(from https://www.snopes.com/tax-plan-graduate-students/)
CLAIM
The Republican tax reform plan would increase the tax burden on graduate students by counting waived tuition as personal income.
WHAT'S TRUE
The House of Representatives' 16 November 2017 version of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act would tax graduate tuition waivers, and has passed the House.
WHAT'S FALSE
As of 20 November 2017, the Senate version of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act keeps the current exemption from taxation on graduate tuition waivers.
WHAT'S UNDETERMINED
Whether the final version of the tax bill, if passed, will include an end to the exemption of tuition waivers from taxation.
. . . Some folks are just plain restless. They bore easily. They are unsatisfied with many things within their own life as well as things in the world as a whole. Many times these folks are truly just plain brilliant and go on to accomplish wonderful things for mankind. Sometimes, not so. I am not, by nature, restless. In fact, I can be quite complacent at times. There was a time however, when I felt so very restless that it was severely affecting my attitude. When I was approaching the end of my college career, I found myself eager to get on with a 'real' life in the 'real' world. This was actually a phrase that I used frequently to express my frustration with what began to feel like some kind of make-believe world, or role-playing exercise. I simply wanted that chapter to end and to get on with career, personal pursuits and the rest of it. I have not regretted the decisions I have made since that time and I now find a deeper understanding of what I was feeling then. But also with hindsight, comes an appreciation for those (relatively) responsibility-free days of being young and being a student. . .
(from http://www.teachthought.com/industry/12-data-points-detailing-the-crisis-of-poor-writing-in-america/)
1. Four out of five students are not proficient writers.
2. Even with spell check and a thesaurus on hand, just 27% of students are able to write well-developed essays with proper language use.
3. Even worse, 26.2% of college graduates produce writing that rates as deficient.
4. Fewer than 50% of college seniors feel their writing improved during college.
5. SAT writing scores are falling, too.
6. About 17% of college freshmen require remedial writing classes.
7. The average fourth grader spends fewer than 3 hours per week writing.
8. Students struggle with reading.
9. Poor writing cost employers $3.1 billion per year.
10. Many students prefer texting over composition.
11. Male students are struggling worse than female students.
12. Writing isn’t considered fun by today’s students.
OHO's "Ocean City Ditty," the CD single is now available at http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/oho4
(and, if you're in town, at Trax On Wax on Frederick Rd. in Catonsville, MD) OHO is Jay Graboski, David Reeve & Ray Jozwiak. Please Visit http://www.ohomusic.com
My latest solo offering, Just More Music by Ray Jozwiak, featuring original, instrumental piano music will be released April 7, 2014 Just More Music by Ray Jozwiak
(To Access all Ray Jozwiak - Gonzo Piano music you can copy-and-paste this URL directly to
your browser: http://http://www.cdbaby.com/Artist/RayJozwiak)
Mohammad Rasheed Ahmad, a student at the Ghousia Madrassa, or Islamic religious school, said he was disappointed so few came out to honor hérif and Saïd Kouachi, the Islamist terrorist brothers behind the Charlie Hebdo magazine massacre at funeral in absentia in the city of Peshawar recently.
"We saw tens of thousands of people gathered in France to show solidarity with their slain men, but Muslims didn't come to take part in the funeral of the two heroes who did this great job," he said.
OHO's "Ocean City Ditty," the CD single is now available at http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/oho4
(and, if you're in town, at Trax On Wax on Frederick Rd. in Catonsville, MD) OHO is Jay Graboski, David Reeve & Ray Jozwiak. Please Visit http://www.ohomusic.com
My latest solo offering, Just More Music by Ray Jozwiak, featuring original, instrumental piano music will be released April 7, 2014 Just More Music by Ray Jozwiak
(To Access all Ray Jozwiak - Gonzo Piano music you can copy-and-paste this URL directly to
your browser: http://http://www.cdbaby.com/Artist/RayJozwiak)
(from http://www.ethosreview.org/intellectual-spaces/is-college-football-profitable/)
"There’s a standard narrative fueling the big business of college football. Many of its advocates put it like this: football programs generate so much revenue for the university, while also supporting “non-revenue” sports like golf and swimming from its own budgetary excess, that college football is its own justification for the large team budgets and coaches’ salaries. Because alumni are much more generous during years when football teams win, academic programming benefits as well. Indeed, so this standard narrative goes, both the jump in admissions applications and the wider “public relations” effect that accompanies a football program cause munificent ripples throughout a university’s stream of income. Many even maintain that football helps to subsidize the obscure and non-remunerative activities of colleges—research into the reproductive biology of ducks and eighteenth-century German poetry, for example. Without a football program, scholarship money would plummet and applicants would flock elsewhere in search of universities with better “student life” opportunities. . .
