Incoming College Quotes

Grit, persistence, adaptability, financial literacy, interview skills, human relationships, conversation, communication, managing technology, navigating conflicts, preparing healthy food, physical fitness, resilience, self-regulation, time management, basic psychology and mental health practices, arts, and music—all of these would help students and also make school seem much more relevant. Our fixation on college readiness leads our high school curricula toward purely academic subjects and away from life skills. The purpose of education should be to enable a citizen to live a good, positive, socially productive life independent of work.

College is being dramatically overprescribed and oversold as the answer to all of our job-related economic problems.

Indentured servitude is banned, but what about students seeking to sell shares of their future earnings in exchange for money up front to pay for their college tuitions?

The “some college,” “four-year college graduate,” and “no college” types who have high incomes often had a head start on many well-educated workers.

College families' were a new concept to me. At Durham, students in their second and third years paired up to act as a mentor team, or 'college parents' for a small group of incoming freshers, who were their 'college children'. I kind of loved it. It made a romance out of something absolutely mundane, which was something that I was incredibly experienced at.

Our fixation on college readiness leads our high school curricula toward purely academic subjects and away from life skills.

JIM AND IRENE Westcott were the kind of people who seem to strike that satisfactory average of income, endeavor, and respectability that is reached by the statistical reports in college alumni bulletins.

In 1971, 73 percent of incoming freshmen said that it is essential or very important to “develop a meaningful philosophy of life,” 37 percent to be “very well-off financially” (not well-off, note, but very well-off). By 2011, the numbers were almost reversed, 47 percent and 80 percent, respectively. For well over thirty years, we’ve been loudly announcing that happiness is money, with a side order of fame. No wonder students have come to believe that college is all about getting a job.

Among college-educated, never-married individuals with no children who worked full-time and were from 40 to 64 years old—that is, beyond the child-bearing years—men averaged $40,000 a year in income, while women averaged $47,000.

Exploitation thrives when it comes to the essentials, like housing and food. Most of the 12 million Americans who take out high-interest payday loans do so not to buy luxury items or cover unexpected expenses but to pay the rent or gas bill, buy food, or meet other regular expenses. Payday loans are but one of many financial techniques—from overdraft fees to student loans for for-profit colleges—specifically designed to pull money from the pockets of the poor.46 If the poor pay more for their housing, food, durable goods, and credit, and if they get smaller returns on their educations and mortgages (if they get returns at all), then their incomes are even smaller than they appear. This is fundamentally unfair.

Baby Steps: Step 1: $1,000 in an emergency fund. Step 2: Pay off all debt except the house utilizing the debt snowball. Step 3: Three to six months of savings in a fully-funded emergency fund. Step 4: Invest 15% of your household income into Roth IRAs and pre-tax retirement plans. Step 5: College Funding (i.e. 529 plan). Step 6: Pay off your home early. Step 7: Build wealth and give.

[If we extrapolate the United States population down to a 100-people village]This village that you inhabit has 14 illiterate members and 27 who have a college education; 5 of the villagers earn a third of the village’s entire income, while 6 of them earn less than .3 percent of it; 40 of them think and hope your village is headed towards a biblical end-times Armageddon; and 7 of them own a Britney Spears album.

how happy individuals were as college freshmen predicted how high their income was nineteen years later, regardless of their initial level of wealth.

When I told my sister, who was a fashion designer in college, what I wanted to do, she said I was crazy. But once I got started, I couldn't turn back. Kimberly Goodwin, Snapping Turtle Kids

I had started on the marriage and motherhood beat by accident with a post on my personal, read only by friends, blog called ‘Fifty Shades of Men’. I had written it after buying Fifty Shades of Grey to spice up what Dave and I half-jokingly called our grown up time, and had written a meditation on how the sex wasn’t the sexiest part of the book. “Dear publishers, I will tell you why every woman with a ring on her finger and a car seat in her SUV is devouring this book like the candy she won’t let herself eat.” I had written. “It’s not the fantasy of an impossibly handsome guy who can give you an orgasm just by stroking your nipples. It is instead the fantasy of a guy who can give you everything. Hapless, clueless, barely able to remain upright without assistance, Ana Steele is that unlikeliest of creatures, a college student who doesn’t have an email address, a computer, or a clue. Turns out she doesn’t need any of those things. Here is the dominant Christian Grey and he’ll give her that computer plus an iPad, a beamer, a job, and an identity, sexual and otherwise. No more worrying about what to wear. Christian buys her clothes. No more stress about how to be in the bedroom. Christian makes those decisions. For women who do too much—which includes, dear publishers, pretty much all the women who have enough disposable income to buy your books—this is the ultimate fantasy: not a man who will make you come, but a man who will make agency unnecessary, a man who will choose your adventure for you.

Contemporary American politics also revolve around this contradiction. Democrats want a more equitable society, even if it means raising taxes to fund programmes to help the poor, elderly and infirm. But that infringes on the freedom of individuals to spend their money as they wish. Why should the government force me to buy health insurance if I prefer using the money to put my kids through college? Republicans, on the other hand, want to maximise individual freedom, even if it means that the income gap between rich and poor will grow wider and that many Americans will not be able to afford health care.

Gertie sighed. “There was a time when a person could work part time and cover living expenses for college. But nowadays, you need full-time income to cover things, especially when you’re making the minimum

At the nation’s top 130 colleges and universities, only 9 percent of first-year students are from the bottom half of the nation’s household income distribution, while 91 percent are from families in the top half of the income range.

The rest of us, on the ·other hand-we members of the protected classes-have grown increasingly· dependent on our welfare programs. In 2020 the federal government spent more than $193 billion on homeowner subsidies, a figure that far exceeded the amount spent on direct housing assistance for low income families ($53 billion). Most families who enjoy those subsidies have six-figure incomes and are white. Poor families lucky enough to live in government-owned apartments of often have to deal with mold and even lead paint, while rich families are claiming the mortgage interest deduction on first and second homes. The lifetime limit for cash welfare to poor parents is five years, but families claiming the mortgage interest deduction may do so for the length of the mortgage, typically thirty years. A fifteen-story public housing tower and a mortgaged suburban home are both government subsidized, but only one looks (and feels) that way. If you count all public benefits offered by the federal government, America's welfare state (as a share of its gross domestic product) is the second biggest in the world, after France's. But that's true only if you include things like government-subsidized retirement benefits provided by employers, student loans and 529 college savings plans, child tax credits, and homeowner subsidies: benefits disproportionately flowing to Americans well above the poverty line. If you put aside these tax breaks and judge the United States solely by the share of its GDP allocated to programs directed at low-income citizens, then our investment in poverty reduction is much smaller than that of other rich nations. The American welfare state is lopsided.

I went back to de Tocqueville. After studying the French Revolution, he wrote that revolts tend to start not in places where conditions are worst, but in places where expectations are most unmet. So if you’ve been raised to believe your life will unfold a certain way—say, with a steady union job that doesn’t require a college degree but does provide a middle-class income, with traditional gender roles intact and everyone speaking English—and then things don’t work out the way you expected, that’s when you get angry. It’s about loss. It’s about the sense that the future is going to be harder than the past. Fundamentally, I believe that the despair we saw in so many parts of America in 2016 grew out of the same problems that Lee Atwater and I were worried about twenty-five years ago.

As far back as 1969, black males who came from homes where there were newspapers, magazines, and library cards had the same incomes as whites from similar homes and with the same number of years of schooling.82 In the 1970s, black husband-and-wife families outside the South earned as much as white husband-and-wife families outside the South.83 By 1981, for the country as a whole, black husband-and-wife families where both were college educated and both working earned slightly more than white families of the same description.

Once without peer, the United States has fallen to nineteenth in college completion in the OECD, and the gap in completion between higher-income and lower-income students has widened.56 Older Americans are the most educated in the world. Younger Americans, not even close.

Universities today loudly proclaim their commitment to diversity. But in the meantime, democratization through public investment has been replaced by democratization through consumer credit, effectively transferring the costs of diversity back to the individual student and her family. The beauty of securitized credit is that it excludes no one a priori. By abstracting from class stratification in the present, it can accommodate all differences preemptively simply by pricing them at variable rates and deferring repayment to some barely imaginable point in the future. In principle, we all have access to a college education, no matter how much we or our parents earn. Yet, private credit does not merely obscure the effects of class; it also actively exacerbates inequality by forcing those without income or collateral to pay higher rates for the same service. When the long-term costs of credit begin to materialize and accumulate, students are once again confronted with the intractable resistances of class, race, and gender stratification. The divisions of family wealth reassert themselves with all their historical force.

