Join me in the cesspool of AmeriKa's Zionist media, if you dare.
"Colleges guard soaring endowments"
"by Peter Schworm, Globe Staff | February 28, 2008
Under growing pressure from Congress, the country's wealthiest colleges and universities are sharply resisting calls to spend more of their soaring endowments to expand financial aid and curb tuition hikes that critics say are putting college beyond the reach of ordinary families.
The pattern of deep-pocketed universities regularly raising tuition while amassing fast-growing fortunes has drawn unusual scrutiny from government leaders and higher education advocates over the past few months. They say elite colleges are hoarding wealth that could help open their doors to more poor and working-class families....
Lawmakers said they remain concerned about escalating costs, and they warn that colleges may have to spend more of their endowments, which are tax-exempt and financed by tax-exempt gifts, to justify their nonprofit status.
Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, the ranking Republican on the Finance Committee, wrote in a letter to the colleges:
"Tuition has gone up, college presidents' salaries have gone up, and endowments continue to go up and up. We need to start seeing tuition relief for families go up just as fast. It's fair to ask whether a college kid should have to wash dishes in the dining hall to pay his tuition when his college has a billion dollars in the bank."
US Representative Peter Welch, a Vermont Democrat... said Congress will continue to debate endowment spending over the coming weeks in hearings over the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, the chief federal legislation governing colleges and universities. Other proposals would put schools that raise tuition more than their peers on a federal watch list and require schools to report how they spend endowments....
More bureaucracy and fed databases, 'eh?.
Nowhere are colleges amassing more wealth than in the Boston area. Harvard University's $34 billion endowment is bigger than the gross domestic product of Montana. MIT's $10 billion cache could buy Facebook. Together, Boston College and Boston University could bankroll the entire city budget, with $500 million to spare.
Colleges use endowments to finance a range of priorities, including chaired professorships, capital improvements, and financial aid. The schools try to limit endowment spending to maintain a buffer to weather financial downturns and to ensure long-term stability.
They have spent proportionately less of their endowment for each of the past four years, a study by the National Association of College and University Business Officers found. They now spend an average of 4.6 percent each year, a figure that colleges say is carefully calculated to maintain the principal.
Proponents of more generous endowment spending say that concentration of wealth runs counter to colleges' legal status as nonprofits.
Lynne Munson, an adjunct research fellow at the Center for College Affordability and Productivity who testified before Congress on endowments last fall:
"They are allowed to collect and invest money tax-free and that should be done toward a public good. Hoarding isn't a public good.... "
But a nice way to accrue capital -- the schools and the insurance companies.
College officials, who bristle at the prospect of government regulation, say endowment spending is largely restricted. Upward of 80 percent of their contributions are earmarked for specific uses, they say.
Robert Berdahl, president of the Association of American Universities and former chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley:
"That kind of intrusion wouldn't be healthy. Endowments have to be dealt with conservatively, because the whole point of an endowment is to conserve."
In their defense, colleges note that financial aid has increased faster than tuition and that only well-off families are required to pay the full price. At some wealthy schools, families earning less than $60,000 a year are no longer required to pay anything, and a new Harvard initiative requires families earning $120,000 to $180,000 a year to pay no more than 10 percent of their income on average.
Other upper-tier colleges already provide generous financial aid packages for low-income and working-class families, and some college administrators say that increased financial aid would primarily benefit the wealthy.
Kirk Kolenbrander, MIT's vice president for institute affairs:
"Our revenues from tuition are going down over time."
Endowments have shown handsome returns. But that could quickly change, and spending to fulfill a mandated limit would be imprudent, officials said.
Among the vast majority of institutions with relatively modest endowments, financial aid budgets are already strained, and tuition increases are necessary, administrators add.
Richard Doherty, president of the Association of Independent Colleges and Universities in Massachusetts:
"Colleges are very reluctant to raise tuition . . . They do it because they have to."
Still, some college administrators are sympathetic to congressional scrutiny, even if they oppose endowment restrictions.
