College Educated and Salary Deprived

Can we really blame college educated 20 somethings for not finding work? The movie, “Post Grad,” is an all too  familiar  scenario many college graduates are facing.

The 2009 movie stars Alexis Bledel, who plays a recent college graduate who seems to have done everything to land her dream job at Happerman and Brown Publishing. She’s earned a good GPA and she’s done three internships at top publishing firms, yet she still can’t land a single job with her degree and is forced to move back in with her family.

If young people today did all the cookie cutter tasks that set them to get good jobs, why hasn’t it happened for so many college graduates?

“It’s the hardest thing in the world to write another cover letter about your great accomplishments if you question every day the greatness of your accomplishments,” says Luke Stacks, who was on his way to finishing his doctorate program in American Studies, when he moved back home with his mom and decided to change careers.

Stacks’s story, which appeared in Good‘s quarterly news magazine, is similar to the 2 million young adults who have a bachelor’s and are without work.

Back in 2006, an article by Reuters reported that, “one study found 80 percent of students on the eve of graduation did not have jobs lined up and 67 percent were not confident in their chosen career path.”

Four years later in 2010, CNN Money reported that nearly 15% of young adults ages 20-24 [found] themselves unemployed and moving back in with their parents.

CNN also reported the findings of a poll by Twentysomething Inc., which discovered that 85% of college seniors decided to move back home with their parents after graduating in May 2010.

The founder of Twentysomething Inc, David Morrison said, “There’s almost an expectation that kids will move back home, there is no stigma attached. The thought now is to move home for 6-12 months but in reality those young adults will be home for a year and a half or longer. Even if they have jobs, they are living at home.”

Young graduates don’t expect their first job to be their ideal job, but studies by Northeastern University economics professor Andrew Sum, indicate that working at a job that does not require a college degree, will lead to earnings that are less than 40 percent than the earnings of college students whose jobs require a degree, and that the longer one stays at a non-degree job, the less likely he or she will return to the college-educated workforce.

“Young college graduates are vastly underutilized. They go ahead and complete school and we don’t have anything to offer them once they’re out,” said Sum.

There’s also the issue of being overqualified, underqualified, and just not being the right amount of qualified. Kristen Vockel moved back home after she graduated with $30,000 in student loans, but like so many college graduates, she still doesn’t want to take the type of jobs she could have done without a college degree. “Why did I bother taking all of those tests and writing all of those papers and working so hard all of those years if I just have to go back to working the same jobs I worked before?” she says.

In some ways, Thomas H. Benton also felt he deserved to have a good job when he graduated back in 1990 with a bachelor’s degree in English. During his undergraduate years, Benton was in the school’s honors program, received good grades, and had good recommendations. He graduated without much work experience, but his internships and jobs lead him into many sales positions.

“Knowing what I know now, that scenario doesn’t seem all that bad, even though at the time, I regarded it as beneath me because none of my co-workers had read Moby-Dick or Ulysses,” wrote Benton in the advice column of The Chronicle of Higher Education. “In the end, it was that arrogance —and the promise of extraordinary job opportunities for college professors (announced everywhere in the early 90s) —that lured me back to graduate school.”

Benton received his bachelors during a recession, and like many post graduates, decided to wait out the current recession by enrolling in graduate school. Graduate school may help some people increase their potential earnings, but without adequate work experience and running the risk of going further into debt, it might be better to work for at least a year or so and then attend graduate school.

Looking for a job isn’t fun. The competition in the job market is tougher than ever before for the limited amount of positions open for college graduates who lack the working experience and bargaining power of more older and experienced workers.

There’s also the outsourcing of jobs to people outside of the United States who would work at cheaper wages and in poorer conditions.

Some people argue that parents are partly at fault by allowing their children to move back home, whereas others say graduates need to put aside their sloth behavior and get a job -any job.

However, some studies showed that some young adults weren’t just sitting around and doing nothing. They were volunteering and were taking their time to find a career in which they’ll enjoy so that unlike the working adults around them, they would try to get things right the first time around.

The good news for the graduating class of 2011 is that job prospects are expected to be better for 2011 graduates than for 2010 graduates.

Based on a study by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) 24 percent of 2010 col­lege graduates had jobs awaiting after gradua­tion, which was higher than the 20 percent found in 2009.

In the same study, employers said that they expected to hire 13.5 percent more graduates in 2011 than they hired in 2010.

It might not be easy to find the perfect job, the ideal job, or even a decent job, but if students in the past were able to overcome challenging prospects upon graduation, then there just might be hope for future graduates.

