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Essay Instructions: hello,
this is an argumentative essay. and the main question that you will be explaining will be -- Is college worth the price? In other words: should people pursue a college degree anymore or go into some other line of work or job training. Please absolutely make sure that you have a clear opposition (real people with real names and real thoughts) when you write this essay. and as far as it is about real people and real name. i can give u a few names of my friends, (roxie - psychology major), (courtney - computer science major), (jojo - computer engineering major), (farila - international studies and criminal justice major), (matt - law major).
i guess that would be enough. also please make sure nottin been taken from any outside source or any website since it all will be checked.
a lil more info that provide by the instructor outlined below:
your purpose of this essay is to research an issue of interest to you, develop a reasoned position about the issue based on your research, and persuade others of the validity of your position. Develop a good clear thesis based on your research. Make sure you understand the problem at issue, why people should care, and what various people believe about the issue.

Keeping these thoughts in mind, choose the organizational strategy that will best fit your claim and argument. When deciding how to structure your argument, remember that it?s just as important to consider the opposition to and/or detractors of your claim. You need to consider the viewpoints of people who disagree with your claim or simply raise objections to your arguments. Concentrate on organizing your thoughts some before you start typing. Take a general organizing strategy and turn it into an informal outline that will provide the shell for your essay. Please remember that absolutely everything in your essay should somehow support and/or develop your claim.

I would also like you to concentrate on your audience as you write the essay. Put yourself in the shoes of all the various people who could read your essay. Make sure to avoid using language someone may find offensive or words that can carry a negative connotation for some people.

CONTENT
? Be careful not to imply a cause and effect where none may exist. Just because something could happen, it doesn?t mean it will happen.
? Make sure to not only include outside resources but also to explain how that information/idea supports your claim.
? Make sure to establish a source?s credibility.

ok and the last part is the citation. since i have to do all the research about the biblography and have it in class before this essay. i already find all of them and the only way is to paste it here for you. i'll probably gonna paste about 4 piece of bibliograpgy but please use only 2 of them. since am not allowed to use anything else other than this bibliography and not more than 2. and the citation should be done in MLA format. these all r taken from electronic college database.
below is the bibliograpy that u have to choose from:
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1.Congress set to battle over education tax cuts:

Copyright Dow Jones & Company Inc May 29, 1997
WASHINGTON -- A schoolyard scrap is brewing over proposed education tax cuts. And President Clinton might be the one getting skinned knees.
House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott have promised Mr. Clinton "roughly" $35 billion in tax cuts "consistent" with the White House's proposed $1,500 tax credit and $10,000 tax deduction for higher-education expenses. But the GOP leaders didn't promise to enact Mr. Clinton's precise plan, which is part of the broader balanced-budget deal. Now, lawmakers and lobbyists are jockeying to scale back the president's proposals in favor of their competing agendas.
Tracor Inc., a Texas electronics concern, is part of a coalition of high-technology companies lobbying for permanent renewal and expansion of the tax credit supporting employer-provided education assistance. The nation's private colleges want tax-preferred prepaid tuition plans -- and they are backed by companies such as Federated Investors Inc. of Pittsburgh which see potential profits in managing the private funds.
Lawmakers are even mulling counting part of the cost of expanding individual retirement accounts against the education pot of money. A proposal pending in the House and Senate would allow penalty-free withdrawals from IRAs for education expenses. "The goal of the president will survive, but we have flexibility to come up with our own ideas," says Louisiana Sen. John Breaux, a Finance Committee Democrat with his own proposal to create a new tax-preferred education account.
Mr. Breaux's readiness to rewrite the Clinton package is reflective of broader views in the House and Senate. The purpose of Mr. Clinton's tax-cutting effort is to increase access to higher education, particularly for low-income individuals. But "the proposed tax cuts for education, most thoughtful observers agree, could be better spent in ways that would demonstrably help students and their families," says Sen. Daniel Moynihan of New York, the top-ranking Democrat on the Finance Committee.
According to the Economic Policy Institute, college graduates earned 44.4% more than their high-school counterparts in 1995. Critics contend the disparity would be better addressed with financial grants to students which have an immediate pocketbook impact and could be clearly targeted to the neediest. But in the current political environment, sharply expanding grants or creating a new spending program isn't as popular as cutting taxes. "The main thing is, it's $35 billion for education," argues Democratic Rep. Barbara Kennelly of Connecticut.
If unchanged, Mr. Clinton's proposed credit and deduction would eat up most of the agreed-on $35 billion. At the same time, critics suggest they would give schools an incentive to raise tuition and to inflate grades, since the credit would require that students maintain a "B" average.
Gene Sperling, head of the White House National Economic Council, says Mr. Clinton "will be holding solid" to his plan but expects to work with Congress. A senior Treasury Department official adds the administration doesn't want anything beyond the president's proposed credit and deduction counted against the $35 billion. "We don't want it in our pot," the official says.
However, the administration is considering changes that would respond to critics. One possible option would drop the requirement that students maintain a "B" average, instead requiring them to show "satisfactory progress." Another change, officials say, would be designed to make "the package more progressive," by allowing low-income students to receive higher amounts of direct aid without disqualifying themselves for the credit.
Paring back the president's proposals too severely would risk Mr. Clinton's veto, which House Ways and Means Chairman Bill Archer of Texas wants desperately to avoid. But the prospect of conflict hasn't dampened the creative spirit of congressional tax-writers. "There's going to be a lot of horse-trading and compromising, and it's going to be the committee's judgment as to what gets considered," says GOP Rep. Clay Shaw of Florida, a senior member of Mr. Archer's panel.
For starters, Mr. Shaw envisions shifting the $3.5 billion, five-year cost of expanding and permanently renewing the employer education tax credit into the $35 billion reserved for Mr. Clinton. The issue might otherwise be considered with a handful of competing tax credits that have either expired or will soon do so.
Another popular proposal would allow a tax deduction for interest paid on student loans. Bankers and the Student Loan Marketing Association, which makes a secondary market for such loans, are working with more than two dozen education groups to lobby for reinstatement of the deduction, which was killed in 1986. The cost of doing so ranges from $700 million over five years to more than $4.5 billion, depending on whether there is a cap on the amount of interest that can be written off.
"If it gives students any kind of edge, more the better," said Joe Belew, president of the Consumer Bankers Association, whose group might also benefit from lower loan defaults. "The cost of education is skyrocketing. It's all about taking out loans and taking on debt."
Meanwhile, the fight over prepaid tuition is more than academic. At the moment, state schools are allowed to offer tuition programs with favorable tax benefits: Balances paid into the program are shielded from taxation until the funds are drawn down. Now state institutions want tax-free withdrawals -- which could cost $600 million over five years -- and private schools such as Princeton and Yale are now demanding equal treatment.
Lobbyists for companies such as Federated Investors are backing the private schools in quiet visits to Capitol Hill. "They need to invest the money and work with money managers, as they currently do with endowments," says Matthew Hamill, a lobbyist for the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities.
GOP leaders also are considering putting part of the cost of IRAs under the $35 billion cap for education, as well as a companion $1.8 billion proposal to create a tax-preferred education account named after former GOP Sen. Robert Dole of Kansas. Each measure would create sales opportunities for Wall Street, which is a big reason Prudential Insurance Co. of America, Fidelity Investments and many other firms have been canvassing Capitol Hill in recent weeks. "We've been making the rounds," says Bill DeReuter, a vice president for governmental affairs at Merrill Lynch & Co.
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2.Colleges' Failure to Resolve Funding May Bar Millions From Attending, Study Finds; [FINAL Edition]