Another example is the modern political order. Ever since the French Revolution, people throughout the world have gradually come to see both equality and individual freedom as fundamental values. Yet the two values contradict each other. Equality can be ensured only by curtailing the freedoms of those who are better off. Guaranteeing that every individual will be free to do as he wishes inevitably short-changes equality. The entire political history of the world since 1789 can be seen as a series of attempts to reconcile this contradiction. Anyone who has read a novel by Charles Dickens knows that the liberal regimes of nineteenth-century Europe gave priority to individual freedom even if it meant throwing insolvent poor families in prison and giving orphans little choice but to join schools for pickpockets. Anyone who has read a novel by Alexander Solzhenitsyn knows how Communism’s egalitarian ideal produced brutal tyrannies that tried to control every aspect of daily life. Contemporary American politics also revolve around this contradiction. Democrats want a more equitable society, even if it means raising taxes to fund programmes to help the poor, elderly and infirm. But that infringes on the freedom of individuals to spend their money as they wish. Why should the government force me to buy health insurance if I prefer using the money to put my kids through college? Republicans, on the other hand, want to maximise individual freedom, even if it means that the income gap between rich and poor will grow wider and that many Americans will not be able to afford health care. Just as medieval culture did not manage to square chivalry with Christianity, so the modern world fails to square liberty with equality. But this is no defect. Such contradictions are an inseparable part of every human culture. In fact, they are culture’s engines, responsible for the creativity and dynamism of our species. Just

White vulnerability’ and ‘racial resentment’ are in themselves euphemisms (political correctness is sometimes not a myth, you see, when it comes to refusing to call prejudices what they actually are). Both terms imply that Trump voters’ motivation was legitimate and understandable – they were just vulnerable and resentful. ‘Racial entitlement’ would be a more accurate and less unnecessarily forgiving descriptor. Racial entitlement, rather than economic concerns, made Trump a more attractive proposition for white voters who, in the millennial category, were in fact less likely to be economically deprived than voters who did not support Trump. White non-Hispanics without college degrees making below the median US household income made up only 25 per cent of Trump voters. On the whole, Hillary Clinton lost to Trump among white voters in every single income category, across classes, educations and incomes. He won among poor working-class voters and their wealthy overlords. This was not an economic revolution; it was a white nationalist one.

If you count all benefits, America’s welfare state (as a share of its gross domestic product) is the second biggest in the world, after France’s. But that’s true only if you include things like government-subsidized retirement benefits provided by employers, student loans and 529 college savings plans, child tax credits, and homeowner subsidies: benefits disproportionately flowing to Americans well above the poverty line. If you put aside these tax breaks and judge the United States solely by the share of its GDP allocated to programs directed at low-income citizens, then our investment in poverty reduction is much smaller than that of other rich nations. The American welfare state is lopsided.[22]

showed that even with the considerable increase in the average level of education over the course of the twentieth century, earned income inequality did not decrease. Qualification levels shifted upward: a high school diploma now represents what a grade school certificate used to mean, a college degree what a high school diploma used to stand for, and so on.

Deferral of gratification may be an effect, not a cause. Just because some children were more effective than others at distracting themselves from [the marshmallow in the famous Marshmallow Test] doesn't mean this capacity was responsible for the impressive results found ten years later. Instead, both of these things may have been due to something about their home environment. If that's true, there's no reason to believe that enhancing children's ability to defer gratification would be beneficial: It was just a marker, not a cause. By way of analogy, teenagers who visit ski resorts over winter break probably have a superior record of being admitted to the Ivy League. Should we therefore hire consultants to teach low-income children how to ski in order to improve the odds that colleges will accept them?

To review briefly, in the late 1960s, men got paid more than women (usually double) for doing the exact same job. Women could get credit cards in their husband's names but not their own, and many divorced, single and separated women could not get cards at all. Women could not get mortgages on their own and if a couple applied for a mortgage, only the husband's income was considered. Women faced widespread and consistent discrimination in education, scholarship awards, and on the job. In most states the collective property of a marriage was legally the husband's since the wife had allegedly not contributed to acquiring it. Women were largely kept out of a whole host of jobs--doctor, college professor, bus driver, business manager--that women today take for granted. They were knocked out in the delivery room... once women got pregnant they were either fired from their jobs or expected to quit. If they were women of color, it was worse on all fronts--work education, health care. (And talk about slim pickings. African American men were being sent to prison and cut out of jobs by the millions.) Most women today, having seen reruns of The Brady Bunch and Father Knows Best, and having heard of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, the bestseller that attacked women's confinement to the home, are all too familiar with the idealized yet suffocating media images of happy, devoted housewives. In fact, most of us have learned to laugh at them, vacuuming in their stockings and heels, clueless about balancing a checkbook, asking dogs directions to the neighbor's. But we should not permit our ability to distance ourselves from these images to erase the fact that all women--and we mean all women--were, in the 1950s and '60s supposed to internalize this ideal, to live it and believe it.

The issue of unequal access to higher education is increasingly a subject of debate in the United States. Research has shown that the proportion of college degrees earned by children whose parents belong to the bottom two quartiles of the income hierarchy stagnated at 10–20 percent in 1970–2010, while it rose from 40 to 80 percent for children with parents in the top quartile.30 In other words, parents’ income has become an almost perfect predictor of university access.

And I’m with Alan Greenspan, who—surprisingly, given his libertarian roots—has repeatedly warned that growing inequality poses a threat to “democratic society.” It may take some time before we muster the political will to counter that threat. But the first step toward doing something about inequality is to abandon the 80–20 fallacy. It’s time to face up to the fact that rising inequality is driven by the giant income gains of a tiny elite, not the modest gains of college graduates.

More fundamentally, meritocracy is impossible to achieve, because, as Young says, a meritocracy is always based on an imperfect definition of merit and often narrowly defined to favor training, connections, and education primarily available to the wealthy. Take Stanford. Because Stanford is filled with students with top high-school GPAs and SAT scores, administrators can pat themselves on the back and say, “We only admit the best students. We’re a meritocracy.” The students are encouraged to think similarly. But is it just a coincidence that the median annual family income of a Stanford student is $167,500 while the national median is roughly one-third that? Did those high-achieving students naturally get high SAT scores, or did they benefit from their parents’ paying for tutors and sending them to private schools? Privilege accumulates as you advance in life. If the college you attend is the basis of your future employment networks, then it is impossible to say that your employment success is solely based on merit.

One result of the federal government’s student financial aid programs is higher tuition costs at our nation’s colleges and universities.” Although paradoxical, this result could have been predicted from basic economic theory: when students can come up with more money for college, thanks to the government’s efforts, colleges can afford to increase their tuition. “The empirical evidence is consistent with that—federal loans, Pell grants, and other assistance programs result in higher tuition for students at our nation’s colleges and universities.

Income from the Maryland province had already helped finance the school that would become Saint Louis University in Missouri and established the Washington Seminary, which later became Gonzaga College High School, in the nation's capital. It also supported Georgetown Preparatory School, a private Catholic high school now located in North Bethesda, Maryland, which was once part of Georgetown College. ... Meanwhile, Jesuits based west of the Mississippi River, who also relied on slave labor, ran colleges in Kentucky, Alabama, Louisiana, and Ohio.

Her husband had pursued an “alternative lifestyle” that was “free of the fetters of capitalism.” The woman herself, when she was in college, had considered the conformist pressures of getting good grades, building a resume, and landing a job in some big corporation to be tedious and distasteful and had thought the life her husband wanted dovetailed with hers. They got married as soon as she graduated, and she got a job right after. She learned quickly that an “alternative lifestyle” meant nothing without a detailed, concrete plan, and living “free of the fetters of capitalism” meant working for places that didn’t pay their workers on time. As she worried about realizing this alternative lifestyle in the real world, she crumbled away under the pressures of working at a company in the non-profit sector that was run not by the normal labor of workers, but through their unrequited sacrifices. Meanwhile, her husband, who was her upperclassman in college but graduated later than she did, fiddled around in search of his ideal “alternative lifestyle” without ever settling down on any particular profession—the result being the twenty-million-won loan he had taken out and used up without her knowledge.

suggest funding college, or at least the first step of college, with an Educational Savings Account (ESA), funded in a growth-stock mutual fund. The Educational Savings Account, nicknamed the Education IRA, grows tax-free when used for higher education. If you invest $2,000 a year from birth to age eighteen in prepaid tuition, that would purchase about $72,000 in tuition, but through an ESA in mutual funds averaging 12 percent, you would have $126,000 tax-free. The ESA currently allows you to invest $2,000 per year, per child, if your household income is under $220,000 per year. If you start investing early, your child can go to virtually any college if you save $166.67 per month ($2,000/year). For most of you, Baby Step Five is handled if you start an ESA fully funded and your child is under eight. If your children are older, or you have aspirations of expensive schools, graduate school, or PhD programs that you pay for, you will have to save more than the ESA will allow. I would still start with the ESA if the income limits don’t keep you out. Start with the ESA because you can invest it anywhere, in any fund or any mix of funds, and change it at will. It is the most flexible, and you have the most control.

