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Progress toward loan payoff goal!

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Along about the first of the year, I framed a goal to set aside enough to pay off a small second mortgage I took out to renovate the Investment House. At that time, about $23,500 was owing on the original $25,000 loan, which has an interest rate of 6.5 percent. I would like to have this loan paid off by the time I retire, in three to seven years.

The loan’s monthly payments are small and easily affordable on my current salary. I decided that rather than paying directly toward principal, I would save enough to pay it off in one swell foop when I retire (or have the equivalent amount in savings should I sell the house before paying off the loan). I created a second income stream by taking on a couple of classes at one of my beloved employer’s satellite campuses. Because those courses were double-enrolled and I threatened at the last minute (when I learned about this) not to accept an FTE workload in addition to my real full-time job, the university agreed to pay me for four sections. This serendipitous fiasco added $1,676 to my monthly take-home pay!

Hence, the strategy: deposit $838 per paycheck to Vanguard’s Prime Money Market Fund, plus the $250/month I figured I could spare from my regular income. Add my income tax refund to it. Label this money the Renovation Loan Fund, and set it aside to pay off the loan and to double as an extra emergency fund. Meanwhile, snowflake down the principal with budget underruns and any small windfalls.

With the final $838 of the semester winging its way to Vanguard, we can see that this scheme is working nicely.

The principal itself is now snowflaked down to $$22,583, an $880 improvement.

The Renovation Loan Stash is up to $17,119. So, if I wanted to pay off the second mortgage today, all I’d have to come up with is about $5,465. If pushed, I could do it. If I sold the house today, the entire amount of principal could come out of the sale price, and I’d still have a substantial part of that amount in savings to put help buy another house.

While snowflaking is very nice-the $880 principal reduction is way better than a hit on the head-clearly the key to effective savings on a modest salary is to establish a second income stream!

If you rally need to pay down a loan or put money aside in savings (and who doesn’t?) and your salary is pegged firmly in the middle to low range, the fastest and most efficient solution is to get a second job or start a small enterprise on the side. Then apply all the net income from that second income stream to your goal.

Now that the teaching gig is over, I’ve picked up a little freelance proofreading job. Pay is low, but hey: I’m getting paid to read detective novels! By the end of 2007, that should pay at least $4,000. If I can also spare $250 a month from my paycheck, the resulting $5,500 stash will be enough to pay off the loan.

Cheap Eats: Delicious veggie spaghetti

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Cheap Eats is a day late, yesterday having been a bit on the hectic side, but it’s not a dollar short. Here’s a yummy, economical meatless spaghetti meal, cadged from a television program whose name I don’t recall.

You need…

  • A handful or two of walnuts (other kinds of nuts will work: almonds, pine nuts, pistachios, cashews)
  • A wad of spaghetti
  • Olive oil
  • Sage leaves
  • Water
  • Optional: canned pepper such as pimiento or roasted chili pepper, cut into small pieces
  • A little chopped Italian parsley, if desired
  • Parmesan cheese

Bring a large pot of water to the boil.

While this is heating, pour enough olive oil into a frying pan to skim the bottom nicely. Heat the olive oil. Take a few sage leaves (about half a dozen) and place them in the oil. Let them crisp up a bit, but don’t scorch. Add a generous couple of handfuls of nuts. Brown the nuts in the olive oil. If you like, after the nuts are nicely browned, add a few pieces of canned pepper.

When the water comes to a boil, cook the spaghetti al dente.

Drain the spaghetti in a colander, then toss with the nuts and olive oil. Serve it up with plenty of Parmesan cheese. Sprinkle on a little chopped parsley at the last minute.

Accompanied with a tossed green salad, this makes a full meal and is truly good to eat.

The miracle of penny-pinching

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OMG! In spite of $708 worth of vet bills, I’m still in the black this month!

How did this marvel happen?

Because I was frugal and stayed out of Costco, I ended up $75 in the black for the first week of this month’s billing cycle.

The following week I was $283 in the hole against that week’s $375 budget, leaving $92 to live on in the cycle’s third week. However, when I carried the first week’s $75 forward into the third week, it gave me $167 for that week. By keeping a grip on spending and returning a couple of items to Costco, I came out $33 in the black at the end of the third week. Carrying forward again meant I started the fourth week with $408.

