The long-standing urban-suburban divide in education, income, race and other characteristics is being turned on its head as college-educated Millennials crowd into U.S. cities, new research shows.
Putting urban neighborhoods under a microscope, a University of Virginia researcher has concluded that the traditional urban "donut" pattern — a ring of thriving suburbs surrounding a decaying city center — is being replaced by a new pattern: a thriving urban core surrounded by a ring of suburbs with older housing, older residents and more poverty.
How can you possibly attend elite colleges for free? You just walk into the classrooms and act like a student.
Here is the opening to this story, which addresses more than a few serious topics:
Between 2008 and 2012, Guillaume Dumas took courses at some of the best colleges in North America—Stanford, Yale, Brown, University of California Berkeley, McGill, and University of British Columbia, among others—without being enrolled as a student. He then went on to start a successful online dating business in Montreal.
For four years, the 28-year-old from Quebec lived the life of a wandering scholar, moving from one university town to the next, attending lectures and seminars, getting into heated debates with professors. Sometimes he was open about his unregistered status, but most of the time, fearing reprisal, he kept it quiet. To pay for his everyday expenses, he worked at cafes and occasionally earned money by writing papers for other students. He lived at co-ops or other cheap student housing, but at Brown, when funds got particularly low, a kind soul let him set up his sleeping bag and tent on the roof. At the end of all this, he never received a degree.
The City of St. Louis, where I live, will hold its primary elections tomorrow. As usual, reporting on many of the races is scant to nonexistent. Here's a typical example of "reporting" on the elections, this from St. Louis Public Radio, and it provides almost no information about the positions of the candidates. You won't find any meaningful information in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch either. Local TV won't cover the candidates positions either. It's amazing that citizens are being asked to vote in elections where it is so incredibly difficult to learn about the candidates. This is the way things are, year after year. This year I decided to do something about the problem.
Based on hundreds of signs appearing on front yards in the Shaw Neighborhood of St. Louis (where I live), two of the Democrat candidates are especially active in the race for Alderman. The incumbent is Stephen Conway. Kevin McKinney is also vying for that office. Rather than rely on the sound-bite information on the yard signs and flyers, I decided to invite both candidates to my house to separately videotape 30-minute discussions of the issues with me. I posted both videos on my neighborhood website, and I have received considerable appreciation from my neighbors for providing this information. My role in offering to produce these videos was that of a citizen journalist. I wanted to do my part to make important information available to voters in an upcoming election.
This was a no-brainer, really. Simply post decent quality videos on YouTube where people can hear from the candidates in the privacy and comfort of their own homes.
Sen. Warren's op-ed in the Post this week is a must-read, and a must-share: it explains how our country's consumer, worker, and environmental protection laws could be undermined by a dispute-resolution clause in the TPP, currently being negotiated. More generally, the danger Sen. Warren describes is a potent illustration of how trade deals that may sound benign in terms of their general aims can contain some pretty radical giveaways to corporate interests.
Here's a flavor:
[The Investor-State Dispute Settlement clause, or ISDS] would allow foreign companies to challenge U.S. laws — and potentially to pick up huge payouts from taxpayers — without ever stepping foot in a U.S. court. Here’s how it would work. Imagine that the United States bans a toxic chemical that is often added to gasoline because of its health and environmental consequences. If a foreign company that makes the toxic chemical opposes the law, it would normally have to challenge it in a U.S. court. But with ISDS, the company could skip the U.S. courts and go before an international panel of arbitrators. If the company won, the ruling couldn’t be challenged in U.S. courts, and the arbitration panel could require American taxpayers to cough up millions — and even billions — of dollars in damages.
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