be apart. Despite getting rejected by my top-choice school, I was starting to really believe in myself again based on all the positive feedback we continued to get on our videos. And besides, I knew I could always reapply to Emerson the following year and transfer. • • • College started out great, with the best part being my newly found freedom. I was finally on my own and able to make my own schedule. And not only was Amanda with me, I’d already made a new friend before the first day of classes from a Facebook page that was set up for incoming freshmen. I started chatting with a pretty girl named Chloe who mentioned that she was also going to do the film and video concentration. Fitchburg isn’t located in the greatest neighborhood, but the campus has lots of green lawns and old brick buildings that look like mansions. My dorm room was a forced triple—basically a double that the school added bunk beds to in order to squeeze one extra person in. I arrived first and got to call dibs on the bunk bed that had an empty space beneath it. I moved my desk under it and created a little home office for myself. I plastered the walls with Futurama posters and made up the bed with a new bright green comforter and matching pillows. My roommates were classic male college stereotypes—the football player and the stoner. Their idea of decorating was slapping a Bob Marley poster and a giant ad for Jack Daniels on the wall.

It’s easy to raise graduation rates, for example, by lowering standards. Many students struggle with math and science prerequisites and foreign languages. Water down those requirements, and more students will graduate. But if one goal of our educational system is to produce more scientists and technologists for a global economy, how smart is that? It would also be a cinch to pump up the income numbers for graduates. All colleges would have to do is shrink their liberal arts programs, and get rid of education departments and social work departments while they’re at it, since teachers and social workers make less money than engineers, chemists, and computer scientists. But they’re no less valuable to society.

The integrationist transformation of King as color-blind and race-neutral erases the actual King. He did not live to integrate Black spaces and people into White oblivion. If he did, then why did he build low-income Atlanta apartments “using Negro workmen, Negro architects, Negro attorneys, and Negro financial institutions throughout,” as he proudly reported in 1967? Why did he urge Black people to stop being “ashamed of being Black,” to invest in their own spaces? The child of a Black neighborhood, church, college, and organization lived to ensure equal access to public accommodations and equal resources for all racialized spaces, an antiracist strategy as culture-saving as his nonviolence was body-saving.

Today, black families have an average net wealth of $11,000 compared to a white family’s average of $141,900. Pew data reveals that white families have thirteen times more wealth than black families.20 The wealth gap exists at every income and education level. On average, white families with college degrees have over $300,000 more wealth than black families with college degrees. A third of black families have no assets at all.21 Moreover, studies reveal that the gap is accelerating—over the last thirty years, the average wealth of white families has grown at three times the rate for average black families.22 This growing divide perpetuates injustices hard to capture behind the latest news of riots and protests.

Exploitation thrives when it comes to the essentials, like housing and food. Most of the 12 million Americans who take out high-interest payday loans do so not to buy luxury items or cover unexpected expenses but to pay the rent or gas bill, buy food, or meet other regular expenses. Payday loans are but one of many financial techniques—from overdraft fees to student loans for for-profit colleges—specifically designed to pull money from the pockets of the poor.46 If the poor pay more for their housing, food, durable goods, and credit, and if they get smaller returns on their educations and mortgages (if they get returns at all), then their incomes are even smaller than they appear. This is fundamentally unfair. Those

I think the more accurate answer as to why Trump has won working-class support lies in the pain, desperation, and political alienation that millions of working-class Americans now experience and the degree to which the Democratic Party has abandoned them for wealthy campaign contributors and the “beautiful people.” These are Americans who, while the rich get much richer, have seen their real wages stagnate and their good union jobs go to China and Mexico. They can’t afford health care, they can’t afford childcare, they can’t afford to send their kids to college and are scared to death about a retirement with inadequate income. Because of what doctors call “diseases of despair,” their communities are even seeing a decline in life expectancy.

[James M. Buchanan] directed hostility toward college students, public employees, recipients of any kind of government assistance, and liberal intellectuals. His intellectual lineage went back to such bitter establishment opponents of Populism as the social Darwinists Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner. The battle between "the oppressed and their oppressors," as one People's Party publication had termed it in 1892, was redefined in his milieu: "the working masses who produce" became businessmen, and "the favored parasites who prey and fatten on the toil of others" became those who gained anything from government without paying proportional income taxes. "The mighty struggle" became one to hamstring the people who refused to stop making claims on government.

Child psychologists Betty Hart and Todd Risley learned the same thing when they recorded hundreds of hours of interactions between children and adults in forty-two families from across a wide socioeconomic spectrum and assessed the children’s development from nine months to three years. Children in well-to-do families, whose parents were typically college-educated professionals, heard an average of 2,153 words an hour spoken to them. In contrast, the children of low-income families heard an average only 616 words per hour. By their third birthday, the children in well-to-do families heard 30 million more words than economically deprived children and the amount of conversation parents had with their infants was directly proportional to IQ test scores assessed at three years of age and the performance in school of these children at ages nine and ten. (Hart and Risley 2003) The exciting part is that Hart and Risley’s research has spawned conscious parenting initiatives thanks to technology in the form of LENA (Language Environment Analysis) devices. LENA devices work like pedometers except they keep track of words rather than steps. The Thirty Million Words Initiative in Chicago is making LENA devices available to parents so they can track the numbers of words they expose their children to. After six weeks, researchers in Chicago found a 32 percent increase in the number of words the children heard. Says Dr. Dana Suskind, Director of the Thirty Million Words Initiative: “Every parent has the ability to grow their children’s brain and impact their future.” (Suskind 2013)

It is interesting to note that in nearly all the economics courses it is taught that the income tax is the proper instrument for the regulation of the country’s economy; that private property is not an inalienable right (in fact, there are no inalienable rights); that the economic ills of the country are traceable to the remnants of free enterprise; that the economy of the nation can be sound only when the government manages prices, controls wages, and regulates operations. This was not taught in the colleges before 1913. Is there a relationship between the results of the income tax and the thinking of the professors? There is now a strong movement in this country to bring the publicschool system under federal domination. The movement could not have been thought of before the government had the means for carrying out the idea; that is, before income taxation. The question is, have those who plug for nationalization of the schools come to the idea by independent thought, or have they been influenced by the bureaucrats who see in nationalization a wider opportunity for themselves? We must lean to the latter conclusion, because among the leaders of the movement are many bureaucrats. However, if the movement is successful, if the schools are brought under the watching eye of the federal government, it is a certainty that the curriculum will conform to the ideals of Big Government. The child’s mind will never be exposed to the idea that the individual is the one big thing in the world, that he has rights which come from a higher source than the bureaucracy. Thus, the immunities of property, body and mind have been undermined by the Sixteenth Amendment. The freedoms won by Americans in 1776 were lost in the revolution of 1913.

In her book The Government-Citizen Disconnect, the political scientist Suzanne Mettler reports that 96 percent of American adults have relied on a major government program at some point in their lives. Rich, middle-class, and poor families depend on different kinds of programs, but the average rich and middle-class family draws on the same number of government benefits as the average poor family. Student loans look like they were issued from a bank, but the only reason banks hand out money to eighteen-year-olds with no jobs, no credit, and no collateral is because the federal government guarantees the loans and pays half their interest. Financial advisers at Edward Jones or Prudential can help you sign up for 529 college savings plans, but those plans' generous tax benefits will cost the federal government an estimated $28.5 billion between 2017 and 2026. For most Americans under the age of sixty-five, health insurance appears to come from their jobs, but supporting this arrangement is one of the single largest tax breaks issued by the federal government, one that exempts the cost of employer-sponsored health insurance from taxable incomes. In 2022, this benefit is estimated to have cost the government $316 billion for those under sixty-five. By 2032, its price tag is projected to exceed $6oo billion. Almost half of all Americans receive government-subsidized health benefits through their employers, and over a third are enrolled in government-subsidized retirement benefits. These participation rates, driven primarily by rich and middle-class Americans, far exceed those of even the largest programs directed at low income families, such as food stamps (14 percent of Americans) and the Earned Income Tax Credit (19 percent). Altogether, the United States spent $1.8 trillion on tax breaks in 2021. That amount exceeded total spending on law enforcement, education, housing, healthcare, diplomacy, and everything else that makes up our discretionary budget. Roughly half the benefits of the thirteen largest individual tax breaks accrue to the richest families, those with incomes that put them in the top 20 percent. The top I percent of income earners take home more than all middle-class families and double that of families in the bottom 20 percent. I can't tell you how many times someone has informed me that we should reduce military spending and redirect the savings to the poor. When this suggestion is made in a public venue, it always garners applause. I've met far fewer people who have suggested we boost aid to the poor by reducing tax breaks that mostly benefit the upper class, even though we spend over twice as much on them as on the military and national defense.

