The Great Recession is taking its toll. Let us count the (two) ways.

First, if you’re graduating, you probably won’t be able to find a job. Cue The Chronicle of Higher Education:

The good news: Hiring for new college graduates is expected to hold steady in 2010. The bad: Hiring for new college graduates is expected to hold steady in 2010. That’s after plummeting in 2009 by about 35 to 40 percent, according to a major annual survey of companies.

“It’s going to be competitive, no doubt about it,” says Phil Gardner, director of Michigan State University’s Collegiate Employment Research Institute, which conducts the survey.

Only 27 percent of employers have definite plans to hire college graduates this year.

But if you’re an underclassmen, don’t think things are going to be much better. You’re likely going to have deal with a few more years of budget cuts as the fiscal crisis continues to decimate state budgets. From The Chronicle yet again:

“The strains on state and local budgets stay with us even if we get a better economy,” Mr. Strauss said. He predicts that the domestic economy will start to strengthen early next year, and that state and local revenues will improve six to 12 months after that. “It is going to be a tough couple of years for state revenues coming into higher education.”

Quick Hits

• Very Important Washington Post Metro Columnist Robert McCartney visited the campus last week and after looking at controversies over diversity and the Wooded Hillock, declares that the administration shouldn’t sacrifice its ideals in hard times.
• The weekly newspaper for D.C.’s gay community, The Washington Blade, has shut its doors. But staffers say they plan to start a new venture soon.
• Graduate assistants are striking at the University of Illinois, Inside Higher Ed reports, leading to empty classrooms across the Urbana-Champaign campus. Here, they are still struggling for their union to be recognized.
• And while officials here are considering a controversial move to merge different diversity departments, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour is taking an even more extreme step: he is proposing merging three universities. Inside Higher Ed reports that the historically black universities Jackson State, Alcorn State and Mississippi Valley State may soon become one.

Students at Towson University can forget about their between-classes smoke or their nictotine stress break next year as their school will become the first four-year college in Maryland to ban smoking on its campus.

Montgomery College became the first university to become smoke-free in Maryland last year, along with around 365 other colleges across the country. Towson officials cite concern over the health risks of cigarettes first and second hand among students.

“I don’t try to guide people in how they live their lives, but I am going to protect the campus so it’s clean and pleasant for as many people as possible,” said Towson President Robert L. Caret.

Here in College Park, we have been edging toward a smoke-free world for the past few years. Smoking has been banned in Prince George’s County bars since 2005. The University Senate received a proposal to make this university smoke-free earlier this year. The Senate is set to discuss the proposal this month.

Universities are following the trend of a growing number of bars, restaurants and other public areas that are banning smoking. 19 states are now considered by Americans for Nonsmokers’ Rights to be smokefree.

22.2 percent of people between the ages of 18 and 24 smoke, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Though not a majority, at least a fifth of Towson’s student body — and over 50 percent of its adult faculty and staff members — will be facing a dilemma next year when their nicotine level drops.

And the top reasons college students smoke? Stress, less supervision, having more free time and the number of their friends who smoke. So basically, the entire college experience encourages you to light up. The only way to avoid it would be to have no friends, take a few Kinesiology courses and lock yourself in your dorm.

The question then becomes if Towson — or any university — has a right to deny students stress relief in an environment that that does nothing but create stress. Or is it saving students from their own habits and other students from having to breathe those bad habits in second hand?

And with our own University Senate set to review a similar ban this month, could students’ smoking habits here also be up in smoke?

President Obama has had a busy day in China today, calling on the country’s leadership to stop Internet censorship and its students to take the lead in pushing for Internet rights.

“I should be honest, as president of the United States, there are times where I wish information didn’t flow so freely because then I wouldn’t have to listen to people criticizing me all the time,” Obama said in a New York Times story published today.

But, he added,

“Because in the United States, information is free, and I have a lot of critics in the United States who can say all kinds of things about me, I actually think that that makes our democracy stronger and it makes me a better leader because it forces me to hear opinions that I don’t want to hear.”

Obama’s outreach to China’s students takes on special significance as an increasing number of them are electing to study in the United States. According to the annual Open Doors Report, China sent 98,510 to American colleges last year, a 21 percent increase from the year before. And these Chinese students aren’t just studying math and science.