The second giant vet bill struck in the fourth week, which is this week-it ends on the 20th. However, so far this week I’ve only had two expenditures above and beyond the second vet bill. So I have $23.57 to last for four days: until Wednesday morning.

The car still has a third of a tank of gas. One trip to the office takes a quarter of a tank. If I telecommute on Tuesday and leave my car in the garage today, Saturday, Sunday, and next Tuesday, I shouldn’t need to buy more gas.

I’ve got plenty of groceries to last for four days.

So, barring a catastrophe, not only am I not headed for bankruptcy, I actually may make it to the end of this billing cycle in the black! The checking account used to pay these charges has a $500 cushion, so even if I go a few bucks over budget, my credit card payments won’t bounce.

Whew! Thank goodness for penny-pinching habits! No snowflakes this month, but no meltdown, either.

Skeptic saves $175

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Hot dang! I just saved a hundred and seventy-five bucks, give or take. And I did it in ten minutes flat.

A couple years ago, Home Depot sold me a shoddy little vinyl screen door. I bought it because neither HD nor Lowe’s carried real wooden screen doors, and I didn’t want an ugly metal door or a security door. The vinyl things came as close as anything to a real door. They were cheap, too.

Problem was, they come with a shoddy little latch that doesn’t hold the door shut, much less lock it. The HD salesman said you couldn’t drill into the vinyl to screw a hook-&-eye latch into it. The screen door installing handyman agreed, adding that assuming you could drill into the plastic without melting it, you’d need to reattach the hook to an extra-long eyebolt and secure it with a nut; otherwise it would pull out. Ohhh well.

A year passes, and I find some actual, real, old-fashioned plain no frou-frou screen doors at a local door retailer. These cost about $125, and I figure the handyman will charge about $50 to install one of them. And they have to be painted. I delay buying, partly out of inertia and partly out of cheapness.

This week’s steady winds have been driving me nuts. The damn door, which won’t stay closed, keeps banging in the breeze, thwackada whack all night and all day.

So I tracked down the hook-&-eye I bought and didn’t use, and then broke out the electric drill.

Lo! The maleness and paleness lied!

A guide hole significantly smaller than the hook screw’s diameter zipped right into the vinyl, and the screw went in firmly and solidly. No way that thing is going to fall out of there! Now the vinyl door will do-no need to buy a new screen door.

The take-away message:

The frugalist doesn’t believe everything she’s told!

 

Dog redux

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Seven hundred and eight dollars later. . .

Yes. That’s over seven hundred bucks. So much for the Month of Extreme Frugality. How laughable.

Yesterday I took the dog to a new veterinarian, not feeling at all satisfied with what I got for $430 from my regular vet. When I took her to the the latter vet late last month because she stank so violently you couldn’t stay in the same room with her, he said she had a vaginal infection and gave me a bottle of antibiotic pills and a tube of antibiotic ointment, with instructions to smear it on her nether parts (at great risk to life and limb, we might add). This was a week after he saw her for restlessness and hyperventilation and gave her a cortisone shot to quiet her down. Shortly after I got her home, I found a large lesion on her leg. He-or rather, one of his staff-said he had seen it, it was a pressure sore, and I should put the ointment on that, too.

The sore didn’t get any better, and neither did the stink, to speak of. They charged me another fifty bucks for a second round of antibiotics. On my own, I tried myconozale, which helped a little; the problem was, I couldn’t get the stuff on the dog because she threatens to bite me every time I try to apply anything to the affected area. She has to be muzzled, wrestled down, held down, and medicated. It’s no small trick to do that once, much less several times a day, and I am not of an age to be wrestling on the floor with a ninety-pound dog!

Meanwhile, when I called back about the leg sore, the same unhelpful and vaguely rude staff lady proposed, with a straight face, that I lock her in “a small room” where the floor is padded with several layers of comforters. Well, the only such room in this house is the bathroom where the only truly functional toilet resides. The door opens inward. You can’t pad the floor where the door swings. So I had to drag the dog into the bathroom and then barricade the entrance to the bathroom with a couple of dining room chairs. A German shepherd has no problem moving a couple of chairs out of its way. So I had literally to barricade the door with several dining room chairs, jamming them into the hallway so she couldn’t budge them. As you can imagine, this was not very good for the chairs, my back, or the dog. The only other way to keep her on a padded floor is to tie her to a doorknob and spread the comforters, several layers deep, over an area too large for her to escape.

