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In the US, it’s never too soon to start saving for your child’s college education.
My youngest daughter has started her senior year of high school here which, it is already clear, will be dominated by the college [university] application process, despite the fact that she will not be going to university in the US. Most of her peers will, and there is no escaping the vortex.
Almost daily there are emails, flyers, seminars or letters to parents about how to help your child apply for college. Most students want to get into the most prestigious university that their parents’ savings can cover.
If you have a positive pregnancy test in the US, that’s the signal to head to the bank to open a college education fund for your unborn child. Then call your partner to ask if they want the good news or the bad news. The good news is you are having a baby, the bad news is that most of your working lives will be spent saving for your child’s college education. You will do this because, without a postgraduate degree, your child won’t have a snowball’s chance of a highly paid job. That well-paying job will be essential in order for them to save for their own child’s education fund.
To me, it feels like a giant Ponzi scheme. To my daughter, it feels as though she has the most negligent parents in the US. “What do you mean, there’s no fund?”
Both New Zealand and the US preach that degrees are good. Mostly, they are. But the downside of pulling more and more people into the university system is that those with the least resources to take on debt will, if they go to college at all, borrow the most. Those who do not go will have fewer employment choices and prospects, no matter how bright, capable and hard-working they might be. Jobs that once did not require a degree do now. As university participation increases, the colder it gets for those on the outside.
Even for those of us without Twitter, somehow there is usually no escaping knowing what US President Donald Trump thinks all the time. There is, therefore, no reason to doubt we would have heard from him in a crisis. Nevertheless, the new Emergency Alert System (EAS) is a text service that enables the President “to address the nation during a national emergency” via cellphones. Texts sent under the EAS are carried by every significant cellphone provider in the nation and cannot be blocked. The first EAS text was a test and advised that there was no emergency. Fake news, then.
It is hard to guess what kind of national emergency would require the President to communicate with every cellphone user in the US. This is a huge country. Even the cyclone that has devastated parts of North and South Carolina this month has had negligible effect on anyone outside those two states. Inevitably, a text will only refer you to somewhere else for more information. The EAS is a solution looking for a problem.
Alert systems are best known for their failures. One of the most recent was the incoming-missile alert in Hawaii. Unforgivably, it took more than half an hour before terrified residents and visitors were told that it was a false alarm. Last year, Trump entertained insomniacs on Twitter when, shortly after midnight on May 31, he tweeted, “Despite the constant negative press covfefe”. It seems that midsentence, he fell asleep. It was not until after 6am that the meaningless message was removed, though not before a new word had been coined. A lot could go wrong with the Emergency Alert System.
The first text alert was a test and advised that there was no emergency. Fake news, then.