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Crime and Punishment

"Police Crash: Conference." Photo by oiyou. October 7, 2006.

When there’s a dangerous situation and the police are involved, it normally doesn’t end with violence.

According to the New York Times, police officers were able to safely arrest a man who shot eight times from a second-floor window of a house in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn.

The shooter, Derek Gallo, had accused his landlord, Michael Pisciotti, of stealing his E-ZPass, but the police showed restraint and did not fire back as the shots hit nearby cars.

In an interview by reporter Ron Howell, architect and designer, Ren, 22, said, “I think that’s really good, when the police hold back and they didn’t do anything. That’s when the police department is actually on the good side. I trust the police department when they do things like that. but sometimes they don’t do that. They shoot first and ask questions later. So some cops are actually good when it comes to doing their job. Others do their job because they can get away with that.

The police were quickly able to assess the situation and were able to get Gallo to surrender to an arrest, but if the police had not responded in the way they had, things might have turned out differently.

In fact, the connection between disorder and crime can be found in the broken-windows theory.

According to James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling, whose article, Broken Windows, appeared on the Manhattan Institute website, the broken windows theory revolves around the concept that if a window in a building is broken and is left that way, all the rest of the windows in the building will get broken soon afterward.

The theory works for both affluent and poverty-stricken neighborhoods and ordinarily, does not happen on a large scale by avid window-breakers.

Instead, an unrepaired window indicates the lack of care over property so that a single, broken and  forsaken window becomes an open playground with zero repercussions and multiple broken windows.

In 1969, psychologist Philip Zimbardo, tested the broken-window theory by placing a car without a license plate and with its hood up, on a street in the Bronx and one in Palo Alto, California.

The Bronx car was vandalized within ten minutes whereas the Palo Alto car remained untouched for more than a week. However, when Zimbardo used a sledgehammer to damage the Palo Alto car, the car was destroyed within hours.

"Vancouver Transit Police 3." Photo by 2sirius. March 15, 2009.

In both cases, the cars were vandalized by mostly ‘respectable whites’ and showed that untended property invites people to damage the property either for theft or entertainment purposes.

The study also showed that when small things aren’t taken care of, petty crimes become more serious crimes. Violent attacks on strangers are likely to occur as people change their behavior to adapt to neighborhoods that are no longer safe.

With the intention of keeping the streets safe, the controversial stop and frisk practices were practiced by police officers and has stirred up issues of racial profiling and distrust of police officers.

Ren said, “I don’t really like the cops sometimes, on experience, because when they’re looking for a certain type of person, they look for everyone in that book and treat everyone the same without asking anymore information. But on other causes like if there’s something dangerous going on and they actually know it, the police department is very good so I have a little bit of mixed feelings sometimes.”

According to the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), the “[New York Police] Department’s own reports on its stop-and-frisk activity confirm what many people in communities of color across the city have long known: The police are stopping hundreds of thousands of law abiding New Yorkers every year, and the vast majority are black and Latino.”

The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) found that in 2009, Black and Latino popualtions comprised of about 36% of New York City’s total population, but 84% of the 576,394 people stopped were Black and Latino.

In 2006, the NYCLU found that whites were stopped less often than Blacks (2.6% of the 3.6 million White population stopped vs. 55% of the 2.2 million Black population), police officers were twice as likely to find handguns, drugs, or stolen property on White suspects than they did on Black stops.

"Police Arrest." Photo by jennifercw. December 1. 2009.

Based on the New York Police Department’s own reports, the NYCLU also found that “nearly nine out of 10 stopped-and-frisked New Yorkers have been completely innocent” and that “only 10 percent of stops led to summonses or arrests.”

Ren recounted his own experience with police officers one year ago at a New York City park. “Some young white kid was running around doing bad things. All the information [the police] had was some kids were running around spray painting on the buildings and stuff.”

“Me and my younger cousins were walking in the same area,” said Ren. “We were arrested for that crime and we [weren’t] prosecuted because they caught the kids like a week later. That made me not like the cops because they thought we were doing it because we’re black and we all had like book bags and stuff.”

Said Ren, “They thought because we were black, our race was bad, but we’re not bad. We’re actually live in a nice neighborhood so sometimes race is horrible to police.”

Tell the World I’m Coming Home

Youthography.com, a youth focused marketing firm, found that young adults are continuing to live at home a lot longer than previous generations.