Copyright The Washington Post Company Jun 18, 1997
A new report on the nation's universities warns that the pressures of growing enrollment, rising tuition, and declining funding have put campuses on a dangerous financial course and threaten to exclude many students from higher education.
The report, by the Rand Corp., draws a bleak portrait of the financial problems facing universities and suggests that many of them are "floundering" in their attempts to solve those problems.
Thomas Kean, a former governor of New Jersey who helped lead the study, said that if current campus trends in funding and enrollment continue into the next century "millions of Americans will be denied the opportunity to go to college."
The report concludes that neither public nor private support of colleges is keeping pace with campus costs or student enrollment. The report projects that by 2015, the number of full-time college students will swell to 13 million, about 3 million more than now.
That growth, spurred largely by the increasing necessity of a college degree in the nation's labor market, is occurring as college tuition costs are continuing to outpace inflation. Nationally, average college tuition per student, adjusted for inflation, has nearly doubled in the past 20 years, the report concludes.
If that pattern were to continue for another 20 years, the report asserts, more than 6 million students "will be priced out of the system."
Higher education officials said yesterday that the long-term analysis of colleges presented in the report appears to be sound.
"It defines the problems well, and speaks candidly about what states and institutions have to do to try to solve them," said Stanley Ikenberry, president of the American Council on Education, a Washington group that represents more than 1,300 colleges and universities.
Leaders of the study faulted both the federal government and, in particular, states for not making stronger financial commitments to higher education. But they also stressed that the management habits of colleges are a substantial part of the problem.
The report sharply criticizes the way many colleges manage their money, arguing that the financial decisions they make are often "cumbersome and even dysfunctional in an environment of scarce resources." The report urges universities to define their missions more precisely, streamline services, and do more to measure faculty productivity. On many campuses, the report notes, the response thus far to growing financial crises has been "partial and ad hoc."
It also recommends that universities share more of each other's resources and try to save money in the years ahead by relying more on new computer technology and the Internet as tools for class instruction and scholarly research.
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3.Education Aid At What Cost? Clinton's $50 Billion Plan Has Skeptics Even on Campus; FINAL Edition

