ith college enrollment growing, student debt has stretched to a record number of U.S. households – nearly 1 in 5 – with the biggest burdens falling on the young and poor.

The analysis by the Pew Research Center found that 22.4 million households, or 19 percent, had college debt in 2010. That is double the share in 1989, and up from 15 percent in 2007, just prior to the recession – representing the biggest three-year increase in student debt in more than two decades.

The increase was driven by higher tuition costs as well as rising college enrollment during the economic downturn. The biggest jumps occurred in households at the two extremes of the income distribution. More well-off families are digging deeper into their pockets to pay for costly private colleges, while lower-income people in search of higher-wage jobs are enrolling in community colleges, public universities and other schools as a way to boost their resumes.

Because of the sluggish economy, fewer college students than before are able to settle into full-time careers immediately upon graduation, contributing to a jump in debt among lower-income households as the young adults take on part-time jobs or attend graduate school, according to Pew.

As a share of […]

No Comments

WHAT if you constantly change the ingredients in your raw batter, but the baked cake is always lemon? It sounds like something from a surrealist film, but equivalent scenarios seem to play out all the time in the mathematics of the quantum world.

Nobel prizewinner Frank Wilczek and colleague Alfred Shapere say we can’t ignore the absurdity of the situation any longer. It’s time to get to the bottom of what is really going on, and in the process cement our understanding of the fundamental nature of the universe.

They are part of a broader call to arms against those who are content to use the maths behind quantum mechanics without having physical explanations for their more baffling results, a school of thought often dubbed ‘shut up and calculate’.

‘I don’t see why we should take quantum mechanics as sacrosanct,’ says Roger Penrose of the University of Oxford. ‘I think there’s going to be something else which replaces it.’

Einstein’s widely accepted theory of special relativity states that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. But the phenomenon of quantum entanglement seems to flout that speed limit by allowing a measurement of one particle to instantaneously change another, even when the two […]

No Comments

BEIJING — When Xiaobo Zhang got married in the early 1990s, he and his bride, like millions of other couples across China, were given a small room to live in by his danwei, or work unit. At the time a lecturer at Nankai University in Tianjin, Zhang’s room was utilitarian and unremarkable, virtually indistinguishable from the ones inhabited by his colleagues. In a word: average.

In the China of the 1990s, which was characterized by a pubescent limbo between the economic reforms of the 1980s and the last decade’s explosive growth, Zhang recalls that mostly everyone was average. People were neatly packed into work units, generally laboring under the same conditions, eating in the same canteens, and sleeping in the same blocks of industrial-looking housing provided by their employers. There was little disparity in salaries, and few cars and luxury handbags to spend those salaries on.

During these times, Zhang explained, occupants paid minimal rent for their work-unit housing — which was issued based on seniority, family size, and rank — and could essentially stay in it forever. There was no legal market for buying and selling property in China, even in rural areas without employer-provided housing, where families built their own […]

No Comments

In 2008, then-presidential candidate Barack Obama got himself into trouble by saying ‘bitter’ voters ‘cling to guns or religion’ in response to hard times. Obama later apologized and recanted the statement, but new research suggests he may not have been entirely wrong.

People do turn to spirituality after a bad day, according to a study published online Aug. 1 in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. And good news for spiritual folks, it works.

‘We find that having a really spiritual day, committing to a power higher than yourself, carefully considering a purpose larger than yourself, it ends up leading to a lot of well-being,’ said study researcher Todd Kashdan, a psychologist at George Mason University in Virginia. ‘We find profound levels of meaning in life, greater positive emotions, less negative emotions, higher self-esteem.’

Spirituality and happiness

A number of studies have found links between spirituality and happiness. A sense of spirituality, defined as the search for the sacred to differentiate it from organized religion, has even been linked to young women having more sex, perhaps because they feel a greater sense of interconnectedness and intimacy with others.

But most researchers have looked at the link between spirituality in a broad sense, with surveys […]

No Comments