Hiro would have chalked it all up to class differences, except that her parents lived in a house in Mexicali with a dirt floor, and his father made more money than many college professors. But the class idea still held sway in his mind, because class is more than income -- it has to do with knowing where you stand in a web of social relationships. Juanita and her folks knew where they stood with a certitude that bordered on dementia. Hiro never knew. His father was a sergeant major, his mother was a Korean woman whose people had been mine slaves in Nippon, and Hiro didn't know whether he was black or Asian or just plain Army, whether he was rich or poor, educated or ignorant, talented or lucky. He didn't even have a part of the country to call home until he moved to California, which is about as specific as saying that you live in the Northern Hemisphere. In the end, it was probably his general disorientation that did them in.

Rich, middle-class, and poor families depend on different kinds of programs, but the average rich and middle-class family draws on the same number of government benefits as the average poor family. Student loans look like they were issued from a bank, but the only reason banks hand out money to eighteen-year-olds with no jobs, no credit, and no collateral is because the federal government guarantees the loans and pays half their interest. Financial advisers at Edward Jones or Prudential can help you sign up for 529 college savings plans, but those plans’ generous tax benefits will cost the federal government an estimated $28.5 billion between 2017 and 2026. For most Americans under the age of sixty-five, health insurance appears to come from their jobs, but supporting this arrangement is one of the single largest tax breaks issued by the federal government, one that exempts the cost of employer-sponsored health insurance from taxable incomes.

A 2011 study done by Alan Krueger, a Princeton economics professor who served for two years as the chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, and Stacy Dale, an analyst with Mathematica Policy Research, tried to adjust for that sort of thing. Krueger and Dale examined sets of students who had started college in 1976 and in 1989; that way, they could get a sense of incomes both earlier and later in careers. And they determined that the graduates of more selective colleges could expect earnings 7 percent greater than graduates of less selective colleges, even if the graduates in that latter group had SAT scores and high school GPAs identical to those of their peers at more exclusive institutions. But then Krueger and Dale made their adjustment. They looked specifically at graduates of less selective colleges who had applied to more exclusive ones even though they hadn’t gone there. And they discovered that the difference in earnings pretty much disappeared. Someone with a given SAT score who had gone to Penn State but had also applied to the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League school with a much lower acceptance rate, generally made the same amount of money later on as someone with an equivalent SAT score who was an alumnus of UPenn. It was a fascinating conclusion, suggesting that at a certain level of intelligence and competence, what drives earnings isn’t the luster of the diploma but the type of person in possession of it. If he or she came from a background and a mindset that made an elite institution seem desirable and within reach, then he or she was more likely to have the tools and temperament for a high income down the road, whether an elite institution ultimately came into play or not. This was powerfully reflected in a related determination that Krueger and Dale made in their 2011 study: “The average SAT score of schools that rejected a student is more than twice as strong a predictor of the student’s subsequent earnings as the average SAT score of the school the student attended.

Throughout most of the twentieth century, however, and still today, the available data suggest that social mobility has been and remains lower in the United States than in Europe. One possible explanation for this is the fact that access to the most elite US universities requires the payment of extremely high tuition fees. Furthermore, these fees rose sharply in the period 1990–2010, following fairly closely the increase in top US incomes, which suggests that the reduced social mobility observed in the United States in the past will decline even more in the future.29 The issue of unequal access to higher education is increasingly a subject of debate in the United States. Research has shown that the proportion of college degrees earned by children whose parents belong to the bottom two quartiles of the income hierarchy stagnated at 10–20 percent in 1970–2010, while it rose from 40 to 80 percent for children with parents in the top quartile.30 In other words, parents’ income has become an almost perfect predictor of university access.

But now, in a new century and a different time, that great middle class is on the ropes. All across the country, people are worried—worried and angry. They are angry because they bust their tails and their income barely budges. Angry because their budget is stretched to the breaking point by housing and health care. Angry because the cost of sending their kid to day care or college is out of sight. People are angry because trade deals seem to be building jobs and opportunities for workers in other parts of the world, while leaving abandoned factories here at home. Angry because young people are getting destroyed by student loans, working people are deep in debt, and seniors can’t make their Social Security checks cover their basic living expenses. Angry because we can’t even count on the fundamentals—roads, bridges, safe water, reliable power—from our government. Angry because we’re afraid that our children’s chances for a better life won’t be as good as our own. People are angry, and they are right to be angry. Because this hard-won, ruggedly built, infinitely precious democracy of ours has been hijacked. Today

What is a “pyramid?” I grew up in real estate my entire life. My father built one of the largest real estate brokerage companies on the East Coast in the 1970s, before selling it to Merrill Lynch. When my brother and I graduated from college, we both joined him in building a new real estate company. I went into sales and into opening a few offices, while my older brother went into management of the company. In sales, I was able to create a six-figure income. I worked 60+ hours a week in such pursuit. My brother worked hard too, but not in the same fashion. He focused on opening offices and recruiting others to become agents to sell houses for him. My brother never listed and sold a single house in his career, yet he out-earned me 10-to-1. He made millions because he earned a cut of every commission from all the houses his 1,000+ agents sold. He worked smarter, while I worked harder. I guess he was at the top of the “pyramid.” Is this legal? Should he be allowed to earn more than any of the agents who worked so hard selling homes? I imagine everyone will agree that being a real estate broker is totally legal. Those who are smart, willing to take the financial risk of overhead, and up for the challenge of recruiting good agents, are the ones who get to live a life benefitting from leveraged Income. So how is Network Marketing any different? I submit to you that I found it to be a step better. One day, a friend shared with me how he was earning the same income I was, but that he was doing so from home without the overhead, employees, insurance, stress, and being subject to market conditions. He was doing so in a network marketing business. At first I refuted him by denouncements that he was in a pyramid scheme. He asked me to explain why. I shared that he was earning money off the backs of others he recruited into his downline, not from his own efforts. He replied, “Do you mean like your family earns money off the backs of the real estate agents in your company?” I froze, and anyone who knows me knows how quick-witted I normally am. Then he said, “Who is working smarter, you or your dad and brother?” Now I was mad. Not at him, but at myself. That was my light bulb moment. I had been closed-minded and it was costing me. That was the birth of my enlightenment, and I began to enter and study this network marketing profession. Let me explain why I found it to be a step better. My research led me to learn why this business model made so much sense for a company that wanted a cost-effective way to bring a product to market. Instead of spending millions in traditional media ad buys, which has a declining effectiveness, companies are opting to employ the network marketing model. In doing so, the company only incurs marketing cost if and when a sale is made. They get an army of word-of-mouth salespeople using the most effective way of influencing buying decisions, who only get paid for performance. No salaries, only commissions. But what is also employed is a high sense of motivation, wherein these salespeople can be building a business of their own and not just be salespeople. If they choose to recruit others and teach them how to sell the product or service, they can earn override income just like the broker in a real estate company does. So now they see life through a different lens, as a business owner waking up each day excited about the future they are building for themselves. They are not salespeople; they are business owners.

At this point in your Total Money Makeover, you are debt-free except for the house, and you have three to six months of expenses ($10,000+/–) saved for emergencies. At this point in your Total Money Makeover, you are putting 15 percent of your income into retirement savings and you are investing for your kid’s college education with firm goals in sight on both. You are now one of the top 5 to 10 percent of Americans because you have some wealth, have a plan, and are under control. At this point in your Total Money Makeover, you are in grave danger! You are in danger of settling for “Good Enough.” You are at the eighteen-mile mark of a marathon, and now that it is time to reach for the really big gold ring, the final two Baby Steps could seem out of your reach. Let me assure you that many have been at this point. Some have stopped and regretted it; others have stayed gazelle-intense long enough to finish the race. The latter have looked and seen just one major hurdle left, after which they can walk with pride among the ultra-fit who call themselves financial marathoners. They can count themselves among the elite who have finished The Total Money Makeover.