Copyright The Washington Post Company Feb 3, 1997
It would be a federal gift of staggering proportions: tax breaks, loan cuts, tuition grants and new scholarships, all designed to ease one of the most difficult chores facing many of the nation's families -- paying for college.
To President Clinton, the $50 billion package he will send to Congress this week is a centerpiece of his second term, as vital to his legacy in the White House as balancing the federal budget or reforming welfare.
With public alarm over college costs soaring, and with the economy producing a wave of jobs that demand better-educated workers, Clinton is vowing to provide historic new access to higher education, as the GI Bill did after World War II, or as the federal student-loan program did when it was created in the 1960s. "It will open the doors of college education wider than ever before," the president said last week.
But as they scrutinize the emerging details of Clinton's plan, economists, some congressional leaders and even university officials who want more federal aid say they are worried that the president's proposal is fraught with as many risks as rewards.
What he intends to create, they say, is a massive new government entitlement, one whose roots lie more in election-year politics than prudent fiscal policy, that may hardly have the impact he is promising, and that may be difficult to manage.
Thomas Kane, a Harvard University economist who once worked for Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers, said he fears the package will not achieve one of its fundamental goals: boosting college enrollment. "Most of that money will go to students who would have gone to college anyway," Kane said. "That's tax relief, not education policy."
The core of Clinton's proposal is a tax credit, or Hope Scholarship, that would refund up to $1,500 to families in each of the first two years their child attends college and earns a "B" average or better. Alternatively, families could opt to deduct up to $10,000 from their taxable income for each student enrolled in college. Both tax breaks would gradually be phased out for individuals making between $50,000 and $70,000, and for couples filing jointly between $80,000 and $100,000. The $1,500 tax credit is slightly more than the tuition cost at most community colleges.
The president is also calling for a 25 percent increase in the size of the federal Pell Grants program, which pays the college tuition costs of 3.6 million of the nation's neediest students. Many college officials, even some who contend the package is flawed, say it looms as a potential landmark in American higher education because it could make attending two years of college nearly as universal as attending high school. Currently, about 60 percent of high school graduates nationwide choose to go to college.
"This is a genuinely a breakthrough proposal," said Terry Hartle, a vice president for the American Council on Education, which represents more than 1,300 of the nation's colleges and universities. "It could be a huge step forward for American families."
But already in Congress, and on some campuses, there are doubts about key parts of the plan. Some skeptics question whether it would give colleges powerful new incentives to raise costs even more, pressure professors to boost grades of students desperate to qualify for the new aid, and force the Internal Revenue Service to take the extraordinary step of collecting academic transcripts to make sure tax breaks went only to students with high grades.
Others say they worry that much of Clinton's package slights poor families who, because they pay little in taxes, would not benefit substantially from tax breaks on their children's tuition.
Improving access to college has become a pressing national concern. The gap in earnings between college graduates and workers without a degree is widening, yet the rate at which lower-income families send children to college has remained stubbornly low. An analysis by economist Thomas Mortenson of the federal government's Current Population Survey shows that among families with annual incomes of more than $67,000, the proportion of graduates from a four-year college has risen sharply, from 30 percent in 1980 to 80 percent today. But the percentage of college-bound youngsters from families with incomes of $22,000 to $67,000 has held steady at around 20 percent, and for the poorest families, the rate continues to hover at less than 10 percent.Yet if a central goal is to make college affordable for those on the lower rungs of the income ladder, some economists argue, Clinton's plan is an inefficient means of achieving that because so little of the money will end up with the poor.
Just last week, the administration tried to blunt such criticism by shifting several billion dollars it had been planning to spend on Hope Scholarships into Pell Grants. The switch would increase the number of students eligible and raise the maximum grant to $3,000 per student, $300 more than the current limit and the largest increase in 20 years. Even with the increase, however, the grant still would be nearly 30 percent less valuable than in 1980 because of the rising costs of tuition over that period.
To many higher education analysts, the Pell Grant increases are not enough. The Clinton plan "tips the benefits so heavily to the more advantaged in our society that I have great misgivings," said Lawrence Gladieux, executive director for policy analysis at the College Board. "I appreciate that families are struggling {to afford college for their children}, but this is clearly an upper-income program. . . . It's a middle-class tax cut. To claim that it's a new GI Bill is extravagant and misleading."
