Each Day A New Beginning

I wanted to share with you wonderful women a page out of a daily meditation book I have had since I was a senior in college.  The meditation book means a lot to me.

So the entry for Tuesday, March 10 (our last day of class) reads:

"It is healthier to see the good points of others than to analyze our own bad ones."
- Francoise Sagan

Looking for the good in others is good for one's soul.  Self-respect, self-love grows each time we openly acknowledge another's admirable qualities.  Comparisons we make of ourselves with others, focusing on how we fail to measure up (another woman is prettier, thinner, more intelligent, has a better sense of humor, attracts people, and on and on) is a common experience.  And we come away from the comparison feeling generally inadequate and unloving toward the other woman.

It is a spiritual truth that our love for and praise of others will improve our own self-image.  It will rub off on us, so to speak.  An improved self-image diminishes whatever bad qualities one has imagined.

Praise softens.  Criticism hardens.  We can become all that we want to become.  We can draw the love of others to us as we more willingly offer love and praise.  We have an opportunity to help one another as we help ourselves grown in the self-love that is so necessary to the successful living of each day.

                                                                                                                     

I will see the good points in others today.  And I will give praise.

Op-Ed/Blog Post

A.)       I am looking to have this piece placed online through “Buzzfeed” and “The Huffington Post” as mainstream papers and magazines get thousands of submissions on a multitude of subjects.  I may also present this on a stream-able radio station online or in the form of a podcast placed next to the text of this article in “Buzzfeed” and “The Huffington Post.”  In an online article from Business Wire about “The Huffington Post” in 2013 the online site experienced the most growth, stating: “The Huffington Post has 46 million monthly U.S. unique visitors and 78 million monthly global unique visitors (comScore, August 2013) posting over eight million comments each month.”  A post on this site could reach a large and diverse audience.  I expect an op-ed in this net-zine to be read by the generation that directly predates the millennials that are young professionals; those currently serving time paying down their school debt.

            Also, “Buzzfeed” has a unique way of touching the millennial generation and their attention span.  The site has journalists with prior experiences from The Wall Street Journal, NY Times and Propublica.  Journalists with credible backgrounds have been able to touch a significantly different generation raised on technology.  According to The Huffington Post in December 2013 the demographics of Buzzfeed consisted of “51 percent male and 49 percent female.”  The age demographics of Buzzfeed are also compelling in terms of the stakeholders and audience I am trying to reach on my topic.  The Huffington Post reporting on Buzzfeed states, “Readers between the ages of 18 and 24 (the "younger generation") dominate the space. An estimated 24 percent range between the ages 18-24; 28.7 percent are between 25 and 34.”  It is this younger generation I think would be the most effected by the rising cost of tuition and who would be most motivated to advocate for change.  Also this demographic, through the internet, unlike any other generation before, has more exposure to those in other countries.  This exposure to other societies who have different educational experiences has an impact on how we view our educational system and its cost.    

           

B.)      $54,169.00 is my total post-secondary school debt.  Currently I’m enrolled in a master’s degree certificate that qualifies me to defer payments on this debt.  I called Fed Loan Servicing, my loan servicer, to determine if I should keep paying while in the program. 

I asked for the amount of interest I am paying, as the total amount I owed seemed to be higher than the last time I checked despite making the monthly payment.  The customer service rep said the interest was $3.59.  I said, oh per month?  Her reply was PER DAY. 

In shock I asked, can I choose to not accept the deferment?   The representative responded that I could choose not to defer while in the program, but she affirmed that the purpose of this option was to help me focus on my studies.  It was in that moment that I started to wonder if all my education was worth such a heavy price tag.  In the country I live in, what are we doing to make higher education more affordable?

Student loan debt is on the rise in the United States.  According to the Total Federal Student Aid Portfolio Summary found on the https://studentaid.ed.gov/about/data-center/student/portfolio, the outstanding amount of student loan assistance equals $1,140,000,000,000 (a billion dollars equals a thousand millions).

What is the reason so much financing is needed by individuals to pay for higher education?  The greatest reasons have become the rising cost of tuition, commercialization of higher education, mixed with scarce postsecondary resources from the government come in conflict with the demands for education.  To fill the financial gap created by rising tuition parents and students commit to large amounts of loans to supplement what might be provided by other means, such as scholarships and grants.  Scholarships can be both time consuming for a student leaving high school trying to get applications done for entrance and can be extremely competitive with stringent parameters that exclude certain students from the beginning. 

We need to find a way to dig each other out.  Currently the focus of the Obama administration has been to make post-secondary education more affordable.  The price tag can be the most expensive thing you will ever decide to buy for yourself.  What makes buying a higher education more mystifying is that you sign promissory notes not knowing how much your monthly payment will be.  Even when you finance your car or take out a home mortgage you sign documents that show the parties entering into the contract agree to a certain monthly payment amount.  The new focus in the Obama administration is the tagline, “Know Before You Owe.”

How do you budget the cost of post-secondary education before signing up for loans, classes and books?  How do you even know if the loans you are taking on in total can be manageable to pay back?  Aren’t there other options?  I would offer that there are other ways that have proven success in other countries. 

Having been born in the United Kingdom, I often think about what would it be like have attended higher education in that country versus here.  Educational policy in the U.K. has changed greatly from when I lived there – their higher education, pre Margaret Thatcher, was low to no cost, financed by levied taxes.  Currently, higher education in the United Kingdom has moved to an “ICR” system, otherwise known as Income Contingent Repayment.  Small loans can be taken out by students based on their parent’s income at the time, increasing minimally for fees. 

For further comparative higher education models check back for further monthly entries on my blog at: http://maolstrategiccommunication.blogspot.com/

 

 

 

  

Social Media Infographic

What I Have Learned From My Topic on the Comparative Study of Higher Education and My Recommendations on Higher Education in the United States.

              Multiple categories of comparison can be made between the educational system in the United States and in European countries across the pond.  There is the international context – or cultural intelligence that exists in building the structure of a higher education system.  It is hard to find a direct differentiation between each piece of steel beam that makes up the structure of higher education. 

              An important encyclopedia entry I found stated these two broad classifications in which to subcategorize a comparison; Mortimore (1992) identifies these segmentations: International Context and Requirements of Higher Education on School Students.  The subsections drill down to the meat of the equivalence and are as follows: Organization of Schools, The Curriculum of Schools, Assessment of Student Achievement, Motivation of Students, Financial Factors, Entry Qualifications, and Ability to Benefit from Higher Education.

              What I came to find in my research was some difficulty in gathering data that would compare the “ROI” or return on investment of post-secondary education in different countries.  Especially in the hopes of finding European statistics that would be measurable to the United States.  The more I wanted to find this information, the lens began to focus on why this endeavor is quixotic at best.

              In other words, I was trying to stab moving fictional windmills.  There is not a one to one correlation between the ROIs of higher education because each country has an economy that runs in different ways and on various types of employment.  Thus making it difficult, if not impossible to conclude one educational path leads to greater return on investment over another in different countries.  So, what I thought would be a plethora of data turned out to be dry quicksand.

              As I continue to research, argue, and purpose in my position paper the information I obtain through scholarly writings may not mirror exactly the expectations of what I thought would be out there.  Therefore this final paper will be more qualitative than quantitative.