Photo by philentropist (Parents at MIT)

According to President and CEO of youthography.com, Max Valiquette, Generation Y are going through a phenomenon known as “extended adolescence,” where all things related to  adulthood are being postponed. The 2008 findings by youthography.com found that the trend can be found in larger cities where 54-59% of 20-29 year-olds live at home.

The firm also found “the average age to graduate from university is now 25 (20 years ago it was 23). The average age of first marriage is 28 (20 years ago it was 25) and the average age to give birth to your first child is 29 (20 years ago it was 26).”

Generation Y have often been accused of not making an effort to get good jobs and move out of their parent’s homes, but some say parents are the ones at fault.

Two parenting styles that often come to when discussing extended adolescence are helicopter parenting and cockpit parenting. Helicopter parenting describes parents who hover over their child’s decision-making, whereas cockpit parenting is more extreme and involves parents essentially making all their child’s decisions.

In a recent January 2011 study, “money was shown to be the top concern for Generation Y and that a majority of them were still financially dependent on parents and family members.”

The study, called “The Quarterlife Project,” surveyed 1,253 people and found that “only two in five people in their 20s describes themselves as being completely financially independent.”

The survey results also reveal that, “[t]he vast majority (86%) of people in their twenties describe their current financial situation as “stressful” [and a] few feel that there are financial resources and tools that are helpful to their demographic.

Furthermore, the survey shows that “more than half (54%) of Generation Y believe that most financial services are geared toward older age groups [and that] two-thirds say they wish they had more tools and resources to increase their understanding and knowledge about financial issues (67%) and money management (66%).”

A 2008 poll by Gumtree.com showed similar results with 86% of the 1,082 20-somethings surveyed saying that they felt pressure to do well financially, to form good relationships, and to have a solid career before they turned 30-years-old.

Research has also indicated that some parents are more willing to welcome home their child, while others are not as lenient. In the United Kingdom, a survey conducted by Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment found that the sex of the child played a role in whether or not parents allowed their son or daughter to move back home.

The survey shows that “parents are three times more likely to let a son move back home than a daughter.” This may be due to findings that showed that “almost 60% of parents  say they spoil their sons, while only 35% say they spoil their daughters.”

Regardless of the case, both sons and daughters will still need to rely on their parents and relatives in the future. They’ll also need a place to call home -well, at least for the time being.

Yearbooks, Get Digital or Get Going

With so many things going digital, Brooklyn College has joined other schools in producing digital copies of its yearbook.

On March 30, Brooklyn College students received an email which invited graduating students to schedule their yearbook photo appointment for the Broeklundian, Brooklyn College’s DVD yearbook.

“The transition has been, in my opinion, an interesting one,” said  Vanessa E. Green, Assistant Dean of Student Affairs. “Individuals who are used to having a book would probably prefer having a book, but with the technology and resources available, we’re moving forward.”

As stated by the email, “The move to a DVD was made to take advantage of current technology and drastically reduce production costs, thus passing a 75 percent savings on to you.”

On the decision to move from a printed copy to a digital copy, Green said, “It wasn’t easy,  but it was necessary. The cost of producing a book was almost $20,000 which would get you about 400 books. That’s like spending $50 per student. If we weren’t getting the sales and we couldn’t estimate what we needed, we’d end up with extra and not gain a profit back.”

Ingersoll Hall

Liaison of the Honors Academy, Robert Scott, said that with the printed copy, it was about $80.00, but with the DVD, the college is pushing for it it be less than $30.00.

On the similarities and differences between the printed and digital copies, Scott said, “The DVD will have very similar content. We can arrange the images, combine stills and motions, and add sound. We can completely change it around so that in the end, you don’t have to give up anything. You’re adding things. We don’t have to lose anything.”

The students would determine the content and design of the yearbook. They would schedule appointments for seniors, get information out, and decide on the theme. Then the vendors would make copies of the master copy of the yearbook.

“The difficult part would be training the students to learn skills to produce a digital yearbook,” said Green.

The move toward a DVD yearbook began months ago with the idea of having a digital yearbook for the class of 2010.

Scott said that he wanted a yearbook that was low in costs, but high in quality so graduates of the 2010 class have not yet received their yearbooks. The production of the 2010 class yearbook is currently in its final stages and will soon be ready to be copied by outside vendors so that the DVDs can be distributed to students.

Graduates from the class of 2010 did not receive a yearbook. Students still working on last year’s yearbook, but are beginning to work on the 2011 class yearbook.

For the 2011 class yearbook, Green said that she would like the yearbook to have music playing in the background and people speaking.