Piketty and some colleagues would later publish a paper containing a startling fact about 2014, the year of Cohen’s graduation and debut as a self-supporting earner. The study showed that a college graduate like Cohen, on the safe assumption that she ended up in the top 10 percent of earners, would be making more than twice as much before taxes as a similarly situated person in 1980. If Cohen entered the top 1 percent of earners, her income would be more than triple what a 1 percenter earned in her parents’ day—an average of $1.3 million a year for that elite group versus $428,000 in 1980, adjusted for inflation. On the narrow chance that she entered the top 0.001 percent, her income would be more than seven times higher than in 1980, with a cohort average of $122 million. The study included the striking fact that the bottom half of Americans had over this same span seen their average pretax income rise from $16,000 to $16,200. One hundred seventeen million people had, in other words, been “completely shut off from economic growth since the 1970s,” Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman wrote. A generation’s worth of mind-bending innovation had delivered scant progress for half of Americans.

Early on it is clear that Addie has a rebellious streak, joining the library group and running away to Rockport Lodge. Is Addie right to disobey her parents? Where does she get her courage? 2. Addie’s mother refuses to see Celia’s death as anything but an accident, and Addie comments that “whenever I heard my mother’s version of what happened, I felt sick to my stomach.” Did Celia commit suicide? How might the guilt that Addie feels differ from the guilt her mother feels? 3. When Addie tries on pants for the first time, she feels emotionally as well as physically liberated, and confesses that she would like to go to college (page 108). How does the social significance of clothing and hairstyle differ for Addie, Gussie, and Filomena in the book? 4. Diamant fills her narrative with a number of historical events and figures, from the psychological effects of World War I and the pandemic outbreak of influenza in 1918 to child labor laws to the cultural impact of Betty Friedan. How do real-life people and events affect how we read Addie’s fictional story? 5. Gussie is one of the most forward-thinking characters in the novel; however, despite her law degree she has trouble finding a job as an attorney because “no one would hire a lady lawyer.” What other limitations do Addie and her friends face in the workforce? What limitations do women and minorities face today? 6. After distancing herself from Ernie when he suffers a nervous episode brought on by combat stress, Addie sees a community of war veterans come forward to assist him (page 155). What does the remorse that Addie later feels suggest about the challenges American soldiers face as they reintegrate into society? Do you think soldiers today face similar challenges? 7. Addie notices that the Rockport locals seem related to one another, and the cook Mrs. Morse confides in her sister that, although she is usually suspicious of immigrant boarders, “some of them are nicer than Americans.” How does tolerance of the immigrant population vary between city and town in the novel? For whom might Mrs. Morse reserve the term Americans? 8. Addie is initially drawn to Tessa Thorndike because she is a Boston Brahmin who isn’t afraid to poke fun at her own class on the women’s page of the newspaper. What strengths and weaknesses does Tessa’s character represent for educated women of the time? How does Addie’s description of Tessa bring her reliability into question? 9. Addie’s parents frequently admonish her for being ungrateful, but Addie feels she has earned her freedom to move into a boardinghouse when her parents move to Roxbury, in part because she contributed to the family income (page 185). How does the Baum family’s move to Roxbury show the ways Betty and Addie think differently from their parents about household roles? Why does their father take such offense at Herman Levine’s offer to house the family? 10. The last meaningful conversation between Addie and her mother turns out to be an apology her mother meant for Celia, and for a moment during her mother’s funeral Addie thinks, “She won’t be able to make me feel like there’s something wrong with me anymore.” Does Addie find any closure from her mother’s death? 11. Filomena draws a distinction between love and marriage when she spends time catching up with Addie before her wedding, but Addie disagrees with the assertion that “you only get one great love in a lifetime.” In what ways do the different romantic experiences of each woman inform the ideas each has about love? 12. Filomena and Addie share a deep friendship. Addie tells Ada that “sometimes friends grow apart. . . . But sometimes, it doesn’t matter how far apart you live or how little you talk—it’s still there.” What qualities do you think friends must share in order to have that kind of connection? Discuss your relationship with a best friend. Enhance

The charge of heartlessness, epitomized in the remark that William H. Vanderbilt, a railroad tycoon, is said to have made to an inquiring reporter, "The public be damned," is belied by the flowering of charitable activity in the United States in the nineteenth century. Privately financed schools and colleges multiplied; foreign missionary activity exploded; nonprofit private hospitals, orphanages, and numerous other institutions sprang up like weeds. Almost every charitable or public service organization, from the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals to the YMCA and YWCA, from the Indian Rights Association to the Salvation Army, dates from that period. Voluntary cooperation is no less effective in organizing charitable activity than in organizing production for profit. The charitable activity was matched by a burst of cultural activity—art museums, opera houses, symphonies, museums, public libraries arose in big cities and frontier towns alike. The size of government spending is one measure of government's role. Major wars aside, government spending from 1800 to 1929 did not exceed about 12 percent of the national income. Two-thirds of that was spent by state and local governments, mostly for schools and roads. As late as 1928, federal government spending amounted to about 3 percent of the national income.

Here's a resume of crucial knowledge you should have in today's world but universities are not providing: Financial - Not just on management, but also on how to profit, how to manage and control flows of income; Linguistic - In today's world, speaking only a language is prove of lack of education. Knowing two languages is a basic necessity, and knowing three languages is essential, while knowing four is merely the ideal situation. Which four languages? Chinese, English, Spanish, and another of your choice, just for fun; Intellectual - It's not about what you know; it’s all about how you think about what you know. Therefore, it's ridiculous to think that there’s only one answer and one way to examine our life. Most students are extremely dumb because they lack the ability to educate themselves, despite their certificates or where they’ve studied. They never read with an intention in mind. And as they graduate, they become completely futile as individuals. This situation is the same all over the world. Millions are graduating every year, without any significant knowledge to live with. Their books are often outdated once they graduate and they're unable to learn by themselves and develop the necessary skills to adjust to the economic society in which we live. Maybe they can keep a job for 3 or 5 years of their life, but then are surprised to lose it and never finding a suitable job again. The world is changing very fast and most people can’t or are unwilling to recognize this fact.

THE PAYOFF IS EXTRAORDINARY I was giving a seminar in Detroit a couple of years ago when a young man, about thirty years old, came up to me at the break. He told me that he had first come to my seminar and heard my “3 Percent Rule” about ten years ago. At that time, he had dropped out of college, was living at home, driving an old car, and earning about $20,000 a year as an office-to-office salesman. He decided after the seminar that he was going to apply the 3 Percent Rule to himself, and he did so immediately. He calculated 3 percent of his income of $20,000 would be $600. He began to buy sales books and read them every day. He invested in two audio-learning programs on sales and time management. He took one sales seminar. He invested the entire $600 in himself, in learning to become better. That year, his income went from $20,000 to $30,000, an increase of 50 percent. He said he could trace the increase with great accuracy to the things he had learned and applied from the books he had read and the audio programs he had listened to. So the following year, he invested 3 percent of $30,000, a total of $900, back into himself. That year, his income jumped from $30,000 to $50,000. He began to think, “If my income goes up at 50 percent per year by investing 3 percent back into myself, what would happen if I invested 5 percent? KEEP RAISING THE BAR The next year, he invested 5 percent of his income, $2,500, into his learning program. He took more seminars, traveled cross-country to a conference, bought more audio- and video-learning programs, and even hired a part-time coach. And that year, his income doubled to $100,000. After that, like playing Texas Hold-Em, he decided to go “all in” and raise his investment into himself to 10 percent per year. He told me that he had been doing this every since. I asked him, “How has investing 10 percent of your income back into yourself affected your income?” He smiled and said, “I passed a million dollars in personal income last year. And I still invest 10 percent of my income in myself every single year.” I said, “That’s a lot of money. How do you manage to spend that much money on personal development?” He said, “It’s hard! I have to start spending money on myself in January in order to invest it all by the end of the year. I have an image coach, a sales coach, and a speaking coach. I have a large library in my home with every book, audio program, and video program on sales and personal success I can find. I attend conferences, both nationally and internationally in my field. And my income keeps going up and up every year.

The owner of the coal mines, Baron Takaharu Mitsui (1900–1983), a graduate of Dartmouth College in New Hampshire and world famous as a philatelist, was head of one of the two most powerful industrial families in Japan (along with Mitsubishi), and among the wealthiest men in the country. His mines produced half of its coal, though those at Omuta had been closed down in the 1920s as unsafe. He was well aware of the work and living conditions of the POWs, having visited the camp several times in his open touring car. Like other companies that used Allied prisoners as slave labor—Mitsubishi, Nippon Steel, Kawasaki—Mitsui paid the Japanese army a leasing fee per prisoner of two yen per day (above the average Japanese daily income), and the army kept the money. Though the prisoners were supposedly being paid a wage that was a minuscule fraction of this, very few ever received anything.