“It used to be that they were all in the graduate science departments, but now, with the one-child policy, more and more Chinese parents are taking their considerable wealth and investing it in that one child getting an American college education,” said Peggy Blumenthal, the executive vice president of the Institute of International Education, which published the Open Doors Report along with the State Department.

Expect to see more of this flag waving on U.S. college campuses.

The ever-quotable state Sen. Jim Rosapepe, who represents College Park, can now list author on his resume along with Romanian ambassador and University System Regent. His new book “Dracula is Dead” provides an in-depth look at the country where he served as an ambassador under the Clinton administration and centers on how Romania went from a communist nation to a thriving democracy over a 20-year period.

Co-authored with his wife Sheilah Kast, a broadcast journalist, the book has already received rave reviews from a few notables, according to publisher Bancroft Press. Romanian Olympic gymnast Nadia Comaneci said the husband-and-wife writing duo deserve a “gold medal” for examining the “many layers” of her native home. Former secretary of state Madeleine Albright said they are “outstanding guides to this country, which is both familiar and exotic”. And political analyst Cokie Roberts said “with the eye of the journalist and the ear of the politician, Sheilah Kast and Jim Rosapepe make their Romanian experience so absorbing that you’ll want to jump on the next plane to go see for yourself.”

Time released their list of the top ten college presidents yesterday. Sorry, Dr. Mote, but you didn’t make the cut, although nearby UMBC president Freeman Hrabowski landed at the 7-spot for leading the nation in the number of African-American students in science and engineering majors.

The Big Man on Campus in the rankings is Ohio State’s E. Gordon Gee, a sporter of bow ties who does not look unlike Orville Redenbacher. Gordon leads the list on the merits of, wait for it, acting like a politician: as the head of one of the nation’s top research facilities that employs 40,000 people and serves as a powerful economic booster shot for the state, Gee treats his position as if he were an elected official by, among other things, barnstorming the state’s 88 counties twice.

“Being president of a major public university is the most political nonpolitical office around,” he says. “We’re campaigning on behalf of our mission.” Gee’s power is evident in his $4.35 billion budget — bigger, he notes, than the budget of the state of Delaware — and the outsize role his institution plays in the state’s economy.

Also among the recognized are Middlebury College’s Ronald Liebowitz, who presides over one of the greenest campuses in the country, and John Sexton of New York University, who oversees the first full-fledged campus run by an American university abroad in Abu Dhabi.

Judging by this picture taken from College Humor, Testudo gets a little more action than the occasional nose rub.

Do you know who this turtle lover is?

While a Maryland undergraduate wins big on Wheel of Fortune, a GW alum plays a douchebaggier version of himself on the small screen. Freddie Fackelmayer, who graduated from the university in 2005 with a degree in finance, made his debut late last month on the ‘reality’ show The City, a spin-off of the wildly popular and completely vapid series The Hills.

The former Colonial, who sports boat shoes and summers in the Hamptons (although that’s probably not all too uncommon for students of the third-most expensive college in the nation), told the GW Hatchet that the show made him look like a “womanizing jerk”. The bright young star maintained a rocky relationship with main character Whitney Port. GW fratboys aren’t known for their words of wisdom, but this one may take the cake.

To tell you the truth, a lot of the show is contrived,” Fackelmayer said.

The producers’ splicing and dicing of hours of dialogue into a 20-minute episode skewed what actually happened although they didn’t feed cast members cues or lines, he revealed. But even though he has no regrets about appearing on the show, Fackelmayer said his acting days are over: his real ambition is to be a writer. He’s cleaning up his act now that he’s shopping his novel to prospective agents.

“You know it’s fun to look like a jerk on TV, it’s not good to be a sloppy mess when you’ve got a real job,” he said.

In the middle of the economic downturn, things can occasionally seem kind of rotten here in College Park. But remember, it could be worse.

For example, disabled students here worry Disability Support Services doesn’t have enough support staff. But at East Central University in Oklahoma, administrators are kicking a quadriplegic student out of campus dorms unless he pays for an $11,000-a-year assistant to stay with him overnight.

And while Debbie Yow and the Athletics Department struggle with budget issues, at the  University of California – Berkeley, officials are taking $7.4 million a year from the university’s general fund to subsidize athletics. Oh, and they forgave a $31 million loan to the Athletics Department. Despite all of this, the athletics program is still running multi-million deficits.