Neither of these strategies was any too practical.

I also very much doubted that the sore was a pressure sore, because the dog is too active for such a thing to have developed. She’s in motion much of the time and never lies still longer than about four or five hours. I know: that’s about as long as she will allow me to sleep for any given stretch. It’s the wee hours right now, and we’re up.

So I decided to try a friend’s vet.

Well, the place was very impressive-and much, much closer to home. It’s clean, with absolutely no typical veterinary odor. Very spacious and shiny, with several vets and at least a half-dozen staffers that I could see. Meaning, of course, that the practice is cranking the bucks.

Lots of brochures laying around detailing all the expensive things you can do to/for your dog. The basic “senior well dog” checkup is $275, and that’s a fishing expedition that looks for chronic ailments to treat for the rest of the animal’s life. Onward.

The vet was a young woman, very smart. I overwhelmed her with two pages of the dog’s symptoms and four questions:

  • What is the sore on her leg?
  • What can be done about the vaginitis?
  • Why does she pant and hyperventilate constantly?
  • Can she be treated in a reasonable way that does not drive me to wacky behavior like tying the dog to doorknobs and barricading the bathroom with the dining-room furniture?

She examined the dog, shaved the hair off around the irritated rear end, and, having learned to her surprise that the other vet had not done a culture on the diseased area, swabbed up a sample for culturing in a lab. After this, she opined that the lesion is not a pressure sore, because it’s not in an area where a bony prominence comes in contact with the floor and it does not look like a pressure sore. She thinks it’s a hot spot, probably brought on by an insect or spider bite. About the infection, she thinks the dog is in a great deal of pain.

About the heavy breathing, she noted the dog’s nasal secretions are bloody and said she may have a tumor, an expensive item to diagnose and treat. To find out whether she does have nasal cancer, which as it develops is pretty likely, will require a $300 X-ray. If that is positive, the dog will have to be put down.

(As I write this, ominously enough, no air is flowing through the dog’s nose and she’s breathing, loudly, through her mouth.)

The vet then gave me four different medications: a spray, fistfuls of medicated wipes, goop for her rear end, and goop for the sore. She recommended I continue the antibiotics I have until she can get the results of the lab test back, at which time she probably will recommend some other $50 antibiotic. So at this time, the dog is supposed to get FOURTEEN DOSES OF MEDS A DAY. She did, at least, say it is unnecessary to try to force the dog to stay on pads, so I can leave off that aspect of the wacky behavior. IMHO, medicating a dog 14 times a day is quite wacky enough.

At any rate, she charged $278 for all this.

Compared with the other vet’s bill, it seemed like a bargain. Consider:

Vet 1: $430

Services and products:
cursory exam
cortisone shot for agitation
2 bottles of antibiotics
1 tube of ear ointment
not so much as a clue about the leg sore
absurd recommendation for management of leg sore

Vet 2: $278

Services and products:
thorough exam
shaved hair from affected area, allowing access for medicating
lab culture and test
ointment for leg sore
pain-killer for vaginal infection
spray-on antifungal for vaginal infection
antifungal, antiseptic wipes for vaginal infection
consulted at length and made more or less rational recommendations

I said I suspected the dog really does not need Soloxine, because at the time the other vet put her on it, she had no visible symptoms of thyroid dysfunction and because I had learned that hypothyroidism is the most overdiagnosed ailment in veterinary medicine. She said the only way to tell is more bloodwork: $125. To test for thyroid function in the presence of Soloxine, you have to test about 5 hours after the drug has been administered. Since I dose Anna at 6:00 a.m. and it was by then after 3:00 p.m., that scheme was obviated. I’ll have to bring her back another time to find out if she really needs thyroid pills. But first we probably should find out if she has a tumor in her nose, a situation that would do some more obviating.