Nationwide, the burden of paying for college is growing. Tuition at public and private universities continues to rise at twice the rate of inflation, and there has been an explosion in student borrowing this decade. Nearly half the nation's students have tuition loans and nearly half also hold jobs. Their debt burden, more than $24 billion, has never been higher. On most campuses, loans have become the dominant form of aid.
Tuition hikes have slowed a bit in recent years, but that has not brought students much relief. At four-year public universities, which enroll the majority of students, annual tuition is now nearing $3,000, costs that typically double when room and board charges are included. In inflation-adjusted terms, that is 33 percent higher than a decade ago.
To many parents, the numbers are overwhelming. "It's scary," said Gerrianne Crenshaw, a federal worker with a daughter in high school in Clinton, Md. "You know a college education is an opportunity your children shouldn't miss -- they can't really get a decent job without it -- but it's hard to figure out how to pay for it without taking out loans."
That anxiety is what Clinton says he is striving to reduce. As he braces for debate in Congress, he and his aides are insisting that fears of tuition or grade inflation are exaggerated, and that giving the nation's middle class a tax windfall for college education is a wise investment.
"There are still a substantial number of middle-income people who don't believe they can really afford college, and this will help," said Deputy Education Secretary Marshall Smith. "Loans have become a terrible burden for an awful lot of students."
The most provocative part of Clinton's plan -- the $1,500 Hope Scholarship -- is modeled after a similar initiative created several years ago in Georgia. The program, funded by a state lottery, gives students who graduate from high school with a "B" average or better free tuition and a book allowance at any public university in the state for four years, as long as they keep their grades up. Those who attend private colleges in Georgia receive a $3,000 grant.
Educators say it is having a wide impact. College enrollment in Georgia is surging, and analysts say the program is attracting more lower-income students to seek an education after high school. Tuition has not risen wildly, nor have student grades. Many students lose the scholarship their second year because their grades are too low. Educators also say the size of freshman classes makes it unlikely for professors to know which students most need the new aid.
Still, many doubt that Clinton can duplicate those results on a national scale, in part because his plan is more modest and may not have the allure of Georgia's four-year free ride. Colleges also are wary of incorporating student grades into a financial-aid formula for the first time, in part because their grading systems vary.
"We would prefer that the B average provision not be used," said David Pierce, president of the American Association of Community Colleges. "It will make things very complex to manage. There ought to be some other kind of academic standard."
Many other questions surround Clinton's package, and some have come from the top ranks of his administration. Senior members of his economic team, including Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin and National Economic Council Chairman Laura D'Andrea Tyson, objected to the measures last year, according to aides who participated in the debate. Some Republicans in Congress are seizing on that to bolster their critique of Clinton's plan.
In his recent memoir, Dick Morris, Clinton's former political strategist, recalls Rubin complaining that the tax credit was "opening the treasury door to pass out goodies before the election." The book details how Clinton's advisers said tax cuts were a sloppy and inefficient way to boost enrollment because they would squander money on wealthier students bound for college anyway. Rubin does not dispute Morris's account. But he says now that he supports the president's plan.
Using tax cuts for education had irresistible appeal to Morris and other White House aides for one reason: The approach tested brilliantly with voters. In his book, Morris said he found tremendous support for government efforts to expand access to college, but scant voter interest in new federal spending. Championing ideas funded by tax cuts, instead of spending hikes, seemed to be a perfect solution to that problem.
But as Clinton's plan heads to Congress, where it will compete with alternative education proposals from both parties, its fate may lie in whether lawmakers believe it will clear a new path to college for students -- whether, in essence, it delivers enough bang for the buck.
"The mythology is that there are vast numbers of deserving people out there who, but for lack of financial resources, would be summa cum laude at Princeton," said former Congressional Budget Office director Robert D. Reischauer. "For some, that may be true. . . . But if the question is whether new tax credits are the way to trigger some huge surge in enrollment rates, the answer is clearly `No.' "
[Illustration]
CHART,,Twp CAPTION: MAKING COLLEGE MORE AFFORDABLE President Clinton plans a $50 billion package that would: + Cut $1,500 from tax bill for each of first two years of college if student maintains "B" average. (For families earning under $100,000.) + Phase in tax deduction of up to $10,000 on tuition for families earning under $100,000. + Allow families earning up to $100,000 to set up IRAs and withdraw tuition without penalty. + Increase maximum Pell Grant for low-income students from $2,700 to $3,000 a year and expand eligibility to those above age 23. + Cut fees from 4 percent to 2 percent on Stafford loans and 3 percent on other loans. SOURCES: The College Board, Department of Education.
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4.Rising Tuitions Fill Loan Firm Coffers; Constellation of Businesses Grows Around Education Financing Series: DOLLARS AND DIPLOMAS; MAKING MONEY ON THE HIGH COST OF COLLEGE Series Number: 1/3; [FINAL Edition]