Q. If you were president what wold you do? A. declare world peace, remove taxation on all people with income under 100K place qa 20% flat tax on all others with zero loopholes, forgive all student loans and make state colleges tuition free, repair the infrastructure and phase out all industries that contribute to pollution or climate change. Care for all animals and their habitats. Abolish money in politics remove gerrymandering and the electoral college. Remove all non-violent offenders from prisons to create an infra-structure job corps release program and things like that....

The good part: if you employ some of the techniques I will share in part 2, you can quickly start earning money while you learn and take the first steps to becoming an influencer. Try that with college! Plus, the results will come much faster, sometimes instantly, and with much less expense than a college education.

That summer, the month he turned twenty-nine, my brother had proposed to his girlfriend, the one he’d met four years earlier, just before coming to stay with me in Brooklyn. Nearly everyone from high school and most of my friends from college were married, or soon to be, and as for ex-boyfriends: W married in 2005; R met his soon-to-be wife in 2006 (today both couples have two children). Even the close friends I’d made in New York were “joining the vast majority,” as Neith had put it. All of us wanted to believe this wouldn’t change anything. But it did, invariably, in ways small and large. It’s a rare friendship that transcends the circumstances that forged it, and being single together in the city, no matter how powerful a bond when it’s happening, can prove pretty weak glue. Alliances had been redrawn, resources shifted and reconsolidated; new envies replaced the old. Whereas before we were all broke together, now they had husbands splitting the rent and bills, and I couldn’t shake my awareness of this difference. A treacherous, unspoken sense of inequality set in, which only six months into my new magazine job had radically reversed: I’d become the one who could afford nice restaurants while they had to channel their disposable incomes toward a shared household, and I felt their unspoken judgment just as before they’d felt mine. One newly married friend lashed out at me for never inviting her to parties. I tried to explain: Didn’t she see I was going because someone else had invited me? And that if I didn’t go, I’d be home alone, whereas she had someone to keep her company? When a dear friend said, “You know, I may be married now, but I’m still just like you! I can still do whatever I want!” I blanched. She’d been on her own so recently herself. Didn’t she remember that being single is more than just following your whims—that it also means having nobody to help you make difficult decisions, or comfort you at the end of a bad week?

In reality, long-term travel has nothing to do with demographics—age, ideology, income—and everything to do with personal outlook. Long-term travel isn’t about being a college student; it’s about being a student of daily life. Long-term travel isn’t an act of rebellion against society; it’s an act of common sense within society. Long-term travel doesn’t require a massive “bundle of cash”; it requires only that we walk through the world in a more deliberate way.

An en masse increase in ability within a competitive system doesn’t advantage all individuals. Instead, more competition weakens each individual’s bargaining position within the larger structure. The White House’s own 2014 report on increasing college opportunity for low-income students noted, “Colleges have grown more competitive, restricting access. While the number of applicants to four-year colleges and universities has doubled since the early 1970s, available slots have changed little.” 15

There are some important myths to dispel: The average college student does not live on campus—only around 15 percent of undergraduates do. Most do not attend selective institutions that accept fewer than half of their applicants. 4 Only 19 percent of full-time undergraduates in four-year public degree programs graduate on time, and it’s 5 percent for two-year programs. 5 Students from poor families who go to college will probably remain working-class—38 percent of people from low-income families will remain in the bottom two deciles regardless of their educational accomplishment. But the biggest myth is probably the one about students and wage labor. In her book Paying the Price, Sara Goldrick-Rab (herself a scholar of education policy) writes about how she assumed that a drowsy student of hers had been partying too hard and failing to take her studies seriously. When Goldrick-Rab confronted the student, the professor learned a valuable lesson: The student had been working nights at the local grocery store because the graveyard shift paid a little better. She had been attending class after an 11-p.m.-to-6-a.m. shift, taking her education very seriously. This is a good example of the difference between college student stereotypes and the reality, and the experience prompted Goldrick-Rab to take a look at how hard students are working outside the classroom:

How Much Money Can We Afford To Give To Charity? Knowing how much money you can safely give to charity is challenging for everyone. Who doesn’t want to give more to make the world a better place? On the other hand, no one wants to become a charity case as a result of giving too much to charity. On average, Americans who itemize their deductions donate about three or four percent of their income to charity. About 20% give more than 10% of their income to charity. Here are some tips to help you find the right level of donations for your family: You can probably give more than you think. Focus on one, two or maybe three causes rather than scattering money here and there. Volunteer your time toward your cause, too. The money you give shouldn’t be the money you’d save for college or retirement. You can organize your personal finances to empower you to give more. Eliminating debt will enable you to give much more. The interest you may be paying is eating into every good and noble thing you’d like to do. You can cut expenses significantly over time by driving your cars for a longer period of time; buying cars—the transaction itself—is expensive. Stay in your home longer. By staying in your home for a very long time, your mortgage payment will slowly shrink (in economic terms)with inflation, allowing you more flexibility over time to donate to charity. Make your donations a priority. If you only give what is left, you won’t be giving much. Make your donations first, then contribute to savings and, finally, spend what is left. Set a goal for contributing to charity, perhaps as a percentage of your income. Measure your financial progress in all areas, including giving to charity. Leverage your contributions by motivating others to give. Get the whole family involved in your cause. Let the kids donate their time and money, too. Get your extended family involved. Get the neighbors involved. You will have setbacks. Don’t be discouraged by setbacks. Think long term. Everything counts. One can of soup donated to a food bank may feed a hungry family. Little things add up. One can of soup every week for years will feed many hungry families. Don’t be ashamed to give a little. Everyone can do something. When you can’t give money, give time. Be patient. You are making a difference. Don’t give up on feeding hungry people because there will always be hungry people; the ones you feed will be glad you didn’t give up. Set your ego aside. You can do more when you’re not worried about who gets the credit. Giving money to charity is a deeply personal thing that brings joy both to the families who give and to the families who receive. Everyone has a chance to do both in life. There Are Opportunities To Volunteer Everywhere If you and your family would like to find ways to volunteer but aren’t sure where and how, the answer is just a Google search away. There may be no better family activity than serving others together. When you can’t volunteer as a team, remember you set an example for your children whenever you serve. Leverage your skills, talents and training to do the most good. Here are some ideas to get you started either as a family or individually: Teach seniors, the disabled, or children about your favorite family hobbies.

In reality, long-term travel has nothing to do with demographics- age, ideology, income- and everything to do with personal outlook. Long-term travel isn't about being a college student, it's about being a student of daily life. Long-term travel isn't an act of rebellion against society; it's an act of common sense within society. Long-term travel doesn't require a massive "bundle of cash", it requires only that we walk through the world in a more deliberate way.

In other words, it is the amount of money that colleges and universities can get—from tuition, endowment income, donations, etc.—which determines how much their spending or costs will go up, not the other way around, as they represent it to the public. To say that costs are going up is no more than to say that the additional intake is being spent, rather than hoarded. When

Unless we focus on educating each child to high levels and close the achievement gaps between affluent (largely white) and low-income students (largely students of color), the most highly educated generation in U.S. history could be replaced by a generation with far lower education levels (as measured by high school and college completion rates).

The average new American home now has more bathrooms than occupants. Nearly half have four or more bedrooms, up from 18% in 1983. The average car loan adjusted for inflation more than doubled between 1975 and 2003, from $12,300 to $27,900. And you know what happened to college costs and student loans. Household debt-to-income stayed about flat from 1963 to 1973. Then it climbed, and climbed, and climbed, from around 60% in 1973 to more than 130% by 2007.

We spent countless dinner conversations talking about a move away from whiteness, away from country clubs and catered dinner parties and classrooms with fifteen students discussing literature around large wooden tables. A group of Peter’s closest friends from college had moved to a predominantly African American, low-income neighborhood in Richmond, Virginia, and we thought we might join them. Those friends—a multiracial group that included white men as well as men with families from Haiti, Sri Lanka, and India—had all been involved in efforts to acknowledge the historical racial divides within the church in America, and they wanted to participate in building bridges of reconciliation. They also had wanted to live near each other, and they had prayed for an inner-city community where people of color invited them into the neighborhood. Now, a decade later, two friends worked as doctors in the city, one served as a copastor of a multiethnic church, two taught school, one ran a nonprofit to connect kids in the neighborhood to the outdoors. We took our family to Richmond to visit those friends one summer.

On the downside, there are pretty serious motivational problems, especially among the young. Why go to college and pursue a career when your income is guaranteed for life? Why try and find a job? The casino employs about half of the adults in the tribe, and that’s a constant source of friction. Who gets an easy job and who doesn’t? There’s a lot of infighting and politics involved. But on the whole, the tribe realizes that it has a good thing going. Why rock the boat? Why should anyone worry about me? Why should Wilton help you bring down a crooked judge when everyone might get hurt in the process?