Mark G. Yudof, chancellor of the University of Texas system:
"To me, the taxpayers are subsidizing these large endowments, and it's not irrational for Congress to question whether the beneficiaries are receiving a suitable payout."
Others criticize the discussion as a distraction. Focusing on schools with vast resources ignores the struggles of the bulk of the nation's students at public colleges, said John Lippincott, president of the Council for Advancement and Support of Education.
Anthony Marx, president of Amherst College, said wealthy colleges should be judged not only on how much financial aid they provide, but how many needy students they enroll:
"We need aid policies that ensure access, but that's not the end of the story."All this money spent (or not) for what?
AmeriKa's schools suck!
Not any better abroad, either.
I love this article because Middle East Christians appear to be crazy and the Egyptians just look bad.
And Israel comes out smelling like a rose in the Zionist War Daily!
"Maine teen says he starved during stay with host family in Egypt"
"by Jerry Harkavy, Associated Press | February 28, 2008
HALLOWELL, Maine - Jonathan McCullum was in excellent health at 155 pounds when he left last summer to spend the school year as an exchange student in Egypt.
But when he returned home to Maine just four months later, the 5-foot-9 teenager weighed a mere 97 pounds and was so weak that he struggled to carry his baggage or climb a flight of stairs. Doctors said he was at risk of a heart attack.
McCullum says he was denied sufficient food while staying with a family of Coptic Christians, who fast for more than 200 days a year, a regimen unmatched by other Christians.
But he does not view the experience as a culture clash. Rather, he said, it reflected mean and stingy treatment by his host family and a language barrier that made it difficult to communicate.
"The weight loss concerned me, but I wanted to stick out the whole year," he said in an interview at his family's home outside Augusta.
Friends and teachers at his English-speaking school in Egypt urged him to change his host family, but he stayed put after being told that the other home was in a dangerous neighborhood of Alexandria.
After returning to the United States, he was hospitalized for nearly two weeks. The 17-year-old has regained about 20 pounds, but his parents say he's not the same boy he was when he left under the auspices of AFS Intercultural Programs.
"He was outgoing, a straight-A student, very athletic," said his mother, Elizabeth McCullum, who was shocked when she met her son at the airport on Jan. 9 and saw he had lost one-third his weight. "Now, he's less spontaneous and more subdued."
Jonathan McCullum's parents said the exchange program should have warned them that students placed with Coptic families would be subject to dietary restrictions.
Marlene Baker, communications director at AFS headquarters in New York, declined to discuss McCullum's experience.
She referred calls to the program's lawyer in Portland, Patricia Peard, who said she could not comment on McCullum's case because of the potential for a lawsuit.
McCullum said that his host family gave him only meager amounts of food and that his condition worsened during the last seven weeks, when the family observed a fast limiting the amount of animal protein he was given.
The host father, Shaker Hanna, rejected McCullum's story as "a lie," suggesting that he made it up because his parents were hoping to recover some of the money they paid for his stay as compensation.
"The truth is, the boy we hosted for nearly six months was eating for an hour and a half at every meal," Hanna said. "The amount of food he ate at each meal was equal to six people."
He added that the boy was active, constantly exercising and playing sports.
McCullum sometimes bought food, but at one point was reduced to stealing it from a supermarket. He was caught, but the store accepted the small amount of money he had and let him go.
Still, McCullum did not complain to his parents. They first sensed that something was amiss shortly before Christmas, when they got e-mails from their son and one of his teachers about seeking a new host family. They also saw a picture of him on Facebook indicating he had lost a lot of weight.
In early January, the teacher sent another e-mail saying that McCullum was "in bad shape" and "really, really needs to go home."
The McCullums said AFS provided false assurances that he had seen a doctor and was in excellent health.
AFS, a nonprofit formerly known as American Field Service, is one of the largest and oldest organizers of student exchanges. Since its founding as an ambulance corps during World War I, the agency has arranged exchanges for 325,000 American and foreign students from more than 50 countries."By this time in my readings, I was already exhausted.
