If your child is one of the 1.5 million high school students eagerly awaiting acceptance letters from colleges this month, he or she is probably entertaining dreams of high scholarship, intellectual ferment, new friends, raging keggers. You probably have a few other things on your mind. For starters, you may be thinking that the average annual cost of a four-year institution now exceeds $20,000. Or that outstanding student-loan debt surpasses $1 trillion. Or that defaults are rising, economic gr

A lot of people search endlessly for the secret key or a magic formula that would enable them to understand China. Naturally, at some point they will want to know how the Chinese are educated. The Middle Kingdom has many prestigious schools, but let us take a closer look at Peking University, the mother lode of the Chinese “wenming.”Wenming is often translated as “civilization,” but that is misleading. In a recent lecture at Peking University, the renowned linguist Gu Zhengkun explained that “we

For a while, it looked as if the European Central Bank’s 1 trillion euro credit program to pump liquidity into Europe’s banking system had calmed global financial markets. But now interest rates for Italian and Spanish government bonds are on the rise again, closing in on about 6 percent.Of course, this may not be the breaking point beyond which the debt burden becomes unsustainable. After all, interest rates in Southern Europe were well above 10 percent in the decade before the euro was introdu

Anyone with half a brain knows that bolstering the middle class is critical to securing the future of the U.S. It’s a matter of national self-interest. Setting aside the misery of poverty for a minute, the rich need a skilled middle-class workforce to make their businesses successful or they won’t stay rich for long. Skills, of course, require education, which is why it’s nutty that Republican House members want to cut Pell grants and are making unreasonable demands in the debate over preventing

May is the best sightseeing season in Northeast Asia. The economic rise of China pushes the tourism market in the region to an explosive growth. Combining these two factors, a tourism rush is expected across the region in the coming weeks. Yet, we have a sense of unease about the state of readiness in this particular service sector.These days, the Japanese, Chinese and South Koreans are thronging to each other’s tourism resorts and large cities, joined by American, European and Southeast Asian t

Conscience tells us that active military service to defend the nation is more than a duty ―it is the privilege of healthy Korean men. So, it is dismaying to hear people talk about the “privilege” of being exempted from military service for various reasons. Further puzzling is the fact that this privilege is officially recognized for persons who “raised the national prestige” with outstanding results in international sports and arts competitions.The idea behind this peculiar system practiced for

One of the first things an undergraduate is required to learn is give due credit whenever he uses another person’s ideas, thoughts or expressions. Otherwise, they will be accused of presenting them as their original work and, by doing so, purloining them.They are also required to give credit to any piece of information, be it a fact or a statistic, when it is not deemed to be common knowledge. It is the same with paraphrased words, either spoken or written, of another person. They must adhere to

Rep. Chung Mong-joon of the ruling Saenuri Party declared his bid for the presidency on Sunday. He was the second politician, after Gyeonggi Gov. Kim Moon-soo, to make public his plan to fight for the ruling party’s presidential nomination. With Kim and Chung apparently aiming to get the advantage of moving first, competition is not likely to get into full swing until after it holds a national convention on May 15 to elect its leadership.It is the same with the main opposition Democratic United

Are the French getting their Tea Party on? That’s what an outsider looking at the country’s first-round presidential voting results might have been led to believe. But, as with many things French, the reality is tres compliquee.The weekend vote knocked out all but the two candidates long expected to square off in the May 6 final: Socialist Francois Hollande (28.6 percent) and incumbent center-right President Nicolas Sarkozy (27.2 percent). This isn’t the story, though. The most striking news is

With Mitt Romney all but officially anointed the Republican presidential nominee, the national political narrative now turns to the “Veepstakes”: who Romney will choose for his running mate. From a policy point of view, this is arguably the most important decision Romney will make in his presidential race.The importance of the vice president is not for electoral reasons ― even the most disastrous choices have been found to have a negligible impact on the electorates’ voting decision. Instead, as

It might seem a daunting challenge to determine which of the world’s repressive nations offers the least-free news media. We have so many to choose from ― Iran, North Korea, Belarus ...But you may be surprised by the unanimity among organizations that study such things, like Reporters Without Borders, a French group. The consensus choice is Eritrea, a tiny nation most people cannot even pinpoint on a map.Eritrea, a desperately poor desert state about the size of Pennsylvania, lives in an ugly ne

Singapore’s decision to pledge $4 billion loan to the International Monetary Fund to help troubled economies must be seen as part of a broader international effort. It is necessary because, as a trading nation, Singapore is critically dependent on the health of the global economy. Should Europe’s crisis deepen, it could also spread far beyond the region. Singapore’s contribution is therefore an investment made in enlightened self-interest. Even if the funds are drawn down, the money will remain