Jeff Stahler for October 28, 2011

@towie: You abliviously don’t know what you are talking about—again.

As for the toon: College tution has gone up thanks in part by states gutting them from their budget. Yeah it saves the state money (which they use to fund private schools) but then we start to wonder why Toyota has to build factories up north when they can’t find an educated work force here.

I hadn’t heard of loans being forgiven, just restructured.

Tuition at PUBLIC universities and colleges has soared because of “detaxification”, making students pick up ever higher costs, without tax support for education, as Franklin and others thought a laudable investment. My son is back in college, and getting “aid” to cover expenses. All he had to do was spend thirteen years risking getting shot or blown up, and becoming a disabled veteran. Thankfully, the “righties” haven’t quite succeeded in cutting all veterans benefits, but last October, they did reduce them again. Yep, support our troops is really the marching song of the right, NOT!!

I say the GI Bill is the BEST investment we can support for those who risked all to serve our country. And, I got my BS in Nursing totally on grants & scholarships… working full time in a nursing home. I wish ALL kids could have the opportunity I was afforded – because my parents were destitute.

From StatsCan about university tuition fees in Canada:“Canadian full-time students in undergraduate programs this fall paid 4.0% more on average in tuition fees for the 2010/2011 academic year than they did a year earlier. This increase is slightly higher than the one for 2009/2010, when tuition fees rose 3.6%.On average, undergraduate students paid $5,138 in tuition fees in 2010/2011 compared with $4,942 a year earlier.In comparison, inflation as measured by the Consumer Price Index increased 1.8% between July 2009 and July 2010.As was the case in 2009/2010, tuition fees rose in all but three provinces. Fees remained unchanged in Newfoundland and Labrador and New Brunswick, while, for a third year in a row, fees declined in Nova Scotia (-4.5%). Elsewhere, tuition fee increases ranged from 1.5% in Alberta to 5.4% in Ontario.On average, undergraduate students in Ontario paid the highest fees ($6,307) in Canada, followed by students in New Brunswick who paid average university tuition fees of $5,516.Undergrads in Quebec and Newfoundland and Labrador continued to have the lowest tuition fees, averaging $2,415 and $2,624 respectively.”

You are quite right; Harvard has been around longer than any other school in the US, and they keep track of their students (who often do rather well for themselves) with ruthless efficiency! That helps a lot. As I said, when you can be very selective and you have a lot of money, you can afford to make up the difference.There were really very few snobs at Harvard that I met — the intellectually arrogant, yes, but that’s a different category. There are a few rich kids (there was someone with a Roman numeral after his name in my freshman dorm, and I knew a few people with names that matched the buildings), some of whom really weren’t “Harvard quality,” but, hey, because people like them paid, I didn’t have to. Actually, my roommate a couple of years later was (and is) independently wealthy, but you’d never know, because he didn’t want anyone to know.I think it’s a shame that more people don’t know that Harvard is so generous and so aggressively looking for smart kids without means. Having said that, there’s nothing wrong with UC, which has perhaps the second-best state school system in the US. (I grew up in NC, so sue me!) State schools are very important in a lot of ways, and they are indeed being cut back enormously. This is tragic and I think is already having a terrible impact on American innovation and intellectual leadership.

My donations go to support undergraduate financial aid and the School of Education, actually. The first is obvious; the second is because the Ed School has the poorest graduates and thus gets less in donations than, say, the B-School.The Kennedy School has long had a fraught relationship with politics; when Reagan was in office the letterhead was quietly changed to “Harvard School of Government” to downplay “Kennedy.” The City of Cambridge, outraged, changed the name of the street the K-School sits on to John F. Kennedy Boulevard to make sure this craven move did not work! (Gotta love those town-gown games.)

It’s been around a long time and had a lot of students — odds are some of them are worthless…