As for the length of digital yearbook, Scott said, “We would like to aim for an hour or an hour and fifteen minutes. Any longer will be unwatchable. We care about it being watchable, the content, and it being pretty.”

To get students to be more involved in the yearbook making process, Scott said, “We’ve talked about producing a short DVD in the summer which would advertise and inform students about joining the yearbook committee.”

For those students who are interested in learning more about the yearbook, they should talk to the students working on the yearbook. On Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, students can visit the official room of the yearbook committee, room 152 in New Ingersoll.

For more information on yearbooks going digital, click here.

Growing Up Is Hard to Do

For a good portion of young adults, leaving the nest and breaking free from mom and dad, just isn’t going to be happening anytime soon.

Back in 2006, an article by Reuters said, “[O]ne study found 80 percent of students on the eve of graduation did not have jobs lined up and 67 percent were not confident in their chosen career path.”

Four years later in 2010, CNN Money reported that nearly 15% of young adults ages 20-24 [found] themselves unemployed and moving back in with their parents.

Photo of Neil T and His Parents

CNN also reported the findings of a poll by Twentysomething Inc., which discovered that 85% of college seniors decided to move back home with their parents after graduating in May 2010.

With poor economic times, companies have been downsizing and outsourcing jobs to people outside the United States.

New to the game, college graduates are faced with large student loans and a rocky job market that’s increasingly requiring higher degrees and technical know-how.

The competition is stiffer than ever for the limited amount of positions open for college graduates who lack the working experience and bargaining power of more older and experienced workers.

For my showcase, I’d like to shed more light into the situation many of these former students are going through and defend the twenty-somethings who are still dependent on their parents.

Some people compare the early independence of youth in former generations to the youth today. However, times have changed and the youths of yesteryear barely needed a high school degree to land good jobs.

The generation of past youths married and started families at an earlier age, but today’s youth are more highly educated and wait longer to get married and start families.

They want to enjoy their youth and they’re willing to take more chances while they can, in order to find a career that suits them best.

Young adults have seen what the poor economy has done to more experienced workers and they’ve also seen more divorces.

With innovations in science and medicine, people can now live past their 70s. They don’t want to settle down just yet with anybody and they want to find the right thing for them now.

Far from the contrary, it’s not a stigma to still need your parents.

Job Fair: USACE Public Affairs, Corps talks jobs to engineering students

The founder of Twentysomething Inc, David Morrison said, “There’s almost an expectation that kids will move back home, there is no stigma attached. The thought now is to move home for 6-12 months but in reality those young adults will be home for a year and a half or longer. Even if they have jobs, they are living at home.”

According to Health Day, a study that appeared in the March 2011 issue of the Journal of Marriage and Family found that it’s normal and healthy for parents of 20-something year olds to provide financial and housing support.

The study goes against the myth that young adults receiving help are slackers who don’t want to grow up. The study also goes against the assumption that parents are spoiling their children and stifling their children’s independence.

“[Y]oung people do eventually become independent of parents as they grow older,” study author Teresa Swartz, said in a journal news release.

“Parental aid serves as ‘scaffolding’ to help young people who are working towards financial self-sufficiency and as ‘safety nets’ for those who have experienced serious difficulties,” Swartz said.

In all likelihood, most young adults won’t stay at home forever.

According to CNN Money, “The job picture for recent grads may be brightening. Employers expect to hire 13.5% more new grads from the Class of 2011 than they hired from the Class of 2010, according to a new study conducted by the National Association of Colleges and Employers.”

Young Adults Slow to Reach Independence

Young adults are growing up at a slower pace. The social science terms-extended adolescence, kidults, boomerang kids, whatever you want to call it, it’s been going on for years.

The 2006 movie, “Failure to Launch,” and the new sitcoms. “$#*! My Dad Says,” and “Big Lake,” all depict young adults who still rely on their parents and family members for financial support.

According to Marie Claire, in a  study by Teresa Swartz, Swartz explained, “Parental aid serves as ‘scaffolding’ to help young people who are working towards financial self-sufficiency and as ‘safety nets’ for those who have experienced serious difficulties. In an economy that requires advanced education for good jobs, parents are more likely to aid their children when they are students. As the labor market offers fewer opportunities for stable … well-paid work … parents often fill in when needed.”

According to Boundless, which offers a Christian viewpoint of single adult lives, “For kidults marriage and family fall in the zone of “maybe, someday, but that’s years away.” The typical kidult isn’t committed to any particular local church. They’re doing all sorts of things, but getting nowhere, just living from day to day in their own Never-Never Lands. They’re Peter Pans who shave.”

