Harvard for the Middle Class

Harvard has announced that for the next year a financial aid program will be installed, cutting tuition from 1/3 to 1/2 of the usual cost. They are looking to help the middle class and even the upper middle class families send their children to ivy league schools without going bankrupt. The program will make families only have to pay 10% of their annual income for tuition each year. The drop will be as much as 50,000 dollars for some families. Harvard has witnessed the dramatic increase within the last few years in university's tuition and have decided they are going to take the initiative to fix the problem. Their financial aid program offers more help than any other private university in the country. Attending Harvard is now comparable to the price, but certainly not the status, as attending a state university. They now will be giving out over $120 million dollars a year just in financial aid. Other schools are following Harvard's lead, mainly on the East Coast, to increase financial aid and therefore making attending college ultimately easier. Over the years they have been debating whether or not a drastic change in tuition was needed, but up until now they had been creating only differences for very poor families. But now everyone is included and Harvard is excited, as well as everyone else, to satisfy the nation by providing more financial aid and proving they really do care about education even if our current government does not.

The Internet's a Scary Place...

Myspace, facebook, livejournal. For the most part we all have/had one. However, the dangers which come from these sites is more than just someone being able to look at your pictures. For the most part, it is young girls who are the victims of these sexual predators. Girls like to look "sexy" in order to seem older, but what about that 30 year old man who is able to sit at his computer and interrogate...As a teenage girl with one of these sites I have found that it is certainly not uncommon for someone you have never seen before to try and strike up a conversation. Girls must be aware of the dangers and communicate with their parents or friends if they are receiving creepy comments from a person they have never met before. In Kansas City, a 13 year old girl, Megan Meier, was found hanging in her closet after receiving hateful comments from a made up person over myspace. Her mother told a source that she went into her room crying and within 20 minutes was found hung in her closet. She had felt like an outcast and thought the easiest way out was by committing suicide. What she didn't know was the person on the other end was a fictional character, Josh Evans, played by another girl named Ashley. The neighbors have now shunned her family and constantly berate them by performing acts on their house or making crude comments about their daughter. It is horrible to think a girl would go through with something like this after a conversation over the Internet. It is one thing to be the outcast at school, but this could have been easily solved by telling her mother and not communicating with "him" anymore. The Internet is a dangerous place because you can't see who the person is on the other end and a lot of times they are someone you would never expect.