Copyright The Washington Post Company Oct 27, 1997
Last January, eight months after David J. Whelan graduated from the Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia, the bill came due for his education. Eleven bills, actually, because the Virginia Beach native had taken out 11 student loans to underwrite nearly $30,000 in tuition costs.
As Whelan scanned the invoices, he noted that five of the student loans were from the U.S. government for money borrowed directly from Uncle Sam. The six others, however, came from an Indiana company Whelan had never heard of, USA Group Inc.
Although those half-dozen loans originally had been issued by banks, the banks had given a middleman, USA Group, the task of tracking Whelan and ensuring he made monthly payments. With his new diploma, his sheaf of debts and an Indiana enforcer breathing down his neck, David Whelan discovered what innumerable other students and new graduates have learned: They are small cogs in the very big machine that the college loan business has become.
Whelan's loans are among 37 million tracked by the mainframe computer in USA Group's sprawling operations center, which rises from a soybean field here just beyond the Indianapolis beltway. The $40 million building stands as a monument to the lucrative industry now thriving on the insatiable financial needs of college students and their families, who this year have borrowed record amounts of money for schooling.
USA Group's main subsidiary is only one of three dozen "guaranty" agencies across the country that police student loans, sometimes on behalf of the government, sometimes on behalf of banks and other lenders. Business is flourishing enough for USA Group, a nonprofit company with nearly 3,000 employees, to have paid its chief executive $1 million last year; four other executives make at least $300,000 a year, while nearly 30 others get in excess of $100,000 each.
With college costs more than doubling over the past 15 years -- rising 10 times faster than median family income -- an unprecedented 7 million students depend on tuition loans today. Loans account for 80 percent of federal aid to higher education, compared with 20 percent two decades ago when grants were the dominant form of assistance. This year, students and their parents will borrow $36 billion in federally guaranteed education loans, more than double the figure five years ago.
But few students or their parents are more than dimly aware that as borrowing has mushroomed, so too has the constellation of private companies and quasi-public agencies that issue, track and collect those loans. "School was my primary focus," said Whelan, 28, now a graphics designer living in Arlington. "I'd worry about the rest later."
While one-third of the $36 billion this year will come directly from the federal government, two-thirds comes from a network of banks and companies, such as USA Group, which provide the cash and collect from the borrowers in exchange for fees and interest paid under a complex entitlement deal approved by Congress.
Last year, the government paid the loan industry nearly $4 billion for its services; over time, the industry has collected $50 billion. Spiraling college costs and student indebtedness have meant spiraling increases in the amount of money to be earned in the loan business. "We pay too much today," David Longanecker, assistant secretary of education, said in an interview. "We're talking huge dollars. And a lot of people have benefited from that."
"There's so much money at stake for the industry that we never get to talk about the really important issues, such as the amount of debt a student should reasonably be expected to bear and whether low-income students will have the resources for college," said Thomas A. Butts, director of the University of Michigan's Washington office.
The loan business is not only rewarding for the industry but also virtually risk-free, because the government shoulders responsibility for student borrowers who fail to repay their loans. Taxpayers picked up a $2.8 billion tab last year for such defaulted loans.
No one suggests that USA Group, with its state-of-the-art computers and massive telephone banks, does an ineffective job. Company officials stoutly defend not only the firm's salaries and tax-exempt status, but also USA Group's contribution to American higher education. In fact, the Indiana company and others in the college loan industry assert that they have become indispensable, given the enormous demand for money from American families faced with soaring tuitions.
While the Clinton administration and many educators would like to streamline the industry and eliminate layers of middlemen, some economists and legislators believe that the ever-expanding pool of loan money is itself a significant factor in rising college costs. Because students and parents can borrow virtually as much as they want from the federal government and banks and other lenders, schools can avoid difficult cost-cutting measures by simply raising tuition another 5 percent -- as American colleges did this year.
"It does seem the more we pump out there, they'll raise the price to whatever they think the market will bear," said Rep. William F. Goodling (R-Pa.), chairman of the House Education and the Workforce Committee.
"Picture the world without that loan money there," added David Breneman, dean of the University of Virginia's school of education. "It's pretty hard to believe tuition would be as high without it."
On one issue, almost everyone involved with the college loan industry agrees: It's a curious and complex creature that evolved as much by accident as design. "You would never do it now," Longanecker said, "the way it was done."
Angela Jamison, a Colorado native who now lives in Bowie, paid little heed to the nuances of the loan industry when she applied in 1989 for what became the first of more than $50,000 in federally guaranteed loans to finance her college education. "Student loans were the best thing going," Jamison said. "There was no collateral required. No one asked for a triple-A credit rating."
Not until it came time to pay off the loans did Jamison, with a newly minted master's degree in regional planning, discover the complexities of the system. Together, she and her husband, Curtis, held 15 loans, totaling $80,000, from a variety of lenders. Monthly payments amounted to nearly $1,000. But efforts to consolidate the loans into a single bill -- and lower the payment by extending the life of the loans so the young couple could buy a house -- became what Jamison called a red-tape "nightmare" despite the intervention of numerous congressional and Education Department officials.
That's not what Congress had in mind in 1965 when it approved President Lyndon B. Johnson's program of federal grant and loan aid for students. The concept was straightforward. Students needed money for college, but bankers were reluctant to make high-risk loans; therefore, the government would guarantee repayment of the loans and even pay the interest on borrowed money while students were in school if the borrowers couldn't shoulder the load.
But over the past 30 years that simple Great Society brainstorm turned into a complicated reality.
Today, more than 5,000 banks and other lending institutions make federally guaranteed student loans. They make money on the interest charged as students repay their loans. They also make money because the government pays the institutions more than $3 billion in annual subsidies to cover the interest of student borrowers until they leave school, find jobs and can pick up the tab themselves as part of their repayment obligation. And some make more money helping the government keep track of loans and by acting as collection agents.
A Money Maze
From the vantage point of a student or parent trying to pay tuition bills, the industry can be a bewildering hodgepodge. Borrowers can take out a traditional home equity loan -- borrowing against the accumulated value of the family home -- or amass huge credit card debts, an increasingly common form of indebtedness.
But most borrow either directly from the federal government or from banks, which offer federally guaranteed loans -- that is, loans the government has agreed to repay if a student borrower defaults. For a student, a loan is a loan; the annual interest rate charged on a direct student loan from the U.S. Treasury is, by law, identical to that on a guaranteed student loan made through a bank -- capped today at 8.25 percent annually. College financial aid offices decide whether a student's aid package includes loans that are direct, guaranteed or a combination of both.
Yet the burden of administering the millions of student loans made every year has led to a bureaucracy that further complicates the lending industry and contributes to the costs. A prime example is the guaranty agency system established by Congress in the mid-1970s. These institutions -- of which a USA Group subsidiary is the largest -- serve, in part, as government agents. They monitor banks to make certain the bankers are diligent in collecting on delinquent loans because the U.S. Treasury ends up paying for federally guaranteed loans that go bad.