When I got the dog home, I could not get her out of the car. She couldn’t stand up. She’d jammed herself up against the driver’s seat so that she couldn’t get enough purchase to pull her weakened hindquarters off the floor, and she threatened to bite me when I tried to help her get upright. It looked for a while like I was going to have to drive her back to the vet and have them put her down, right then and there. Finally I pulled the car into the garage and just left her there with the door open and the lights merrily running the battery down. After a half-hour or forty minutes, she managed to get herself up and out of the vehicle.

The four Benadryl I walloped her with an hour ago have finally taken effect. She’s out cold on the floor. On a positive note, she’s now breathing through her nose (more or less), which she was unable to do when she woke me with the steam-engine sound effects. So maybe the nasal problem is just allergies. Probably not, though. You don’t get a bloody discharge from allergies.

My head hurts, my neck hurts, my back aches, my iced tea has gone warm, and even our pet house fly is asleep. Now that it’s quiet, I’m going back to bed.

Month of Extreme Frugality, indeed!

2Commentsleft on iWeb site:

Pinchnickel

Gasp!Have you asked the veterinarians to treat your pooch “pro bono?”I watched a Hollywood TV show, All Things Large and Small, that portrayed veterinarians as compassionate, caring, green-minded people, generous with their time and money.

Thursday, May 15, 2008 – 07:15 AM

vh

Isn’t that the loveliest program? You know, it’s based on a series of semiautobiographical books whose author was an English veterinarian. Each of them is equally delightful.

Veterinarians are compassionate and caring people. But compassionate and caring people have to eat, too. Veterinary school is said to be more difficult to get into than medical school, and the course of studies is extremely challenging. After one of these very bright young people graduates, she or he goes into the business of veterinary care, which IS a business, not a hobby or a charity.

Veterinarians are not in business to give away their skills. They’re in business to make a living. Given how hard they have to work to acquire their skills, they rightly expect to make a good living. Many vets, however, earn only a middle-class income; it’s a lot less profitable than you would think.

Compared to what Vet #1 charged, I felt Vet #2’s fee was pretty reasonable: she devoted a lot of time to examining the dog and talking with me in detail, she provided more medications, and those medications appear to be more specific to the ailments at hand. And she did not leave me in the dark, wondering what is wrong and whether it can be treated at all.

Am I willing to pay $300 to have a 13-year-old German shepherd’s skull X-rayed? The jury is still out on that one. Since I’ve already spent more than half (!!) of this month’s disposable income on the dog, it will have to wait until another couple of paychecks come in, so there’s plenty of time to make a decision.

And at the rate the poor old gal is going, she may not last that long. She has a tough time dragging her crippled hindquarters off the floor, and so frankly, I suspect the end is in sight.

Thursday, May 15, 2008 – 09:06 AM

Are college degrees overrated?

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On Monday, NPR’s Talk of the Nation chatted with career coach Marty Nemko, who recently published an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education arguing that the bachelor’s degree is one of America’s most oversold products. He stops short of calling the marketing of undergraduate degrees to those who are unqualified for university work a scam. But after twenty years in academe, I surely would go that far.

Nemko points to the vast numbers of college graduates who end up in jobs they could have had with a high-school diploma, and then goes on to cite figures showing that only 23 percent of high-school students who take the ACT are prepared to perform at the college level in English, math, reading, and science. That just about accords with my experience. As I’ve explained in earlier posts, I organize students into groups, each of which is led by a classmate who, in the absence of grade inflation, would genuinely be an A student. Any given class of thirty students will have at most six who really do perform at the A level: that’s 20 percent. The rest are folks who tell me that Wisconsin is a Rocky Mountain state and World War I occurred in the nineteenth century, and who turn in papers with their own names misspelled.

According to Nemko, of the four-year college students who graduated in the bottom 40 percent of their high-school classes, two thirds had not managed to finish the bachelor’s degree after eight and a half years! Meanwhile, however, universities merrily collect these kids’ tuition, running them deeper and deeper into debt as the young people continue a fruitless pursuit.

And fruitless, he suggests, is le mot juste. The claim that workers with college degrees earn more over their lifetimes is, he says, “misleading”:

You could lock the collegebound in a closet for four years, and they’d still go on to earn more than the pool of non-collegebound—they’re brighter, more motivated, and have better family connections.

