she found a lawyer, Colby Bruno, who is senior legal counsel at the Victim Rights Law Center in Boston, which represents pro bono about 40 to 50 college sexual assault victims a year, and helped her file a formal complaint with Amherst. She said that she can’t discuss the details of the case, but that she ultimately returned to campus feeling safe.
Her activism grew from a desire to share her story to feel less alone. She found more and more sexual assault survivors who had similar experiences, some, she said, who were also victimized by her rapist. She was one of several students whose protests put Amherst into the national news in fall 2012, prompting an anguished promise from the president to change the campus climate.
The Amherst students were able to learn from a student at Yale, who had already been part of a similar campaign. Then counterparts from the University of North Carolina contacted Bolger on Twitter, and she gave them advice over Skype.
The connections grew from there, Bolger said, and ultimately she and a group of others decided to launch Know Your IX. After raising $11,000 on a crowd-funding website, they debuted a sophisticated website full of guidance on topics including Title IX rights, how to start a campaign on one’s own campus, how to transfer schools, and how to deal with skepticism that a man can be an assault victim.
They also organized a protest last summer outside the US Department of Education, which drew attention from the White House.
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This week, the White House raised the public pressure to a new level, issuing new requirements for colleges to both prevent and respond to violence. The Department of Education issued an unusual finding that Tufts University is violating Title IX, the federal law mandating gender equity on campus and could lose its federal funding. And the Education Department revealed for the first time the full list of colleges under federal investigation for their handling of sexual assaults, currently 55 schools, including six in Massachusetts.
The latest push from the White House is at least partly in response to a savvy and rapidly expanding crop of young student activists, many of them sexual assault survivors, who have made the issue impossible to ignore. They built informal networks to pass legal and public relations advice from one campus to another in what one called a “domino effect.”
Some went on to create national grass-roots organizations such as Know Your IX to pressure individual universities and the federal government to take the issue seriously.
Suddenly, it is hard to find a college president who has not issued a statement promising to do more and do better in helping victims of sexual violence.
Some of the credit for the blossoming of activism goes back to the Obama administration, which three years ago offered encouragement to students to file government complaints if they felt mistreated.
They were pressured to act, took advantage of the issue for political gain, and now we are told it was all their idea from the start!
Is there no cock-$ucking so low as to which this $hamele$$ mouthpiece of a pre$$ won't stoop
So what is Obama going to get credit for next, the flush toilet?
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Advocates believe these searing accounts are helping to fuel the intense scrutiny colleges find themselves under from the Obama administration and critics....
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Maybe it's the professors that are the problem.
Well, I definitely sense a theme and agenda at work, and am sure if I just apply myself I can get off (what a melee).
Another kind of rape:
"Student loan interest rates to rise with 10-year Treasury note" by Janet Lorin | Bloomberg News May 03, 2014
NEW YORK — College students who take out federal loans are likely to see interest rates jump, potentially by a percentage point or more, in the coming academic year.
As predicted one this very site so long ago since rates had nowhere to go but up.
Last year, the government began to peg rates on most student loans to the Treasury 10-year note.
That was the deal that dropped rates for you kids, remember?
Stafford loans, the most widely borrowed, carried an undergraduate rate of 3.86 percent for the 2013-2014 school year. In the past three months, the 10-year yield has traded 0.80 to 1 percentage point higher than a year ago, which means education borrowing costs may rise.
Interest rates for the school year beginning July 1 will be determined following the Treasury’s 10-year note auction on May 7. While interest rates are fixed for the life of an education loan, borrowers take out a separate loan for each school year. Federal loans make up most of the $1.2 trillion in outstanding education debt, which has become a drag on the economy in recent years as many borrowers struggle to repay.
Don't tell that to the graduates.
‘‘The interest rates that people are going to be paying on these student loans are going to go up, making the cost of college that much more burdensome,’’ said David Ader, head of interest rate strategy at CRT Capital. ‘‘As the years come on, they’re more likely to come up than come down.’’