In a blog post, Jason Young lists eight observations he’s made about twenty-somethings: increased risky behavior, longer financial dependence on parents, lack of commitment, hop from job to job, lack of direction, getting married later, adolescent-like decision making skills and in and out of multiple relationships.

Young also notes eleven factors that contribute to extended adolescence: American affluence, economic shifts, older adults trying to act young again, higher education requirements, helicopter parents, perceiving adulthood as no fun, our industrialized culture, the enabling of familial environments, delayed responsibility, their personal family experience and society’s technological advancements.

In a USA Today article by Sharon Jayson, Jayson argued that “Society is also an enabler. The advent of birth control pills led to changes in sexual mores, with less pressure for marriage. Twenty-somethings have seen their parents’ early marriages end in divorce and the jobs their parents thought they’d have for 30 years end with corporate downsizing. As boomers resist aging and watch TV programs like Nip/Tuck that glorify youth, their offspring are paying attention.”

The same article quoted Alexandra Robbins, co-author of the 2001 book Quarterlife Crisis. “Twentysomethings are proving they want to get it ‘right’ now. Our generation does not want to make our parents’ generation’s mistakes.”

In another post Peter Lavelle discussed a study on the benefits of prolonging young adulthood. “In September 2004, the Current Population Survey discovered that graduates were three times more likely to volunteer for charitable work than those without a degree. Further, though graduates typically spend longer finding work, the roles in which they establish themselves tend to bring greater satisfaction.: they rate their happiness above gross domestic product.”

Lavelle also pointed out that “[i]n short, reports of a ‘generation that won’t grow up’ are alarmist, and misrepresent both the prevalent experience of Generation Y-ers and their intentions. Higher rates of education have produced a generation given to contemplation, more inclined to make sure the path they set themselves is correct than give in to societal expectations. Doubtless a number of young adults exploit this situation, finding in the release from immediate responsibilities an excuse to do nothing. Yet for others, using their twenties as a ‘transition stage’ can benefit themselves and society.”

According to the New York Times Magazine, “The whole idea of milestones, of course, is something of an anachronism; it implies a lockstep march toward adulthood that is rare these days. Kids don’t shuffle along in unison on the road to maturity. They slouch toward adulthood at an uneven, highly individual pace. Some never achieve all five milestones, including those who are single or childless by choice, or unable to marry even if they wanted to because they’re gay. Others reach the milestones completely out of order, advancing professionally before committing to a monogamous relationship, having children young and marrying later, leaving school to go to work and returning to school long after becoming financially secure.

The same article continued with, “Even if some traditional milestones are never reached, one thing is clear: Getting to what we would generally call adulthood is happening later than ever. But why? That’s the subject of lively debate among policy makers and academics. To some, what we’re seeing is a transient epiphenomenon, the byproduct of cultural and economic forces. To others, the longer road to adulthood signifies something deep, durable and maybe better-suited to our neurological hard-wiring. What we’re seeing, they insist, is the dawning of a new life stage — a stage that all of us need to adjust to.”

The King Hearing: The Heroism and Hatred

Peter King, Official 109th Congress Photo

After incidences of violence by radical Muslims, Representative Peter T. King (R-N.Y.) called for a congressional meeting to discuss homegrown Islamic terrorists and the role of Muslims in American society.

King, who is head of the House Committee on Homeland Security, called for the hearing entitled, “The Extent of Radicalization in the American Muslim Community and that Community’s Response” on Thursday, March 10, 2011.

Over concern over Al-Qaeda activating recruiting within the Muslim community and in defense of the hearing, King said in a statement that appeared on Fox News, “I will not allow political correctness to obscure a real and dangerous threat to the safety and security of the citizens of the United States.”

King was largely motivated to call the hearing because he wanted to prevent another al-Qaida attack. “To back down would be a craven surrender to political correctness, and an abdication of what I believe to be the main responsibility of this committee, to protect America from a terrorist attack,” said King to Voice of America.

On Fox News, King said he was concerned over al-Qaida activating recruiting within the Muslim community, but critics believe that the hearings only serve as a witch hunt for Muslim Americans.

Critics have argued that the hearings should not focus on the Muslim community, but it should include a broader array of groups that may threaten American lives such white supremacists groups and anti-government hate groups, according to the same article on the Voice.

King’s hearings are largely supported by Republican committee members and stand in opposition against many Democratic committee members, civil rights groups, Muslim advocacy groups and multiple religious leaders from Muslim, Christian and Jewish faiths.