While that is not 100 percent so—thank goodness, we still do have some social and economic mobility in this country—the truth is that class matters. Students who do well in school often are those whose parents were well educated and have provided their kids with a fistful of educational, social, and economic advantages. Not least of those is Dad’s old college chums now in a position to hire Junior. The uphill climb for a first-generation college student is a lot steeper than it is for a kid whose parents have graduate or professional degrees.

He adds that as increasing numbers of decently paying jobs are sent off-shore or converted to part-time, the pool of good opportunities drops. So, many college graduates are forced to take blue-collar work, driving trucks and waiting tables.

Then there’s the question of whether college students get what they pay for. It’s a big question, since many university graduates start their working lives with five- and six-figure student loan debt. Graduates surveyed in recent studies are understandably dissatisfied with the quality of instruction in environments where an average of 28 percent of their courses are taught in classes of thirty or fewer.

But did they learn anything?

Apparently not much. A 2006 study underwritten by the Pew Charitable Trust showed that 50 percent of tested college seniors could not follow the argument in a newspaper editorial or compare credit-card offers. Folks. That’s half of them! Twenty percent had such weak math skills that they could not estimate whether their car had enough fuel to get to the gas station.

Think it can’t get worse? Think again, says Nemko:

Unbelievably, according to the Spellings Report, which was released in 2006 by a federal commission that examined the future of American higher education, things are getting even worse: “Over the past decade, literacy among college graduates has actually declined. . . . According to the most recent National Assessment of Adult Literacy, for instance, the percentage of college graduates deemed proficient in prose literacy has actually declined from 40 to 31 percent in the past decade. . . . Employers report repeatedly that many new graduates they hire are not prepared to work, lacking the critical thinking, writing and problem-solving skills needed in today’s workplaces.”

What to do?

Nemko suggests that colleges should be held to the same standards as, say, tire manufacturers: at the least, they should be required to provide applicants full data on their performance in areas such as graduation rates; average costs for every year, broken out by race and gender; and employment data for graduates. He also suggests that a high-school graduate in the bottom half of his or her class consider more profitable alternatives, such as associate-degree programs at community colleges, apprenticeships, the military, and on-the-job training with a successful small-business owner.

The national campaign to enroll every body that’s still breathing in four-year bachelor’s degree programs is a rip-off. It rips off the young men and women who are unprepared to succeed in universities, and it rips off the ones who are prepared, by siphoning resources away from them. Not everyone needs a four-year degree. In fact, some people are likely to find more success by using those four years in vocational training and on-the-job learning.

3 Comments left on iWeb site

BeThisWay

I think that a degree isn’t necessary, per se, and you can certainly have success, even great success, without one.

That said, I don’t think Nemko is right if he says that many of the jobs could have been landed without the degree.Degrees are actually required for more jobs above a certain pay grade than not, especially in corporateland, and having one certainly gives you the edge when all other things are equal.That doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of other industries where great success can come without that degree.

To me the issue isn’t how many people are going for degrees, the issue is the commitment of each individual student to learning and getting what they’re there for in a university setting. Many kids go for the social aspects instead of the educational aspects, and view it as a way to delay having to take responsibility for their own lives.

That’s why I agree with Nemko’s suggestions.College isn’t for everyone, and parents IMO should look at who their child really is and what they are really capable of and committed to.Otherwise it’s just a waste of time and money, and it dilutes the quality of education for those that are really committed.

And the lackluster way these uncommitted grads approach their jobs has far-reaching effects and dilutes the quality of life for us all.

Wednesday, May 14, 2008 – 10:47 AM

Strid

I’m not an American, or going to university in America, but I’ve seen the relative worthlessness of bachelor’s degrees all around me. I’m not sure if it’s so much more of a scam than a high school education was back in the past, though. You know, when only the rich or the scholarship kids went to uni?

Nemko’s right, class does matter, and I’m pretty sure that it’s really one of the few constants in this whole education-employment system. If you’ve got parents that went to uni, you’ll get a decently paying job. If not…be prepared to struggle. And as for the upper class, it’s unthinkable that you could NOT have at least a bachelor’s degree from somewhere (the quality of the degree…well…it only really matters that you can say you went to university).