Just like I said!
In the current year, graduate Stafford loans had a 5.41 percent interest rate, while PLUS loans for graduate students or for parents paying their undergraduate children’s college costs were set at 6.41 percent.
The Congressional Budget Office projected rates for the 2014-2015 school year of 5.09 percent for undergraduate Stafford loans, 6.64 percent for graduate Staffords, and 7.64 percent for PLUS loans, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Even with a probable increase, rates on most government loans will still be below the levels before Congress began tying them to the 10-year note. In the academic years starting in 2011 and 2012, the Stafford rate for undergraduate and graduate students regardless of their income level was 6.8 percent while the rate on PLUS loans was 7.9 percent.
That's because Congress let the rates lapse!
See: Warren Whips Up Students
The Democrats thought using you kids as pawns would be politically useful to Obummer.
While rates are rising, federal loans are still a safer option than private loans, according to Pauline Abernathy, vice president of the Institute for College Access & Success, a nonprofit research and advocacy group in Oakland, Calif. Private loans often carry variable interest rates and don’t have the same kinds of protections as government loans, such as income-based repayment....
It's le$$ of a $crewing.
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Liz Warren getting nowhere, but credit unions are willing to take the risk:
"Taking risk, credit unions push student loans; Interest rates, default level high" by Deirdre Fernandes | Globe Staff March 03, 2014
Credit unions, in the hunt for younger customers and higher returns, are rapidly expanding sales of private student loans and grabbing the attention of regulators worried about the increased risks these member-owned institutions are taking.
Many credit unions in Massachusetts are among those entering the market, even as some of the nation’s biggest commercial banks are leaving, partly because of the growing risks of default as college students take on higher levels of debt, only to graduate into a labor market with few jobs....
For once the truth popped out of their pants!
Private student loans have become attractive to credit unions during a period of low interest rates that have squeezed the revenues of lenders everywhere....
You are better off going to the Feds, kids.
Massachusetts, with its many universities, is fertile ground for private student loans, and it makes sense for credit unions to want a piece of that business, said Perry O’Grady, a partner with Silver Sword Capital Partners, a sales and marketing firm in Newton. But collecting on these loans can be a challenge, he said, pointing to several big banks that are getting out of the business.
Yup, everyone wants a piece of you kids, and the big banks threw you away after they were done with you!
JPMorgan Chase of New York, the country’s largest bank, scaled back its student lending as federal regulators increased scrutiny of rising student debt, pegged at $1.1 trillion last year, and investors, fearful of rising defaults, backed off of buying the loans. Minneapolis-based US Bank stopped accepting new student loan applications after 2012.
Many credit unions have entered the private student loan industry by contracting with third parties, called credit union servicing organizations. These for-profit businesses provide credit screening and collection services for credit unions that don’t have the money and staff to do it themselves....
See: Lip-Smacking Debt Collectors
Get rid of the cellphone, kids.
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Even the aid is for the advantaged or the wealthy(?).
NEXT DAY UPDATE:
"White teenagers from wealthy families—who are already ahead in practically every way imaginable—are also the likeliest by far to have jobs. Whatever it is that early jobs provide—pocket money, work experience, soft skills—those benefits are going disproportionately to this more privileged group. The tightening teen job market has energized advocates and policy makers."
So if it isn't the illegal immigrant getting the job it is those with connections, huh?
Related(?): The wealthiest philanthropists did not give as much in 2013 as they gave before the Great Recession, even as a strong stock market and better business climate have continued to concentrate American wealth in the top 1 percent of earners.
What you kids need is a get-you-up speech:
"Napolitano tells NU grads to embrace life’s ‘zigs and zags’" by Matt Rocheleau | Globe correspondent May 02, 2014
Janet Napolitano, former US homeland security secretary, urged Northeastern University’s 2014 graduating class Friday not to fear life’s “zigs and zags.”
“Beware the tyranny of the straight line,” she repeated during her keynote speech at the school’s 112th commencement inside TD Garden in Boston Friday, this spring’s first local college graduation.
