Posted under American history & jobs & unhappy endings
Gee–let me guess: unscrupulous people will be more interested in profits than in serving the public? And, the jobs that private corporations create will be vastly inferior to their government job counterparts? Here’s what happens at a lot of private, for-profit universities (via Susie at Suburban Guerrilla), which amazingly enough are much more interested in talking the students into huge loans than they are in actually educating them:
In the end, [Martine ] Leveque decided to enroll. The day she came in to fill out her paperwork, she says, the recruiters rushed her through the process and discouraged her from taking the forms home to look over. They told her that she would be taking out private loans in addition to federal loans that are traditionally used to pay educational expenses, but did not explain what the terms of those [$29,000 worth of] loans would be. “They just kept telling me that ‘we’re with you,’ and that they would try to get me the maximum amount of federal loans allowed,” she says. Only later did she learn that those private loans—which made up two-thirds of her “financial aid” package—carried double-digit interest rates and other onerous terms.
To make matters worse, the program did not come close to delivering on the promises that had been made. The instructors had little recent medical experience. Instead of really teaching, she says, they usually just read textbooks aloud in class and sometimes offered students the answers on tests ahead of time. On the rare occasions when Leveque and her class were given time in the lab, she found that the equipment was broken down and shoddy—except for the expensive new mannequin, which no one knew how to use. Instead of the promised rotations at UCLA Medical Center, her clinical training consisted of helping pass out pills at a nursing home. . . . Continue Reading »
It’s Thanksgiving week, so I thought I would reprise my Thanksgiving foods posts from last year. Just in case you haven’t finalized your menu, here’s a retrospective of Thanksgivings past (and in the far distant past):
All this semester, I’ve been meaning to do some food blogging based on my re-reading of M.F.K. Fisher’s How to Cook a Wolf (1942), as a response to our current Great Depression, but frankly, I’ve been a little flummoxed. (How to Cook a Wolf was written as a guide to surviving rationing and fuel shortages in the U.S. during World War II, but I thought it might contain some useful tips for economizing more generally.) I must report reluctantly 
As I was running this morning, I thought to myself: how strange and unlikely that I now live and work in a location where I am in proximity to more large animals than to small animals. (I have two small animals myself, but cattle really are a big part of my life these days. This seems strange, since I work in a Liberal Arts college and not Animal Sciences–strange but not unwelcome. The big animals I run into (and next to) are penned or fenced, and well under control. The animals I encounter aren’t part of big agribusiness, but are clearly free-range herds under the care of a small farm.
(Sorry for the craptastic photos–they were taken literally on the run with a cell-phone camera. I wanted to get one that showed the mountains in the background, but the light and the cattle weren’t cooperating. Besides the fact of my craptastic cell-phone camera! But those of you who know me probably know me well enough to know that a new phone or digital camera is not going to be a priority on my Christmas list.) 
Via 
Check this out, from Flavia at 
Busy day here at the ranch! I thought I’d throw you few curves to help keep your day interesting:
That’s what we used to say back at my “Seven Sisters” college in the 1980s! Every twenty years or so, it seems like even the most elite and well-established women’s colleges have a conversation about going co-ed. Let’s face it–coeducational or historically all-male colleges have much bigger endowments. My sense is that male alumns support their colleges much more generously, because they can. (That is, they can give more because of the wage gap that persists between men and women, plus the fact that few male college graduates drop out of the workforce even temporarily because they married and/or had children.) So, I understand the appeal of admitting male students. (I also understand the value to the endowment of invoking the spectre of co-education for women’s college alumnae. That sure opens up a few moth-eaten old wallets and revs up the donorcycles, eh?) 
I didn’t even bother posting photos or commenting on our pre-Halloween freak snowstorm of October 28-29 that left 8-10 inches of snow on the ground in my neighborhood. Well, here’s evidence of our second “freak” snowstorm this past weekend, another 8 inches or so. Wild!