The guaranty agencies collectively took in $775 million last year from the guaranteed loan program. Eighty percent of that came as fees from the federal government, the rest as fees from students and parents.
USA Group alone last year earned more than $200 million in fees for processing student loans and helping collect repayments. Its guaranty agency, known as USA Funds, reported an "excess" -- the nonprofit word for profit -- on its latest tax return of more than $67 million.
When USA Funds moved into its new Indiana headquarters in late 1990, the company's chief executive, Roy Nicholson, commented that he wasn't sure the new 400,000-square-foot building in Fishers would hold his growing staff of 1,300. Nicholson's comments proved prescient: The company has continued to create subsidiaries, profit-making as well as nonprofit, to handle every aspect of making, administering and collecting student loans. USA Group just completed a $28 million renovation of another office building in downtown Indianapolis to complement the Fishers headquarters and house a staff that has more than doubled this decade.
"More borrowers, schools, states and lenders rely on us for more education loan-related products and services than any other company in America," USA Group's 1996 annual report noted.
The growth of the loan business, with more and more students borrowing money for school, has paid off handsomely for industry executives such as those at USA Group. In 1993, the company paid Nicholson $591,214 in annual salary, plus benefits. By 1995, his salary had nearly doubled to more than $1 million, according to USA Group's tax return.
Marshall Smith, acting deputy secretary of education, in a recent interview offered a one-word assessment of the $1 million figure: "Outrageous." Former senator Paul Simon (D-Ill.), in a scathing complaint to the Internal Revenue Service, singled out USA Group's high executive salaries and overhead costs, saying the company "violated the spirit, if not the letter, of its tax-exempt status."
James C. Lintzenich, a company financial officer who succeeded Nicholson earlier this year as chief executive, compared USA Group's high salaries to those paid in the nonprofit health care world and said that in both sectors they are needed to attract capable executives. Lintzenich said there is a "large gap" between his pay and his predecessor's but declined to disclose his salary.
Guaranty Agency
`Dinosaurs'Many educators and federal officials believe the student loan system as it has developed over three decades is now obsolete and excessively expensive; the guaranty agencies have become a particular target of criticism. Advances in computers that can track and administer millions of loans mean less need for middlemen, according to some critics. Guaranty agencies such as USA Group "have become dinosaurs," Longanecker said.
But efforts by the Clinton administration to reform the system have met bitter resistance. Clinton in 1993 tried to dismantle the loan industry and replace it with a "direct loan" program in which the government rather than the banking industry puts up the cash for guaranteed student loans.
Clinton's proposal built on a Bush administration pilot program that "started with the premise that the loan program was fundamentally screwed up, overly complex and needed to be streamlined," said Charles Kolb, a former Bush aide. "We thought the government could do it faster and cheaper." Rep. William Ford (D-Mich.), then chairman of the House Education Committee, predicted that interest rates on student loans could be cut by more than half.
Clinton's ambitious attack on the loan industry ignited an intense lobbying battle. USA Group and its allies, seeing thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in fees at stake, eventually forged a compromise with help from sympathetic members of Congress. The administration's direct lending approach was adopted but on a much-reduced scale. Under the agreement, direct loans were initially to account for 5 percent of the total guaranteed loan volume and gradually build to half or more.
But even that less-ambitious plan has fallen far short. Today the loan industry still controls about two-thirds of the market for guaranteed loans and interest rates for student borrowers have not declined. Colleges remain wary of using the new direct loan option because of uncertainty about whether Congress will discontinue the program and because of government difficulties in managing the direct portfolio.
For example, Columbia University, where about half the students take out loans to finance the $18,000 annual tuition, has decided after careful scrutiny to eschew direct loans given the program's uncertain future, university President George Rupp said in a recent interview.
The General Accounting Office of Congress has long cited federal student aid as a program at "high risk" of waste, fraud and abuse because of lax management. For example, a 1992 audit found that 100,000 borrowers who had defaulted on their student loans were nevertheless able to secure additional government-guaranteed loans because their earlier defaults had not been adequately flagged.
Now, the Education Department is trying to track traditional federally guaranteed loans and lenders while also administering the direct loan program -- without the computer systems needed to oversee either task adequately, according to GAO findings. Department officials concede they have stumbled in administering direct loans.
Moreover, government data regarding the amount and disposition of student loans are so inadequate that the Education Department doesn't know whether it is overpaying guaranty agencies and other loan industry institutions for fees and defaulted loans, according to the GAO. Education Inspector General Thomas R. Bloom voiced surprise at the department's deficient systems for tracking loans. "This is an information business, like a bank," Bloom said. "Information is the key."
USA Group's Lintzenich agrees and points to the investment his company has made in computers and data processing technology as justification for preserving the current layer of middlemen. Congress in recent years has trimmed fees paid to banks and guaranty agencies, he added, although the huge surge in student loan volume means revenue has remained high.
"I don't believe any guarantor is in this business to make money," Lintzenich said. "Everybody's in the business to provide services to students."
Congress recently passed some tax deductions for the interest paid on student loans, while offering modest tax credits to help defray tuition costs. Educators hope the new program will mean less borrowing. But neither measure is expected to alter significantly the loan industry or the burgeoning demand for money if college costs continue to rise, they said. Also, an administration initiative that would force lenders to lower the interest rate ceiling has touched off another lobbying fight. A USA Group lobbyist and others earlier this month began raising money for a new political action committee -- Friends of Higher Education -- while noting in a fund-raising letter, "Once again we must turn to our friends in Congress for help."
Words of Warning
As the struggle continues, neither taxpayer nor student borrower is especially well-served by the hybrid system that has evolved, said Barmak Nassirian, an official with the American Association of State Colleges and Universities. "You have excess profits" in the older system of banks and middlemen, Nassirian said, and "a near complete management failure" in the government-run direct lending program. "Students and families are paying substantially more than they really should for those benefits," he added.
John T. Casteen III, president of the University of Virginia, who is skeptical of direct lending despite his school's wide use of the program, urges young borrowers to proceed cautiously until the government realizes that turning the Education Department into a "financial services operation" is not a prudent solution to the high cost of college.
"It's sort of like saying we'll let Chase Manhattan Bank begin to write national education policy," Casteen said in an interview. "If you turn that around, the absurdity of it just jumps right out at you."
And in the long history of efforts to fix federal student lending, one truth emerges, he added: "Whatever this year's assurances are, it simply takes an act of Congress next year to change it."
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also in the very last page can u please explain: In a brief but well-structured paragraph (at least 100 words), discuss what you plan to do differently when drafting this essay and why.

