There are some things in life that are always going to be on the up and up.
College tuition is one of them. The cost of tuition at the four-year publice university went up 6.5 percent last year, The New York Times reports. At private colleges, tuition rose 4.4 percent. As America’s spending power has sunk to all-time lows, Patrick Callan, president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, called the increases “hugely disappointing.”
“Given the financial hardship of the country, it’s simply astonishing that colleges and universities would have this kind of increases. It tells you that higher education is still a seller’s market. The level of debt we’re asking people to undertake is unsustainable.”
And as tuition continues to soar upwards, we can count on the hype surrounding the college admissions process to continue to increase as well. One high school English teacher in Columbus, Ohio, requires his students to write 25 unique sample college essays, one each week for 25 weeks. “Practice makes better,” the teacher, Chad Hemmelgarn, says.
And finally, there’s the world’s population. That remains on an upward tilt too. But as the world population continues to increase, some scientists are worried the world won’t have enough food to feed all its mouths. The New York Times reports that the number of hungry people in the world rose to 1.02 billion this year, meaning that nearly one and seven people don’t have the means to buy the food they need. The United Nations estimates that the global financial recession added 100 million people to the ranks of the underfed, and now scientists are racing for a solution.