. . . According to Jeff Benedict and Armen Keteyian, authors of The System:
The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football (2013), figures from
the 2010-11 academic year show that only 22 of the 120 top-tier football
programs broke even or made a profit. That means that while these
big-time teams generate millions of dollars of revenue, the cost of
running such programs usually exceeds that revenue. To put that more
starkly, even within the so-called top tier, 82% of college football
teams actually take away money from the university’s budget, rather than
generate net revenue. Thus, the myth that college football generates revenue for universities is a lie 82% of the time among the highest grossing “tier” of teams."
OHO's
"Ocean City Ditty," the
CD single is now available at http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/oho4
(and, if
you're in town, at Trax On Wax on Frederick Rd. in Catonsville, MD) OHO is Jay Graboski, David Reeve & Ray Jozwiak
My latest solo release, '2014' of original, instrumental piano music, can be downloaded digitally at:
(or you can copy-and-paste this URL directly to
your browser: http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/rayjozwiak4)
(from Dylan Ratigan
Host, MSNBC's 'The Dylan Ratigan Show'; Author, 'Greedy Bastards'; Founder, Get Money Out Foundation
Auction 2012: Greedy Bastards and Student Debt)
".
. . In President Obama's first speech to a joint session of Congress,
he said "education in no longer a pathway to opportunity, it is a
prerequisite." It's no wonder - conventional wisdom says that those
with college degrees earn roughly a million more dollars over their
lives than those without them. And there is a vast apparatus of lending
institutions and Federal guarantees set up to help put people into
college. They do this not by keeping tuition free or low, as we did as a
country after World War II, but by helping people get access to student
loans.
This is the essence of what I've been calling
The Very Bad Deal, where costs are deferred while benefits accrue
upfront. If you get a student loan, you get to attend college, and
college is apparently the key to earning more over your lifetime, to
"opportunity". But student debt has some very nasty tricks and traps
that most 18 year olds aren't aware of when they sign on the dotted
line, and college may not be the opportunity gateway we've been assured
it is.
The scale of the deal is vast and getting bigger
- two thirds of those who attend college do so with borrowed money. In
August of 2010, the Wall Street reported that student loan debt
surpassed credit card debt for the first time in history. This amount
is now sitting at roughly a trillion dollars. Higher education
inflation is the higher than health care inflation, and two and a half
times the rate of normal inflation. Are students really learning two
and a half times as much?
Of course not. What is
happening is that universities have pricing power, and the Greedy
Bastard behavior encourages them to compete on facilities and brand-name
faculties rather than price and quality. The Chronicle of Higher
Education has described "an arms race of expenditures triggered by the
pursuit of prestige." Student debt also distorts pricing. If students
had to pay the full freight in college, they might be more
price-sensitive consumers. But since the costs of the education they
are receiving are hidden, they don't pressure universities to reign in
costs. Lavish living environments, pointlessly luxurious sports
facilities, and high salaries for administrators are just symptoms of a
system where costs have become irrelevant. . ."
(from http://factcheck.org/2013/06/jeb-bush-gets-f-on-school-spending/)
Jeb Bush has repeatedly — and falsely — claimed that the United States spends “more per student than any country in the world.” Luxembourg, Norway and Switzerland all spend more than the U.S. on elementary and secondary education.
The former Florida governor most recently made this claim at the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s annual Road to Majority Conference, held on June 14 in Washington, D.C. At the conference, Bush spoke about the need to create sustainable economic growth and cited education (at the 15:23 mark) as the “greatest challenge our country faces.”
Bush, June 14: To me the greatest challenge our country faces is that 40 percent of our kids — truly, truly, honestly — 40 percent of our kids are college or career ready. And we spend more per student than any country in the world. That is not acceptable. Too many young people now have shattered dreams because they don’t have the skills to be successful.
Bush made a similar claim in an earlier interview with Newsmax TV (about 19 minutes into the video):
Bush, March 31: We have a third of our kids that don’t make it through the system, even though we spend more per student than any country in the world. And a lot of students could be doing college-level work by the time they’ve graduated from high school but in effect they’re held back because we have this adult-centered homogenized learning model.
We asked Bush spokeswoman Jaryn Emhof for information that would support the governor’s claim that the U.S. has the highest per-student expenditure rate. But the information she provided contradicted his claim.