Here (in the Caribbean) if you don’t have some kind of degree, you’re simply not going to get an ‘acceptable’ middle-class job. Sure, you can be a tailor, or a carpenter, or a maid or whatever without a degree, but you’ll never be higher up than a bank teller, really. Many more people go to university now than ever before.

However…since everyone has one…bachelor’s degrees aren’t worth much any more. University graduates are jobless because lower-end degrees won’t get you the pay you want…but you’re not going to go into a trade or some such ‘menial’ labour because you went to uni, darn it!

It’s definitely true that many people are getting ripped off by the system and preconceived notions of status in relation to a certain type of education. Really, there SHOULD be some attempt to expose high school graduates to the various options open to them, and to emphasize that an excellent mechanic will be more successful than a pass-degree BA Literature grad will be. However, people in general aren’t stupid. They figure things out sooner or later. Many people drop out, work for a few years, and when they settle down, do their degrees successfully. And I know many people that only started to shine in uni…moving from simply passing in high school to really maturing and buckling down (and being really successful) in uni. There ARE positives to the huge increase in enrollment in the university/college system; more people have more opportunities, and a greater chance of realising their full potential.

Friday, May 16, 2008 – 01:35 AM

vh

It’s true that for certain kinds of jobs, a bachelor’s degree is key. It’s also true that an undergraduate degree in the liberal arts enriches your life immeasurably, in ways that far surpass the financial cost of obtaining the degree. And a bachelor’s degree in an academic subject prepares you for graduate study in professional programs such as the law, business, journalism, and education; in that sense, the bachelor’s degree does eventually pay for itself monetarily.

However, when you’re actually in the trenches, you come to appreciate Nemko’s estimate that 40 percent of students who are sucked into the university system are not prepared for university-level work.

Persuading those kids that they need a bachelor’s degree to have a decent life is probably a scam. When they finish the four-year degree, too many of them end up in low-skill, low-wage jobs that DO NOT REQUIRE A COLLEGE DEGREE. I have a nephew, for example, who got a bachelor’s degree in construction (don’t ask!) some years ago and to this day drives a delivery truck for a paint company. He could have driven the delivery truck with his high-school diploma and got a four-year leg up in experience and wage increases.

Advertise for a $28,000/year secretarial position and you’ll get a slew of applications from people with bachelor’s and even master’s degrees. You don’t need a college degree to push papers and answer the telephone. Give me a break! Why have these people wasted their time and gone into debt up to their schnozzes if jobs like this are what they have to look forward to?

I argue that for many young people, there are alternatives that may serve them better than marking time for four years in a bachelor’s degree program. For example, a two-year program at a community college could very well land you in a job that will earn lots better than the $28,000 secretarial position—or at least no less. Many trades are well paid, and you can’t off-shore a plumbing or an electrical job. A paid apprenticeship could prepare a young man or woman for a decently paying job—and possibly prepare the person to own a business—without leaving him or her in five-figure debt.

I also argue that filling up our universities with students who are academically unprepared dilutes the quality of the degree for every student. When faculty have to deal with gigantic classes, 40% of whose members cannot keep up with the work, attention that should be given to those students who belong there is diverted and wasted. We would not be sending college graduates into the workplace with subminimal skills if we were not having to grant degrees to people who come to us with subminimal skills.

Should we flunk out every freshman who arrives in our classes with subminimal skills? What? Send away 40% of our little cash cows? Not and keep our teaching jobs!

By and large, as a college instructor you are ill-advised, indeed, to fail students whose skills and performance do not come up to par. Promotion and tenure depend largely on semester-end student evaluations—if you give these students an honest assessment of their performance, they blow you out of the water. If you fail them, they and their parents show up at the dean’s office. If they are members of minority groups and you are not, you’re likely to be accused of discriminatory practices. If their politics are conservative and yours are liberal—or vice-versa—you may be accused of vindictive behavior.

The system as it is currently set up is designed to churn huge numbers of students through to the bachelor’s degree. Because some 40% those students are unprepared and stay unprepared throughout their four-year experience, a large proportion of those degrees are fraudulent. It is a system that cheats the students and cheats employers. And because it defrauds strong students as well as weak ones by diverting resources away from the truly qualified, over time it weakens our country’s economy.

Monday, May 19, 2008 – 09:59 AM