Choose Lifework

Pleas unheeded as Students US jobs soured

The college student from Moldova was in the United States on a cultural exchange program run for half a century by the federal government, a program designed to build international understanding by providing foreign students with a dream summer of fun in America. So he summoned his best English for the e-mail he sent to the State Department in June.

“Pleas hellp,” wrote the student, Tudor Ureche. He told them about “the miserable situation in which I’ve found myself cought” since starting a job under the program in a plant packing Hershey’s chocolates near the company’s namesake town in Pennsylvania.

Students like Mr. Ureche, who had paid as much as $6,000 to take part in the program, expected a chance to see the best of this country, to make American friends and sightsee, with a summer job to help finance it all.

Read more…


Cutbacks force tuition fee increases

On what should have been a carefree day of reconnecting with friends and settling into new classes recently, more than two dozen students at the University of California, Berkeley, sat in uneasy silence outside the financial aid office.

The airy room on the second floor of Sproul Hall took on the desperate feeling of an unemployment office, with students waiting their turn to plead for emergency loans.

“I want to have enough money to pay for school,” Daniel Seman, a junior majoring in English and music, said as he waited to see a financial aid counselor last Wednesday. “My mom is really worried.”

Mr. Seman, 23, said he had already spent an emergency loan of $500 from the university on books and food. But faced with about $7,230 for tuition and fees this semester, roughly $1,000 more than the fall semester last year, he was back in line trying to get another loan.

Faced with drastic cutbacks in state financing, U.C. tuition increased 18 percent this school year, and the university’s Board of Regents is expected to vote on a plan to raise tuition 8 percent to 16 percent a year through 2015-16. With the cost of rent, food and books also soaring, more students like Mr. Seman are scrambling to be able to afford their education.