(from wikipedia.com)
. . . (Keith) Jarrett grew up in suburban Allentown, Pennsylvania with significant early exposure to music. He possessed absolute pitch, and he displayed prodigious musical talents as a young child. He began piano lessons just before his third birthday, and at age five he appeared on a TV talent program hosted by the swing bandleader Paul Whiteman. The young Jarrett gave his first formal piano recital at the age of seven, playing works by composers including Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, and Saint-Saëns, and ending with two of his own compositions.[4] Encouraged especially by his mother, Jarrett took intensive classical piano lessons with a series of teachers, including Eleanor Sokoloff of the Curtis Institute.
In his teens, as a student at Emmaus High School in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, Jarrett learned jazz and quickly became proficient in it. In his early teens, he developed a strong interest in the contemporary jazz scene; a Dave Brubeck performance was an early inspiration. At one point, he had an offer to study classical composition in Paris with the famed teacher Nadia Boulanger—an opportunity that pleased Jarrett's mother but that Jarrett, already leaning toward jazz, decided to turn down.
Following his graduation from Emmaus High School in 1963, Jarrett moved from Allentown to Boston, Massachusetts, where he attended the Berklee College of Music and played cocktail piano in local clubs. After a year he moved to New York City, where he played at the Village Vanguard.
In New York, Art Blakey hired Jarrett to play with the Jazz Messengers. During a show with that group he was noticed by Jack DeJohnette who (as he recalled years later) immediately realized the talent and the unstoppable flow of ideas of the unknown pianist. DeJohnette talked to Jarrett and soon recommended him to his own band leader, Charles Lloyd. The Charles Lloyd Quartet had formed not long before and were exploring open, improvised forms while building supple grooves; without quite realizing it at first, they were moving into terrain that was also being explored, although from another stylistic background, by some of the psychedelic rock bands of the west coast. Their 1966 album Forest Flower was one of the most successful jazz recordings of the mid-1960s and when they were invited to play the Fillmore in San Francisco, they won over the local hippie audience. Although the band would become plagued by internal instability and (according to Jarrett) siphoning-off of show revenue by Lloyd, its tours across America and Europe, even to Moscow, made Jarrett a widely noticed musician in rock and jazz underground circles. It also laid the foundations of a lasting musical bond with drummer Jack DeJohnette (who also plays the piano). The two would cooperate in many contexts during their later careers.
In those years, Jarrett also began to record his own tracks as a leader of small informal groups, at first in a trio with Charlie Haden and Paul Motian. Jarrett's first album as a leader, Life Between the Exit Signs (1967), was released on the Vortex label, to be followed by Restoration Ruin (1968), which is arguably the most bizarre entry in the Jarrett catalog. Not only does Jarrett barely touch the piano, but he plays all the other instruments on what is essentially a folk-rock album, and even sings. Another trio album with Haden and Motian, titled Somewhere Before, followed later in 1968, this one recorded live for Atlantic Records.. . . Jarrett has acknowledged that audiences, and even fellow musicians, have at times been convinced he is African American, due to his appearance.[19] He relates an incident when African American jazz musician Ornette Coleman approached him backstage, and said something like, "Man, you've got to be black. You just have to be black", to which Jarrett replied, "I know. I know. I'm working on it.". . . "
What
do YOU think?
http://www.rayjozwiak.com/guestbook.html
My latest release, Black & White Then Back,
can be downloaded digitally at:
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. . . until you've heard forty seven accordionists playing HALLELUJA I'M A BUM on a cold, Monday evening in November. Kinda warms the cockles of your heart.
Well, we used to have 'band practice', not as in a conventional 'band' of various compatible instruments rehearsing together for a performance, but a 'band' meaning a group, and 'practice' meaning just that. And many of us most certainly needed practice. Theoretically, the concept had musical merit. Playing with other music students promoted an understanding of time, tempo and dynamics, following a 'conductor' (of sorts) and taught cooperation, support, sympathy, harmony, rhythm and accompaniment.
The configuration was four rows of metal, folding chairs of about 8 - 10 facing the conductor (an accordion teacher, most often Mr. Edward (Taylor) Krawcyk) whose back was to a row of assorted couches and chairs where the parents of the students sat to 'enjoy' the music of their progeny. The protocol had the 'new' or less senior (accordionwise) students in the first row, with students 'promoted' to the following rows as they progressed in skill, or sometimes when they merely 'hung in there' for a period, with or without really improving technically at all.
And the coup de gras for seriously dedicated students of the squeezebox, during each band practice, was the opportunity to perform a solo. Only two rows of students were allowed to perform a 'solo' each week, simply because of the one-hour time limit of the weekly gathering. The first two rows would offer solos one week, with only the 3rd and 4th rows the following week. And Oh Boy, did I look forward to my time to 'shine' with a solo every other week. And this performance opportunity was not taken lightly, by myself at least, and much time and toil was taken in the selection, preparation and eventual performance of my bi-monthly accordion solo.
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