She would have been in a position to know.
Using sailboats as a metaphor, she explained to the 3,520 graduates: “Sailboats do not glide through the water in a straight line. They tack. They zig-zag from here to there. That’s how they move forward.”
When the graduates return for their 50th reunion, she said, “my hope for you is that you will look back on the decades that have passed and see the twists and turns, the tacking, that are the hallmark of a well-lived life,” said Napolitano, who became president of the University of California system in the fall.
Related: Natty Napolitano
Graduates wearing the standard black robes and mortarboards typed on smartphones, undoubtedly sending texts and tweets, and snapped photos of each other, themselves, and the packed arena. As groups of students shuffled to the stage, other Huskies batted around beach balls.
An estimated crowd of 20,000-plus — including family, faculty, and administrators — looked on, cheering frequently and waving to graduates below. Video of the event streamed on the arena’s Jumbotron.
Napolitano, the former governor and attorney general of Arizona, became the third homeland security secretary and the first woman to hold the job when President Obama appointed her in 2009. She led the Cabinet agency, which was created after 9/11, until 2013.
This past September, she became the first woman president of California’s 10-campus public higher education system, which boasts more than 234,000 students and 208,000 faculty and staff.
Napolitano, who has devoted most of her professional life to public sector jobs, also told the graduates not to let salary dictate their decisions.
“It’s not how much [money] you make in life,” she said. “You don’t go to college so you can punch a clock.”
She added: “The point is making a difference.”
Napolitano, who appointed Northeastern president Joseph E. Aoun to the Homeland Security Department’s academic advisory council two years ago, also sprinkled humor into her speech, including jokes alluding to popular campus-area food and drink options.
“This is the time to ask yourself a few serious questions,” she said. “Without Rebecca’s, where will I buy chicken fingers? Without Symphony Sushi, where will I take my dates? Without Conor Larkin’s, where will I meet up with my friends?”
Napolitano was one of three honorary degree recipients. They also went to rapper and actor James Todd Smith, more commonly known as LL Cool J, and former NFL player Wade Davis, who is openly gay and heads an organization promoting inclusion in sports.
They even drag the “recent racist remarks linked to Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling” into this article.
Related: Leader of Los Angeles NAACP resigns amid fury over Sterling honor
Also see: Sick of Sterling Story
I'm even more sick of it after I saw an apologist blackmailer(?) on ABCESPN earlier this morning as I reflect upon what can only be described as a very disturbing interview regarding the mental stability of the woman V(?). A self-described silly rabbit bringing gang members to the games?
I guess the overall point is Jewish racists aren't racists after all, or certainly are not as bad as those they tar with that brush. Deserving of sympathy in any regard.
Related: Bruins condemn racist comments directed at P.K. Subban
I'm not surprised given the racist schools 'roun' h're (although Obama is going to fix that).
I'm done scrubbing for now. Going to go watch game 2.
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Tom Sweeney of Medfield celebrated with his parents, brother, and grandparents. At Northeastern, Sweeney earned degrees in management and finance, completed three on-the-job placements that are Northeastern’s hallmark, and studied in Greece. He will soon begin a job at a Boston-based startup.
“We couldn’t be more proud,” said his father, Jack Sweeney, smiling.
Pennsylvania native Branden Lee said he was thrilled to get his communications degree, adding, “I’m really excited for what’s next.”
But he said he is also sad to leave friends.
“I have a lot of great memories,” he said. “I loved it here.”
Now there are student loans to pay while looking for work that is not there.
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It's costing how much?
Turns out the kids are a lot smarter than I'm giving them credit for:
"‘Millennials’ cynical about politics; Harvard poll finds low interest in midterm elections" by Joshua Miller | Globe Staff April 29, 2014
A new poll of 18- to 29-year-olds found members of the millennial generation are cynical about the political process, increasingly distrustful of the institutions of American government, concerned about economic inequality in the United States, and exhibit low interest in voting in the midterm elections.