But things could be better. Students here are asking for more transparency in how university funds are spent. At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, they’re getting it. In exchange for supporting a gradually increasing $1,000 surcharge, the university’s student government association got a formal role in determining where the money was spent. And as Inside Higher Ed reports students say the role they’re playing is real:

“I know I sound like I’m spouting praise for our administration, but this has been a really well designed program,” said Tyler Junger, chair of the Associated Students of Madison (ASM), which is the university’s student government body.

Quick Hits

• A deer jumped a wall and got in to the lions’ den at the National Zoo, The Washington Post reports. Unsurprisingly, it died.
• Maryland logger Darvin Moon came in 2nd at the World Series of Poker yesterday, but still took in a cool $5.18 million.

Today marked the twentieth anniversary of the fall of Berlin Wall. On November 9, 1989 throngs of West and East Germans gathered on both sides of a wall that had divided the capital city for 28 years. They came to travel across a concrete border that had divided them from friends and family. They came to reunite a nation. They came to reclaim their country’s identity.

Memories of that day remain imprinted in the minds of all Germans. Any German can tell you exactly where they were the day the wall fell. Some watched in amazement on TV, others flocked to the streets and others hopped in their cars and headed to Berlin to see it for themselves.

And though that day lives on, it was only a starting point. Germany has struggled to rebuild itself as one nation but today has become a world power.

It is still a country that struggles with its own identity and the shadows of its former division. To this day, East Germany is poorer and less developed than the West. It’s unemployment rate continues to skyrocket. In Berlin itself, the east part of the city has a distinctively different character, with its unique stores and crumbling buildings than the modernized western half of the city.

The country held an all out bash for its most important date in history. 1,ooo specially decorated Dominos, symbolic of the falling of the wall and other East German regimes after, were knocked down in front of the Brandenburg Gate. The Festival of Freedom continued as Chancellor Angela Merkel, along with world leaders Prime Minister of England Gordon Brown, presidents Nicolas Sarkozy of France and Dmitry Medvedev of Russia and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, symbolically walked through the Brandenburg Gate.

Though most people of our generation were only a few years old or not born at all when the wall fell. It is an important reminder of the changes we can create.

As Merkel told the New York Times:

“One thing I did underestimate: The phase of creating inner unity took much longer than initially thought. But the generation of those who are now in their twenties stands as an example of the success of German unity.”

And even if the fall of the wall was followed by years of imperfection and trial and error, success can be achieved. Never completely, but like the Berlin Wall, there is always somewhere to start.

The onslaught of midterms hasn’t eased, and persnickety professors have you peeved. It’s times like these when you may want to give up on your degree and leave, but don’t.

A recent New York Times column highlights just how hard it can be to find a job without a college degree. Many employers won’t even grant an interview if they don’t see B.A. or B.S. on a resume. And with the recent unemployment spike driving up the competition for the jobs that remain, the column’s author Phyllis Korkki says a college degree is more important than ever now.

But a handful of experts interviewed in a Chronicle of Higher Education question-and-answer session disagreed. Charles Murray, a political scientist at the American Enterprise Institute, pointed to a study that showed that notching a B-average in a traditional college setting requires levels of linguistic and mathematical ability that only 10 to 15 percent of the nation’s youth possess. He concludes:

“That doesn’t mean that only 10 to 15 percent should get more than a high-school education. It does mean that the four-year residential program leading to a B.A. is the wrong model for a large majority of young people.”

Marty Nemko, a career counselor based in Oakland, Calif., adds:

“Students with weak academic records should be informed that, of freshmen at “four year” colleges who graduated in the bottom 40 percent of their high-school class, two-thirds won’t graduate even if given eight and a half years. And that even if such students defy the odds, they will likely graduate with a low GPA and a major in low demand by employers.”

But if you want our view? Don’t believe the haters. Be cool. Stay in school.

From The New York Times

Quick hits:

• Just in case you live under a rock (or spent all weekend in a drunken haze): The House of Representatives passed a sweeping reform of the nation’s health care system this weekend.
• A new study shows that the number of text messages sent in the United States grew by more than 80 percent over a yearlong span between June 2008 and June 2009.
• And in case you were wondering what ever happened to hood ornaments, The Big Money has the answer.