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<strong>Title: </strong> <a href="/article/235929875-fewer-options-open-to-pay-for-costs-of-college" target="_blank">Fewer Options Open to Pay for Costs of College</a>
<strong>Category:</strong> <a href="/topics/49-health-care-and-social-policy" target="_blank">Health Care and Social Policy</a>
<strong>Written By: </strong> <a href="/profiles/RPW" target="_blank">RPW</a>
<strong>Date: </strong> Saturday, April 12 at 18:22<br><br>
<p>Is Education Just Another Commmodity -- Or Is It an Absolute Necessity of Modern Society?<br>
<em>(Please note that, while the article deals with US education, we in Canada are very much tied to the predelictions of that nation)</em></p>
<p>Parents will have to navigate unfamiliar and difficult terrain when it comes time to pay for college this year, with student loan companies in turmoil and banks tightening their standards and raising rates on other types of borrowing.</p>
<p>Lawmakers and the administration are trying to head off any crisis by making sure that “lenders of last resort” stand ready to take the place of companies that have left the federal loan program. And a growing number of colleges have applied to participate in the federal direct loan program, in which students borrow from the government.</p>
<p>But families often use a combination of resources to pay for college, drawing on savings, federal loans, bank loans and home loans to plug the gap between college costs and financial aid.</p>
<p>Even if the government wards off problems in the credit markets and federal student loans are easily accessible, other sources of financing will become less accessible as consumers find themselves stretched thin and lenders get more choosy.</p><br><a href="/article/235929875-fewer-options-open-to-pay-for-costs-of-college">read more >></a>

[RPW]

And ain't it amazing how "economically depressed areas", engineered by generations of administrations, both Democrat and Republican, are now being used by same to demonstrate their "connectiveness" to the American people. It is after all, much easier to take advantage of a tragic, growing, and fatal situation, than it is to do something about it.

http://koreanpower999.wordpress.com/200 ... ll-chosen/

Senator Barack Obama fought back Saturday against accusations from his rivals that he had displayed a profound misunderstanding of small-town values, in a flare-up that left him on the defensive before a series of primaries that could test his ability to win over white voters in economically distressed communities.

For a second day, Mr. Obama sought to explain his remarks at a recent San Francisco fund-raiser that small-town Pennsylvania voters, bitter over their economic circumstances, “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them” as a way to explain their frustrations.

Mr. Obama, of Illinois, had already been under pressure to show that he was capable of connecting with voters in industrial states who have been hit hard by years of economic upheaval and now feel especially vulnerable in the new downturn.

[Ed Deak]

When I was going to college in England in the early post war years, under the then still real Labour government of Clement Attlee, we hardly paid anything and were allowed to take as many courses as we could handle. I checked this out and compared notes with a local , retired UBC professor who was at Cambridge about the same time , and we agreed that this was true.

The country was still bombed out , there was a tremendous housing shortage, and the Labour govt. has made some stupid decisions, like the nationalization of all trucking outfits, but they also made some excellent ones and virtually free education certainly was one of them.

The talent that goes down the drain at the present time, for the lack of imaginary money invested in the right causes, is a crime wave in itself, but it is "economically efficient" in the warped minds of economists and politicians.

Ed Deak, Big Lake, BC.
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