According to the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, there’s still a continuing divide among the public as to whether Islam encourages more or less violence than other religions.

Between February 22 and March1, 2011, the Pew found that among 1,504 adults, 40% of the public agreed that Islam encourages violence among its believers and 42% disagreed.

Down With Terrorism. Photo taken on November 30, 2008 from Bird Eye, who got the photo on http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2008/11/29.

Compared to survey results conducted in March 2002 which showed how 25% of the public believed that Islam encourages violence and nearly twice (51%) the public were in opposition, the 2011 study found a clear split across political, religious, racial and age groups.

Many fear that the hearings will not reach the root cause of terrorism in the United States, but will only serve to increase violence against Muslim Americans.

According to Human Rights First and Islamophobia Watch, there have already been several incidences of violence against Muslims that has been largely fueled by anti-Muslim bigotry.

Asim Rehman, vice-president of the Muslim Bar Association of New York, said that the hearings would divide the country and would be potentially dangerous, according to New York Magazine.

“Last year we saw vandalism, verbal threats, actual physical violence committed against Muslim Americans,” Rehman said. “Will these hearings convince others to do the wrong thing?””

For a large part of the Muslim community, they have been doing the right thing.

National Spokesperson for the grassroots organization, Ahmadiyya Muslim Community USA, Harris Zafar argued the commitment and faithfulness of the Muslim community to American by citing a study released last month.

According to Zafar, the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security found that 48 of 69 individuals who were planning a terrorist attack on American soil were arrested ahead of time due to the vast cooperation of Muslim Americans who provided tips in 48 out of 120 terrorist cases in the United States.

To stop King from solely targeting the Muslim community in his hearings and excluding other groups, Co-director of Religious Freedom USA, Frank Fredericks was seen in a Youtube video making a call to King.

In the video, Fredericks encourages other individuals to reach out to King by repeating his message of contempt towards the hearings.

The hearings are said to continue, but in the meantime, organizations such as Muslim Voices seem to be on the right track of promoting cultural understanding and dialogue between Muslims and Non-Muslims in their videos, “College Life As A Muslim with Musa Burki” and “What Do You Think People Most Misunderstand About Islam?”

King’s hearings are most likely not intentionally trying to hurt the overall Muslim community, but it does so nonetheless. Perhaps King’s future committee hearings should pay more attention to the commonalities between groups across the America so that as we as a nation will be able to move forward instead of backwards.

Creatively Cleaning the City

Photo by web4camguy, taken on May 15, 2009 in Olde City, Philadelphia using a Nikon D200.

There are dog lovers everywhere.

Last year, a website dedicated to dogs, Dogasaur.com, created a Facebook page in July and received over 200,000 ‘Likes’ in less than two months, according to SocialTimes. As of March 2011, Dogasaur is still growing strong with over 251,000 Likes.

However, as much as people love their furry companions, no one likes to clean up dog waste.

According to the New York Post, the upper Manhattan neighborhood, Washington Heights, was ranked by the Sanitation Department as the worst offender of dog poop, with the highest amount of canine waste found on Riverside Drive, Amsterdam Avenue and 179th and 160th streets.

New York State dog owners are required by the 1978 Canine Waste Law, more widely known as the “Pooper-Scooper Law,” to clean up after their dog’s waste, according to a 2004 press release by the New York City Parks & Recreation Department.

At $8.50 to license spayed or neutered dogs and $34 for otherwise unspayed and unneutered dogs, the law calls for the “Removal of canine wastes in cities with a population of four hundred thousand or more persons.”

New York has come a long way in having cleaner, dog-poop-free streets since 1978, but many still continue to violate the law. In the same press release, “the Department of Sanitation enforcement wrote 644 summonses for those in violation of the canine waste law” in 2003.

It can be difficult to provide a financial incentive for people to pick up their dog waste when the penalty for first time offenders is $50 and many people still do not register their dogs with the state, according to Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt, the authors of the New York Times bestseller, “Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, in a 2005 New York Times article.

Photo by 416style, taken on July 7, 2006 in The Distillery District, Toronto, ON, CA, using a Sony DSC-S600.

According to Dubner and Levitt, in 2004, “the city ticketed only 471 dog-waste violations, which suggests that the typical offender stands a roughly 1-in-8,000 chance of getting a ticket.”

To rectify the dog waste situation, Dubner and Levitt suggested that as part of the New York City dog licensing procedure, a sample of the canine’s saliva or blood should be kept on file. When fecal matter is found on the sidewalk, a sample of it could be traced back to the registered canine DNA and the offender would be mailed a ticket.