well, thats all for now.
thanx in advance

Essay Instructions: This is a project for Sustainable Community Development, Faculty of Environment.
However, the topic I chose is “Cloud Computing helps reduce E-wastes”, which is computer science or computer engineering related.
Thus, I hope the writer has knowledge in computer, at least know “Cloud Computing”, and be able to explain how it helps to reduce the emission of E-wastes and protect environment.
The detailed instructions, my proposal, my ideas, my explanations will be provided.

The paper need to be done is a business plan. (Not quit formal, Not need any business background)
The writer needs to expand my proposal and progress report as much as you can.

Citation is required, but not important. Its significant is to prove that the technology or company is real and capable to complete this project. Thus, when introduced technological information in paper, citation is required.

Proper imagination is required
Better do some research on the green policies(such as LEED) and organizations(Cascadia) in Vancouver, BC, Canada, and predict how they will act towards the project.

I recommend the writer to talk with me as soon as possible after reading my upload materials, to make sure the writer got the correct idea.

There are faxes for this order.

Essay Instructions: I am a president's scholar applicant for a 4year fully paid scholarship. I need a two page essay that answers the question - Why you want to be a President's scholar and what you can contribute to the university. To help you answer this question The president's scholar offers full payment of tuition and general student fees, an annual book allowance, paid housing, sponsored meal plan, priority registration for classes each semester, personalized academic advising, campus student parking privileges, exclusive access to president's scholars center, e-mail and internet access, this puts me in small classes which give me "excellent undergraduate education." If you could can you pleace explain how I am going to take advantage of this offer.


co-curricular,
school clubs: California Scholorship Federation (CSF), AlphaPsi- A club that tries to improve the school, Key club- community service

Academic programs:
Engineering and computer tech academy

Sports:
baseball for 3 years

Community service:
Long Beach Memorial Hospital (helped with various activities), Tutored math and english students at my high school, repair computers for free, for financially challenged people, helping to create the class of 2004 senior video.

Activities I have done:
Backpacked around Italy and France with my father and brother, Climbed Mount Whitney and various other local mountains.

Personal reasons for wanting scholarship:
I want to excel in the field of computer engineering (desired major), Meet new people, Take advantage of this great opprtunity due to the benifits of the scholarship, Become an honored part of the communtiy of president's scholars, Make lifelong friends and improve my skills, work with people with my interest, help give back to the community, help to improve peoples interest in computers and related fields, to succeed in my accomplishments.

I am currently attending Artesia High School in Lakewood, Ca. I grew up in Hawaiian Gardens,Ca., one of the feeder communities for Artesia H.S., which is a hispanic low income community. There were many opportunities for me to join a gang, but due to my desire to succeed in life and my natural ability for repairing and learning all about computers, I have avoided those negative influences and have surrounded myself with only positive people. My parents are both teachers and have instilled in me the need to attain a college education through hard work, dedication, and a life long desire to always learn and improve upon myself.
I feel I am always willing and able to help others and can bring to the university a sense of commitment to my goals, desire to learn, a positve and upbeat personality, and a strong commitment to good moral family and community values.

Essay Instructions: Choose any FOUR from the six questions below. I would appreciate if you can write atleast 1.5 pages for each question.



1. [Copyright]
When Richard M Stallman [founder of the gnu/linux project] spoke at Loyola in Fall 2008, he argued that if you have general non-personal information about a subject that would help someone else, you have an ethical obligation to share it. (He did notmean personal, private information.) Of course, when you share information, you still retain it too. Stallman's own example of this principle is Free and Open Source Software (because it's Free, you are able to share it with others), but perhaps a better example is the many contributors to Wikipedia.

Analyze Stallman's position from an ethical standpoint. Here are a few sample points for consideration; you do not have to consider them all.

What exactly is it that you are obligated to share? Does it include, say, food?
Is this the same as the obligation of charity?
Is this position mostly deontological, mostly utilitarian, or is it compatible with either approach?
Is there some more fundamental obligation underlying this idea?
What might be some limits to this obligation to share information?
Are there other weaknesses to Stallman's position?

(Stallman has gone on to argue that we should try to use use only open-source software so that we are always able to share our software as necessary in keeping with the above rule. But that's a separate argument.)


2. [Copyright]
An election is coming up, and one of the candidates, Mike Young, was a former executive at Big Capital corporation. A friend of yours believes Young from 1980 to 1990 participated in several nefarious activities and their coverup:

obtaining federal loan guaranties for acquired companies through fraudulent means
intentionally failing to comply with certain federal reporting requirements
conspiring to drive up the price of certain commodities by purchasing factories and suppliers and then closing them
making promises to workers at acquired companies that they had no intention of keeping

Your friend wants your help in setting up a wikileaks-type site that will hold documents relating to these issues. Your friend has a large set of documents relating to the incidents. The largest portion of the documents are leaked (but reliable) Big Capital internal corporate memos, documenting all the above activities. Some later memos hint at a coverup of Young's involvement. Other documents include correspondence related to the same subjects, old corporate reports, documents distributed to the workers regarding item 4, and, finally, a large supply of newspaper articles from the period.
The concern is that your friend does not have permission to publish (or republish, as the case may be) any of the material. Big Capital would surely refuse publication of their memos, and several of the newspapers have simply gone out of business.

Your friend wants your assistance in getting the site up and running before the election, so that others may refer to it before the voting. Even in cases where permissions might be secured, there is simply not enough time.

What would you advise, and why? Would you have concerns about providing technical assistance? Do you think your friend is on the wrong track here, ethically? Why or why not?

The issue is not libel or defamation; you may assume the memos and articles are believed to be reliable. The concern is the copyright status of the material (and possibly privacy issues).

You may address either legal or ethical issues, or both.




3. [Copyright]
It is common in some styles of music now to include samplestaken from someone else's recordings. Typically samples are relatively short (a couple seconds) or else are electronically modified. Samples are taken from the actual recordings; they are not "re-performed" in the studio by the sampling artist. Sometimes this is done as a form of homage, sometimes to tie the new artist to someone more famous, and often for other reasons. The site whosampled.com has many examples.

Discuss the ethical and/or Fair Useimplications of this practice. On the face of it, the existence of the second artist's work would have absolutely no negative impact on the market for the original.

The industry line here is that anyuse of copyrighted material requires permission, but the Fair Use argument is ignored there. There have been two court cases upholding the industry line, Grand Upright Music v Warner and Bridgeport Music v Dimension Films, but in each case the judge explicitly did not consider a Fair Use argument (likely because the defendants failed to raise it).