Between 1972 and 2001 the wage and salary income of Americans at the 90th percentile of the income distribution rose only 34 percent, or about 1 percent per year. So being in the top 10 percent of the income distribution, like being a college graduate, wasn’t a ticket to big income gains. But income at the 99th percentile rose 87 percent; income at the 99.9th percentile rose 181 percent; and income at the 99.99th percentile rose 497 percent. No, that’s not a misprint.

In 1943, incoming college freshmen—only 6 percent of whom could list the original thirteen colonies—named Abraham Lincoln as the first president and the one who “emaciated [sic] the slaves.” The

You are sitting on a gold mine. Whether you realize it or not, you already have the knowledge, passion, and skills to create an automated income stream that requires no college degree, zero employees, and less than fifty dollars to get started.

Freshmen now say the number one reason to attend college is to “get a better job,” according to a major annual survey of incoming students. Before 2006, students told researchers that the number one reason was to “learn about things that interest me.

High school dropouts earn about $10,000 less each year than high school graduates and $35,000 less each year than college graduates. Over the course of a lifetime, a college graduate will earn, on average, $1 million more than a high school dropout.[63]

Step 1: Secure your basic needs: food, clothing and shelter. Step 2: Create a $1,000 emergency fund. Step 3: Pay off all debts as fast as possible, other than your home. Step 4: Increase your emergency fund until it reaches 6 to 10 months of your basic needs. Step 5: Begin saving 15 percent of your income for retirement. Step 6: If so desired, save for your child's college education. Step 7: Pay off your mortgage early. Step 8: Express your values with your money. Tactics That Bring Your Strategies to Life Live by a zero-balance budget, created at

Often thought of as “finishing schools” for criminals, prisons offer very little in the way of reform but much in the way of a graduate education in criminality. In fact, a study by Ohio University showed that “individuals with an incarceration history earn significantly higher annual illegal earnings than those who do not have such a history, bringing in on average an additional $11,000 per year of illicit income.” Just as college improves the earning potential of those working in the lawful economy, so too does the graduate education received behind bars.

A study of some nine hundred funds (either growth funds or growth and income funds) from 1988 to 1994 found that the returns posted by managers with degrees from universities whose entering students have high SAT scores—such as the Ivy League colleges—beat competitors from lower ranked schools by more than a full percentage point. Younger managers and M.B.A. holders also out-performed their older and non-M.B.A. rivals. The reason behind the superior performance was both simple and predictable. The researchers found that “high SAT” managers and those with M.B.A.s tended to invest in high-risk, high-return stocks! Sound familiar? You don’t need an M.B.A. and you don’t have to pay an active money manager large fees to generate superior returns. All you really need is a faith that markets work—that risks and returns are highly correlated.4

Bruce Mesnekoff Discussing About Refinancing Student Loan and Consolidation Loan repayment is a major goal for any graduate after college. According to our Expert from Student Loan Help Center, Mr.Bruce Mesnekoff, Every individual dreams of a loan free future and having some financial stability. To achieve this, there are options available to help with loan repayment. In our earlier article we spoke about consolidating student loans. In this article, we will discuss refinancing student loans and its associated advantages. So Bruce Mesnekoff, how consolidation and refinancing are different in terms? These two terms are used interchangeably by most people but there is substantial difference between the two. Understanding the difference is critical to know when can each be used and whether it will solve your purpose or not. Consolidation lets you combine all your student loans into one loan and pay interest at a weighted average. Refinancing is taking a new loan to pay off all your student loans. Refinancing is not available for federal loans but only for private loans.Also only private loan lenders provide the option of refinancing, though a few might provide you with the option of refinancing private and federal loans. Why Refinancing and Bruce Mesnekoff tells us what are the Advantages of it? Refinancing has certain benefits if you get good pay. You will have to pay lesser interest rate. This helps you save monthly and eventually a bigger bank balance down the years. Your credit score is high which will help you gain multiple offers from lenders with lesser interest rate. Offers you variable loan interest which come handy if you took loan when interest rates were too high. You also have the option of decreasing your loan repayment cycle, This will increase monthly repayment amount but you will be loan free in shorter time and will save on even more interest money. Disadvantages There is one major disadvantage that comes when you refinance private and federal loans. The benefits offered by federal loans like public loan forgiveness program or income driven repayment will not be transferred to private lenders. So if you are truly confident of your income then you can do away with such options and completely rely on private loans. So Bruce Mesnekoff , Can you tell us Eligibility Criteria, I think its most important for our students. The eligibility is determined by your financial stability, your credit score, employment history etc. If you have poor credit, you can always have a co-signer to make the process feasible. Refinancing is surely a great way to save money, but whether it best fits you or not is completely your decision. Thoroughly analyze all the pros and cons against your goal and then take the first step. Make the best use of the number of lenders available to provide you with the best solution for your areas of concerns. Good Luck! You can also contact Bruce Mesnekoff an author of The ultimate guide to student loans and CEO of Student Loan Help Center Florida.

Wage Garnishment Majority of students complete their education with student loan debt. Once you have graduated from college and stepinto the real world, you realize it isn’t as easy as it seemed. Student loan is one of the most difficult loans to repay and it also cannot be discharged into bankruptcy. Thus it has to be repaid!One thing that should always be kept in mind is to never skip your loan payments. If this happens and happens consecutively for months it will open doors to many other problems. It will put your loan in default; your entire loan amount and interest will become due immediately. It will adversely impact your credit score. We discuss Wage Garnishment with The Student Loan Help Center team, let’s see what they said about it. So What is wage garnishment? Wage garnishment happens when your loan is in default (you can consult The Student Loan help center if you want) i.e you have not paid the loan for consecutive 270 days. Now Wage garnishment is one of the legal consequences of going into default. Through this method the government starts deducting 15% of your income. That means you in hand income willreduce with only 85% coming in your bank account. However the amount of wage that can be garnished for private loandiffers from state to state since every state is not allowed to garnish the wages. How to avoid? As discussed before, wage garnishment happens only when your loan is in default. The department of education sends you one letter when you are in default. The best way to avoid this problem is to avoid going to default. There are numerous measures you can adopt right from very beginning to keep your loan repayment on track. For eg, starting to pay interest in your grace period, automating the process of monthly payments to get some discount from bank etc. Now what if you are in default or going in default, then the best option would be to consider forbearance or deferment which will stop your wages from being garnished. How can it be challenged? If you have just received the notice from Department of Education then you are given one opportunity to get a hearing and object to wage garnishment. You can challenge wage garnishment on following grounds: Your income Your employment Procedures followed to start the garnishment etc Also your wage garnishment cannot begin before the notice of 30 days. During this time period you request a hearing garnishment will be put on hold and if 30 days are over garnishment will not stop if you have won the hearing. One of the Best Student Loan consolidation services in USA is The Student Loan Help Center in Florida for all kind of Student Loan consultation you can contact any time.

On the downside, there are pretty serious motivational problems, especially among the young. Why go to college and pursue a career when your income is guaranteed for life? Why try and find a job?

Parents are often shocked, too, to hear that, once you control for aptitude, a person’s lifetime earnings don’t vary based on what college they attended. In other words, if you’re smart enough to get into Yale, it doesn’t really matter (from an income perspective) whether you go there or instead choose your much cheaper state university. The

In many cases, help for the poor is not simply an income transfer used for short-run consumption but is a government benefit that enables poor households to raise their long-term productivity. Some of the key government programs for poor households include help for nutrition of mothers and young children; preschool; college tuition; and job training. Each of these is a government-supported investment in “human capital” and specifically a way for a poor household to raise its long-term productivity. Taxing the rich to help the poor can then mean cutting lavish consumption spending by the rich to support high-return human investments by the poor. The outcome is not only fairer but also more efficient. The