The the dog owners of the 102,004 dogs that were licensed in 2003, would be held accountable for their dog waste management.

This would still leave 80 percent of the total 530,000 dogs found in New York as unregistered dogs, according to another article by The New York Times.

It would be expensive to create a $30 million citywide canine DNA system so Dubner and Levitt have also suggested that the government should pay dog owners to register their dogs and to enforce the law by having random street checks of registered dogs.

There has also been growing interest in turning fecal matter into sustainable energy.

Many countries have looked into building methane digesters that live off of animal waste and convert fecal matter into methane energy.

However, many government agencies have been weary of methane digester projects, as they should be, warned Nicolette Hahn Niman in her 2006 New York Times Op-Ed article. Niman, who is a livestock farmer and environmental lawyer, said that methane digesters should not be considered “green power,” but more of “brown power” due to the financial and environmental strain it can put on society.

The Park Spark Project. For more information, visit: http://parksparkproject.com/artwork/1595601.html

‘[D]igesters, incinerators and biodiesel plants are expensive to build and run” said Niman, and these projects would have to be subsidized by public money. It would only be economical if waste from hundreds of thousands of animals were made available, such as the waste created by 500,000 pigs that run a manure biodiesal plant at a Smithfield Foods operation in Utah.

Traditional farms would be able to recycle their waste more easily, said Niman, but livestock operations would have to expand their livestock in order to support the costs of installing a methane digester.

Niman also explained that methane digesters do not get rid of the solid waste, but instead turns it into a manure slurry.

The manure slurry can sometimes be larger than the original volume of the manure and contains most of the properties that make feces pollutants, especially when organizations store the feces in its pre and post slurry state in large storage ponds.

Nevertheless, despite the hesitation of using methane digesters, many government institutions and interested parties are looking at one of the most recent innovations of recycling dog waste.

Created by Matthew Mazzotta, who is a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) visual arts program and lead artist of The Park Spark Project, Mazzotta designed a methane digester that converts dog waste into energy.

The methane digester allows dog owners and dog walkers to place their dog’s feces in plastic bags and the bag in the digester. Then they would spin the dial to start mixing and recycling the manure.

It is currently being used in a public dog park in Cambridge, Massachusetts to light up a gas-burning lamppost that’s known as the ‘eternal flame’ and the organizers of the project are looking for other ways of using the energy.

Until then, the ‘eternal flame’ stands alone as a beacon of things to come.

Basically Broke: The Burden of Buying a Bachelor’s Degree

Photo by Carla Besos on her 6/11/2010 blog entry, "Secret to losing weight? GO BROKE!!!" where she describes her unintentional weight loss due to being a broke college student.

Paying for college isn’t easy. Some students take it upon themselves to pay for their own college tuition, while others relay on their parents to fork the bill. However, even relying on mom and dad to pay your tuition doesn’t always cut it.

According to the Dallas News, a study that appeared in the Journal of Family Issues (JFI) found that compared to married parents, divorced parents and remarried parents are more likely to shift the burden of paying for college onto their children.

The study took place between 2006 and 2007 and showed that divorced parents and married parents were less likely to contribute their income (6% and 5% vs. 8%) and meet their children’s financial needs (42% and 53% vs. 77%) than student’s whose parents were married.

“Once a parent has been through the financial fallout of a divorce, “both the professional fees and the splitting of the marital estate, they naturally become more cautious about retaining what assets they have,” said [Joanna] Jadlow, who often serves as the financial expert in divorce cases.”

“”This means that contributing to the cost of their child’s college education may not feel as comfortable as it did prior to the divorce,” she said.”

Photo by Brian Snyder/Reuters/File as seen in The Christian Science Monitor under the article, "College tuition too high? Tune in, drop out, and learn!"

Despite the potential connection between tuition and the martial status of the students’ parents, others like the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), question the quality of higher education.

According to Education-Portal.com, the ACTA, which announced on WhatWillTheyLearn.com, their ratings of colleges “based on the schools’ curricula rather than reputation or self-reported data,” found that most schools were failing to teach the students the seven fundamentals for a well-balanced education: composition, literature, foreign language, U.S. History, economics, mathematics and science, and that as the cost of tuition rose, teaching the fundamentals became less and less enforced.

Not only are some schools failing to address the fundamentals, but they’re also trying to catch up with students today who are more familiar with, and have the desire, to work with computers and technology.

