Skipping School: A Look at Free Higher-Education Alternatives. When I was growing up there was never a question that I would attend college one day.
My parents, both of whom have graduate degrees, would talk about higher education as if it were a foregone conclusion. "What do you want to study in college? " they'd ask pointedly, or "Where do you want to live after college? " Both my mother and father are relatively progressive and from working-class backgrounds, yet they'd never mention trade schools or, God forbid, skipping college altogether. College was just something people did, a rite of passage into a better life.
Today, many Americans are losing faith that a post-secondary education is a wise investment. It wasn't always like this. Most people know there's got to be a better way. 10 Open Education Resources You May Not Know About (But Should) Young activists take DREAMs into their own hands. Ruben Bernal, who recently graduated from San Jose State University, rallies for the Dream Act in downtown San Jose, Calif., Wednesday, June 29, 2011.
Photo: AP/Paul Sakuma When Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas publicly announced in June that he was an undocumented immigrant, he shocked friends and employers and sparked a national conversation about U.S. immigration policy. But throughout the country, young undocumented students have been making their own immigration statuses public, riding a tidal wave of college-based activism to come forward with personal stories of growing up young and undocumented in the U.S. Monday marked the ten-year anniversary of the first introduction of the federal DREAM Act to Congress, the bill that would carve out a path toward U.S. citizenship for those who emigrated illegally as children but graduated from a U.S. college or served in the military. “Because of that, my personality changed,” Hong said in an interview last week. Seeking Arrangement: College Students Using 'Sugar Daddies' To Pay Off Loan Debt. NEW YORK -- On a Sunday morning in late May, Taylor left her Harlem apartment and boarded a train for Greenwich, Conn.
She planned on spending the day with a man she had met online, but not in person. Taylor, a 22-year-old student at Hunter College, had confided in her roommate about the trip and they agreed to swap text messages during the day to make sure she was safe. Once in Greenwich, a man who appeared significantly older than his advertised age of 42 greeted Taylor at the train station and then drove her to the largest house she had ever seen. He changed into his swimming trunks, she put on a skimpy bathing suit, and then, by the side of his pool, she rubbed sunscreen into the folds of his sagging back -- bracing herself to endure an afternoon of sex with someone she suspected was actually about 30 years her senior.
Taylor doubted that her client could relate to someone who had grown up black and poor in the South Bronx. A love match it wasn't. "By the way, how old are you? "