If you wish to focus on the ethical argument, here are a few issues. When using sampling, what exactly is a musician's obligation to the original artist? Must the sample be some form of homage? Is it simply a matter of acknowledging credit for the homage? Can the credit be implicit, or must the original artist's name be spelled out? If a payment should be made, how should the amount be set? Should the original artist be able to set the price?




4. [Privacy]
Facebook collect lots of information about you. Much of it you intentionally gaveto them. But some is less obvious, or "Facebook-collected". Consider, for example, that Facebook knows whose pages you have been visiting. Currently they allow "anonymous" browsing. But they could change that policy, making the information available directly, eg through a "who has viewed you" widget that the other party can use, or else by some indirect means. For example, if B is visiting A's page regularly, then Facebook might increase the rate at which B's wall posts are propagated to A. This information can be sensitive; Eben Moglen writes (see the link in the Week 6 notes) that with it one can determine "who do I have a crush on (whose page am I obsessively reloading)?"

Discuss the ethical obligations of Facebook (and similar commercial services) to its user community regarding privacy for this page-visit data. This information isn't "yours", so you cannot set privacy settings (to be fair, the visibility scope is currently zero) and you cannot delete the information. Should you be able to delete or otherwise manage this sort of information? Would Facebook be within its rights to say "take it or leave it; sharing this is now required for continued use of Facebook"? Would Facebook be within its rights to make available its past archive of data here?

Note that, when it comes to much of your user-posted data (eg profile picture, your schools, and other basic identifying information), Facebook's interest in encouraging you to make this information widely shared is basically that it makes it easier for others to find you, thus increasing the number of user interactions and thus the overall Facebook usage and thus potential advertising revenue. Facebook is interested in growing its service, and to that end it is important to make publicly available as much information as possible that allows people to find friends.

When making ethical arguments in a business context, it is sometimes helpful to recognize that ethical behavior can be closely tied to a business's own long-term self-interest. That is, Facebook would wish to avoid alienating its user base, and also would wish to avoid unforeseen liabilities.




5. [Privacy]
At Foobar College, students are issued passive-RFID-equipped identification cards. These are scanned at the entrances to some rooms and buildings and when checking out library books; RFID scanning for meal-plan billing is scheduled to be implemented the following semester.

A student research group in the Department of Computer Engineering takes a look at these cards, identifies the chip, and builds a simple reader. They discover that each card always transmits the same 48-bit number that they dub the "card number". They publish a report on their website in which they identify the type of chip and the model of RFID reader they used for their tests and also provide links to sites that discuss remote RFID-card reading; they do not publish any of their source code. They do, however, suggest that security is less than adequate, and refer to published papers that state this more forcefully, and they also set up a demo system at the entrance to the lab, where the last four digits of the 12-hex-digit card-number of everyone who enters is flashed on a screen. The antenna they use for "remote" (~10 feet) reading is quite visible: it consists of a modified Pringles can. Generally, only advanced students use the lab.

The school newspaper runs an editorial about this demonstration, suggesting that the Computer Engineering group is to blame for "invading students' privacy", and quotes a school administrator as "outraged". The student group writes a letter to the editor in which they point out that all they've done is exposed a potentially serious weakness; they also claim that they wrote a letter about the issue to the school's IT department but were ignored. Their letter to the editor appears in the same issue with an editorial strongly critical of any attempt to reveal personal information.

The next week the paper publishes letters from two students Alice and Bob who claim their cards have been used to track them. Alice writes that her boyfriend told her he could "track her anywhere" and then did find her at the library, but there is no evidence the card was used. Bob was confronted by someone in his dorm who claimed that "RFID card evidence" proved Bob was in the other student's room and is thus a suspect in a theft of an iPod. Neither writer offers any evidence that RFID reading was involved at all, nor is there any independent evidence, and the alleged iPod theft did not appear in the weekly incident report from the security office.

Discuss the responsibilities of the groups and individuals involved. What do you think should be the response and the responsibility of the college, in either the short term or the long term? How might the Computer Engineering group have handled things differently? Should they have handled things differently? What, if anything, should they do now? Do student card-users have any specific responsibilities here? Are there ways they can protect themselves?

(This scenario certainly has ties to privacy, but it also has ties to the concept of a zero-day exploit, although it is not clear that the scenario here is in fact a zero-day exploit.)

See also here.



6. [Privacy]

As we discussed in class, web advertisers have mastered tracking our browsing history by clever use of web cookies. When we visit a site, the site's advertisers track us, and the site itself may share some information (such as what we searched for, what articles we read, or what we bought) with those advertisers. The end result is that the advertisers have a database of many sites we have visited, together with information from some of the sites as to what we were interested in.

Some have argued, however, that despite appearances this tracking does not in fact amount to a major invasion of individual privacy, for the following reasons:

The information is generally only tied to a computer (or a computer account), not to anyone individually. Normally, for example, the user's name is not among the data collected.
Even if some computers are linked in the database to specific individuals, there's enough "bad" data present (eg from other computer users, typos and mistaken clicks, researching things for others that we're not actually interested in) to make conclusions about those individuals very suspect.

Because of these, the theory goes, it wouldn't be worth it for sites interested in information on specific individuals ??' credit bureaus, the government, prospective employers, investigators or potential dates ??' to purchase information from these sources.

Discuss whether or not individual privacy is in fact at risk here. How much protection do the two points above give us? Feel free to consider some specific types of consumer web visits.

Customer is requesting that (Maryamkazi) completes this order.