Youtube videos such as “A Vision of Students Today” and “A Vision of K-12 Students Today,” also depict the struggles of trying to learn in a traditional way when it’s becoming an increasingly technological driven society where there is a price tag for everything, and educators today are struggling to integrate more technology into the classroom setting.

 

To fight the burden of paying for college, some people have taken to the streets or have demonstrated small acts of defiance.

Last year, on November 10, 2010, upon hearing Prime Minister David Cameron’s government plans to triple the university tuition to 9,000 pounds ($14,000) a year, approximately 50,000 students, lecturers and supporters protested in London in front of the headquarters of the Conservative Party, according to Salon.

A similar act of defiance occurred a month ago on January 18, 2011, when sophomore Nic Ramos paid his $14,309.51 out-of-state tuition at the University of Colorado with $1 bills and some change.

According to Daily Camera, it took three employees at the college’s bursar’s office 55 minutes each to count the spring semester payment that was presented in a duffel bag that weighed 33 pounds. A spokesperson of the school said that the act resembled a previous demonstration in the 1980s where another student paid his tuition in coins.

Although acts like these may be considered courageous and righteous, they are unlikely to change the fact that a majority of college students will be graduating with hefty loans that will take years to pay back.

On top of the loans, some may leave with few marketable skills and very little work place experience, which is why some people like hedge fund manager Peter Theil, encourages young people to pursue skills outside the classroom.

According to Business Insider, Theil plans to pay twenty individuals under the age of 20, up to $100,000 in his two year “20 Under 20” program, in order for young people today to pursue entrepreneurship.

Dropping out, pursuing a non-degree program, or going for a degree -whatever decision an individual makes, try to make a choice that fits well with you because whether you pay for it now or later, in the end you will have to pay for it, but it may not always be financially.

Black to School, One Lesson at a Time

Cathie Black (Photo by Robert Kalfus from the New York Post)

New York City Schools chancellor Cathie Black entered office on January 1, but the skepticism over her inexperience in the educational field has continued to escalate over her recent response to overcrowded schools-birth control.

Despite the joke, Black’s response left much to be desired for by parents, students and officials attending the monthly task force meeting at state Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver’s downtown office.

According to the New York Post, “Some who were at the meeting said Black’s levity was especially inappropriate given that she was addressing a community whose complaints about the scarcity of public-school seats has for years seemed to fall on deaf ears.”

Not only are there a shortage of seats, but old school buildings like the Secondary School for Research, the former John Jay High  School building, are also in need of remodeling.

The John Jay building which has been around since 1903, has been requesting for building improvements from the Department of Education (DOE) for years, according to Rahsan Williams, a ninth-grade English teacher at the school who spoke with the the community news organization, Park Slope Patch.

When the DOE announced on December 3 that the building would be improved in light of the addition of a competitive new high school in the building, Millennium Brooklyn, which would be based on the renowned Millennium High School in Manhattan, students and teachers were dejected over the mixed message.

John Jay Students (Photo by Miriam Coleman, Park Slope Patch)

According to New York Magazine, “The proposal lead more than one resident to wonder if John Jay was about to go apartheid with funding going to a separate school that catered to white students rather than being invested in John Jay’s existing mold-, asbestos-, and minority-filled classrooms.”

Despite the audience waving condoms over Black’s insensitivity and protesting over the lack of comprehensive improvements and integration Black is struggling to bring to the school system, the issue of bringing Millennium Brooklyn to the John Jay building passed with an overwhelming favor of ten votes to none.

Black was former president of Hearst Magazines, which is known for its monthly magazines, including Harper’s Bazaar, Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping and O, The Oprah Magazine,  but will now oversee 1.1 million students in the New York City school system.

As cited in an article by the Associated Press that appeared in The Wall Street Journal, “When Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced the surprise choice of Black to replace the departing Joel Klein, he said her private-sector track record would translate into success as schools chancellor, calling her a “superstar manager” who knew how to run things.”

Black and Bloomberg paired up with the goal of improving the faltering test scores of students in 532 schools by providing $10 million to tutor students.

“It was so obvious that we had a problem,” the Teachers Union President Michael Mulgrew said in an article by The Huffington Post. “Something had to be done; this is a start.”

Cathie Black (Photo by Xanthos/News from the New York Daily News)

Tricia Joyce, a parent whose kids attend the overcrowded PS 234 in TriBeCa, said to the New York Post, “I just hope she chooses to do something much better than what she says.”

Let’s hope Black keeps the ball moving.