In the 1990s, the Clinton administration experimented with a program called Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing, which gave poor families in public housing vouchers to move to safer, middle-income neighborhoods where their children were surrounded every day by evidence that life can be better. Twenty years later, the children of those families have grown up to earn higher incomes and attend college at higher rates than their peers who stayed behind. And

and Medicaid, which would help expand coverage and bring down costs. The other thing we should be honest about is how hard it’s going to be, no matter what we do, to create significant economic opportunity in every remote area of our vast nation. In some places, the old jobs aren’t coming back, and the infrastructure and workforce needed to support big new industries aren’t there. As hard as it is, people may have to leave their hometowns and look for work elsewhere in America. We know this can have a transformative effect. In the 1990s, the Clinton administration experimented with a program called Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing, which gave poor families in public housing vouchers to move to safer, middle-income neighborhoods where their children were surrounded every day by evidence that life can be better. Twenty years later, the children of those families have grown up to earn higher incomes and attend college at higher rates than their peers who stayed behind. And the younger the kids were when they moved, the bigger boost they received. Previous generations of Americans actually moved around the country much more than we do today. Millions of black families migrated from the rural South to the urban North. Large numbers of poor whites left Appalachia to take jobs in Midwestern factories. My own father hopped a freight train from Scranton, Pennsylvania, to Chicago in 1935, looking for work. Yet today, despite all our advances, fewer Americans are moving than ever before. One of the laid-off steelworkers I met in Kentucky told me he found a good job in Columbus, Ohio, but he was doing the 120-mile commute every week because he didn’t want to move. “People from Kentucky, they want to be in Kentucky,” another said to me. “That’s something that’s just in our DNA.” I understand that feeling. People’s identities and their support systems—extended family, friends, church congregations, and so on—are rooted in where they come from. This is painful, gut-wrenching stuff. And no politician wants to be the one to say it. I believe that after we do everything we can to help create new jobs in distressed small towns and rural areas, we also have to give people the skills and tools they need to seek opportunities beyond their hometowns—and provide a strong safety net both for those who leave and those who stay. Whether it’s updating policies to meet the changing conditions of America’s workers, or encouraging greater mobility, the bottom line is the same: we can’t spend all our time staving off decline. We need to create new opportunities, not just slow down the loss of old ones. Rather than keep trying to re-create the economy of the past, we should focus on making the jobs people actually have better and figure out how to create the good jobs of the future in fields such as clean energy, health care, construction, computer coding, and advanced manufacturing. Republicans will always be better at defending yesterday. Democrats have to be in the future business. The good news is we have

But Amazon is not alone in its avoidance of taxes. Bloomberg Businessweek reports, “The tactics of Google and Facebook depend on ‘transfer pricing,’ paper transactions among corporate subsidiaries that allow for allocating income to tax havens while attributing expenses to higher-tax countries. Such income shifting costs the U.S. government as much as $60 billion in annual revenue, according to Kimberly A. Clausing, an economics professor at Reed College in Portland, Oregon.” At a time when both local and federal governments are putting off needed infrastructure improvements because of tax revenue shortfalls, the tax avoidance schemes of our richest technology companies are partially to blame.

A college student who wouldn’t have taken a McDonald’s job for $7.25 an hour may find it worthwhile at $10 an hour, leaving fewer opportunities for, say, an uneducated immigrant from South America.

Most importantly, Payscale’s analysis finds that college is a very sound investment. Over a 30-year career, the graduates of a majority of schools will make at least $6,700 more per year than the average high-school graduate. That is more than enough extra income to make college worthwhile. In the 2013 rankings, Harvey Mudd, a private college with a science and engineering focus, ranks highest. On average, its graduates earn an extra $2.1 million over the span of their careers, which is an annual rate of return of 8.3% on the college investment. In the middle of the rankings, Georgia State alumni earn an extra $457,000 for a return on investment of 4.3%. Over half of the nearly 1,500 colleges have a return on investment of over 5%, and only 28 have negative returns. When you account for grants and financial aid, these numbers look even better.

Unvaccinated children, a 2004 analysis of CDC data reveals, are more likely to be white, to have an older married mother with a college education, and to live in a household with an income of $75,000 or more—like my child.

Upbringing affects opportunity. Upper-middle-class homes are not only richer (with two professional incomes) and more stable; they are also more nurturing. In the 1970s there were practically no class differences in the amount of time that parents spent talking, reading and playing with toddlers. Now the children of college-educated parents receive 50% more of what Mr Putnam calls “Goodnight Moon” time (after a popular book for infants). Educated parents engage in a non-stop Socratic dialogue with their children, helping them to make up their own minds about right and wrong, true and false, wise and foolish. This is exhausting, so it helps to have a reliable spouse with whom to share the burden, not to mention cleaners, nannies and cash for trips to the theatre.

What are Canada and Australia doing differently? For starters, they are doing a better job with mass education. They have near-universal preschool, and they both do more to get low-income students through college. In Australia, college is free.

How many similar restaurants are located in the area? • Find sales volume. (Check business licenses for previous year.) • Are there colleges or student housing in the area? • Is there a high number of working mothers in the area? • What is the population of the immediate area? • Is the population increasing, stationary, or declining? • Are the residents of all ages or old, middle-aged, or young? • What is the average sales price and rental rates for area homes? • What is the per capita income? • Find the average family size. • Is the building/location suitable for a food service establishment?

Why exactly has social mobility declined in the United States in the past thirty years, so that the probability has more than halved that a man born into the bottom 25 per cent of the income distribution will end his life in the top quartile?13 Once the United States was famed as a land of opportunity, where a family could leap from ‘rags to riches’ in a generation. But today, if you are born to parents in the bottom income quintile, you have just a 5 per cent chance of getting into the top quintile without a college degree.

When the bishop's collection for the college had reached £1,500, a decision was made. Rather than start construction with too little, it was resolved to send fifty "tenants-at-halves" to work on the land. Half of their income would go to the college project and half to themselves. Profits, it was expected, would augment the building and maintenance fund and help to support tutors and students. In the meanwhile, friendly relations with the Indians were important to make possible the willing education of their children.

learned two things from the students. One was that they disliked identity politics. They thought that Hillary spent too much time trying to appeal to people based on their race, or their gender, or their sexual orientation, and not enough time appealing to people based on what really worried them—issues like income inequality and climate change. The other takeaway was the misogyny of the media, something we had talked about every week in class. And we talked about the Electoral College. And then I finally said to the students, 2016 will be remembered for how the playbook changed on how to run for President.

Your expenses grow to match your income. As the decades pass and you realize that no, you’re not going to save the world, the money becomes a more and more important part of the justification. And when you have kids, you’re stuck; it’s much easier to deprive yourself of money (and what it buys) than to deprive your children of money. More important, you internalize the rationalizations for the work you are doing. It’s easier to think that underwriting new debt offerings really is saving the world than to think that you are underwriting new debt offerings, because of the money, instead of saving the world. And this goes for many walks of life. It’s easier for college professors to think that, by training the next generation of young minds (or, even more improbably, writing papers on esoteric subjects), they are changing the world than to think that they are teaching and researching instead of changing the world. Sure, there are self-parodying, economically delusional, psychotherapy-needing, despicable people on Wall Street . . . but there are also a lot of people who went there because it was easy and stayed because they decided they couldn’t afford not to and talked themselves into it. A college student asked me at a book talk what I thought about undergraduates who go work on Wall Street. And individually, I have nothing against them, although I do think they should do their best to keep their expenses down so they will be able to switch careers later. But as a system, it’s a bad thing that a small handful of highly profitable firms are able to invest those profits into skimming off some of the top students at American universities—universities that, even if nominally private, are partially funded by taxpayer money in the form of research grants and federal subsidies for student loans—and absorbing them into the banking-consulting-lawyering Borg.7

Many scholars understand the NCAA as a cartel,” court of appeals judge Frank Easterbrook wrote, allowing that Walters was a “nasty and untrustworthy fellow” but pointing out that reality didn’t exempt college sports from legal scrutiny. “The NCAA depresses athletes’ income—restricting payments to the value of tuition, room, and board, while receiving services of substantially greater worth. The NCAA treats this as desirable preservation of amateur sports; a more jaundiced eye would see it as the use of monopsony power to obtain athletes’ services for less than their competitive value.” The word monopsony said it all: the term describes monopoly powers on the buyer side of the market. In this case, the NCAA was the lone competitor for the purchase of the players’ services, contriving to leave young athletes—many of them Black—like sharecroppers on a plantation, only able to sell their yields to the landowner and compensated in goods sold at the landowner’s store in the form of scholarships.

I liked Finland for its absence of overt rage or street crime. This wasn’t the United States, this wasn’t Spain. It was calm here, and moody, a gorgeous, elegant place with slightly off-kilter serotonin levels. A depressed country: this was an easy diagnosis to make, given the suicide statistics, which Scandinavia sometimes tries to deny, just the way Cornell University tries to allay the fears of incoming students’ parents about the famous Ithaca gorge, which, like a harvest ritual each fall, claims the life of a few more hopeless freshmen. Don’t worry, the college brochure should say. Though some students do in fact leap to their deaths, most prefer keg parties and studying. All of Scandinavia was alluring, with its ice fishing and snowcaps, but everyone knew about the legend of ingrained unhappiness among Finns, Norwegians, and Swedes: their drinking, their mournful, baying songs, their muffled darkness smack in the middle of the day.