Related: "
High-income families are spending more time and money than ever on their children’s education, further widening the gulf between rich and poor students, according to a new report."
Also see: Student loan debt making US wealth gap more dramatic
Getting a hard-on yet, kids?
More than half of respondents in the survey, released Tuesday morning by Harvard University’s Institute of Politics, said they think elected officials don’t share their priorities, and almost two-thirds said elected officials seem motivated by selfish reasons. Less than a quarter of the millennials polled said they will definitely be voting in November.
That last bit is bad news for Democrats.
“It’s been clear for some time now that young people are growing more disillusioned and disconnected from Washington,” said Harvard Institute of Politics polling director John Della Volpe in a statement. “There’s an erosion of trust in the individuals and institutions that make government work — and now we see the lowest level of interest in any election we’ve measured since 2000.”
Well, that's what happens when you have a lying, looting government. Even the kids who have been inundated and barraged with government propaganda their entire lives see it.
The poll found millennials’ trust in American institutions, such as the president, the military, and the Supreme Court, has declined over the past year. In 2013, for example, 54 percent of respondents said they trusted the US military to do the right thing all or most of the time. That number dropped to 47 percent in the new poll.
It also found millennials jaded about politics and politicians.
Fifty-eight percent of respondents agreed with the statement “Elected officials don’t seem to have the same priorities I have,” while only 9 percent disagreed with it.
Sixty-two percent agreed with the statement, “Elected officials seem to be motivated by selfish reasons,” while only 7 percent disagreed.
Those percentages are shocking and shameful if you are in government, although true.
The poll found low interest among millennials in the November midterm elections, which will determine whether Republicans or Democrats control the Senate and House of Representatives. Twenty-three percent of respondents said they “definitely will be voting,” 16 percent said they will probably be voting, a quarter said it was “50-50” if they will vote. A combined 36 percent said they probably or definitely will not be voting.
And in a potentially foreboding sign for Democrats, self-identified conservatives were 10 points more likely than liberals to say they will definitely vote in November, the survey found.
Obama is going to have a Republican Senate for this last two years.
Economic issues were also of concern.
Just over half of those surveyed said they believed the income gap between the rich and everyone else in America was a major problem. Sixty-four percent said that gap had increased in their lifetimes.
And they tried to voice their concerns through peaceful protests, but were beaten down by the same government that talks the inequality talk while walking the $tatu$ quo. The kids are obviously no longer fooled by the political $hit $how.
But the poll also found an abiding faith among millennials in the idea that each generation can do as well as or better than their parents. Forty-one percent said they believed when they are their parents’ age, they will be better off financially than their parents are now; 28 percent said they believed they would be doing about the same as their parents. Only 15 percent expected to be worse off financially.
The myth of the American Dream still lives.
“It’s not all gloomy,” Della Volpe, the pollster, said in an interview. He added the generation does have an unflappable “faith in their community, their country” and they “care deeply about making both of those things better.”
Meaning most of them are good kids.
Meanwhile, looking toward the 2016 race for the White House, 52 percent of respondents had a favorable view of Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state who is seen as a top Democratic contender for president. Forty-two percent had an unfavorable view of her, and 5 percent had never heard of her.
I suppose that is the common view of her.
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, a potential Republican White House hopeful, was less known and seen less favorably among millennials, the poll found. Twenty-one percent had a favorable view of him and 39 percent had an unfavorable view. Thirty-nine percent had never heard of the second-term governor, who has seen his political fortunes fall in the wake of the imbroglio over lane closings at a George Washington Bridge toll plaza in September....
Who cares? It's unlikely disillusioned youth will vote anyway.
Besides, presidential politics is leaving me limp at this stage.
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Looks to me like the kids already have the critical thinking skills regarding Common Core and the SAT is in its last ACT. They know who comes first.
At least there is always the Army, kids -- or babysitting.
Related: U.S. Military Making Their Move
How would you like to serve in the Ukraine, kiddo?
