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A fight is cooking on Capitol Hill over budget cuts, proposed by the Justice Department, that will affect local police departments. The Washington Post summarizes the issue:

According to the police group, the most controversial proposals include a $376 million reduction in the popular Community Oriented Policing Services program and the elimination of the $416 million Justice Assistance Grant program. The administration is also proposing to eliminate the $400 million Law Enforcement Terrorism Prevention Program at the Department of Homeland Security.

Overall, the Justice Department's budget would decrease slightly in 2007, to about $20 billion, and would include significant increases for the FBI, the U.S. Marshals Service and U.S. attorneys offices.

The International Association of Chiefs of Police are all over this one -- lobbying Congress and talking to whomever will listen.

Officer.com explains the reasons behind the budget proposal, including how the administration plans to increase funding for fighting terrorism, even while cutting some local funds. 

Students' Debt Prevents Them From Becoming Teachers

In July, the federal student loan rate will rise to the highest level it has been since 2001. That is bad news for the millions of students who are struggling under a mountain of debt. For some, the debt is so large that it factors largely into the kind of work students choose to do after school.

Newsday reports:

Simply put, public service-minded grads faced with tens of thousands of dollars in debt are being forced into the higher-paying private sector, the Public Interest Research Group in Washington D.C. found.

"Burdensome debt likely deters skilled and dedicated college graduates from entering and staying in important careers [such as] educating our nation's children," the report concluded.

Aspiring social workers, with typically lower salaries than teachers, were also burdened with too much student-loan debt.

Nationwide, 23 percent of public college and 38 percent of private college graduates had "unmanageable" debt -- that is, student-loan payments that "hinder their ability to pay for basic necessities." 

USA Today reports:

And the cost of that debt is about to rise. On July 1, the rate on new federally guaranteed student loans will hit a fixed 6.8 percent, the highest rate since 2001. It comes as the average graduate owes $19,000. Many undergrads, though, have debt exceeding $40,000.

 

Those higher payments carry huge implications for this generation of college graduates. The weight of debt is forcing many to put off saving for retirement, getting married, buying homes and putting aside money for their own children's educations. 

The story continues:

The average debt for a college graduate has soared 50 percent in the past decade, after inflation, according to the Project on Student Debt, a non-profit advocacy group. Just as record-low mortgage rates have eased the impact of soaring home prices, low student-loan rates have let borrowers cut their payments, softening the impact of rising debt.

"Low interest rates have served as a sort of amnesty for graduates with debt," says Robert Shireman, founder of the Project on Student Debt. "We haven't seen what the real impact is of much higher levels of borrowing."

Now, with interest rates rising, that amnesty is about to end. The 6.8 percent fixed rate for Stafford loans, the most popular student loan, will replace a variable rate that used to be adjusted every July 1, based on Treasury bills. Under the old system, borrowers could consolidate their loans when rates were low. And they could lock in that low rate for the life of their loans.

Today, students who don't want to borrow at higher rates have few other options. Twenty-five years ago, students who wanted to avoid debt could use money from part-time and summer jobs to help pay for college. But since then, college tuition has risen at twice the rate of consumer prices. Tuition has soared much faster than pay has for the kinds of low-wage jobs that students tend to hold.

In 1981, a student could work full time all summer at minimum wage and earn about two-thirds of annual college costs, according to an analysis by Heather Boushey, economist for the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Today, a student earning minimum wage would have to work full time for a year to afford one year of education at a four-year public university -- and that assumes she saves every penny, Boushey concluded.

Parents, meantime, face competing demands for their money. They're trying to save for retirement just as their kids are starting college. Financial planners have long urged people not to delay retirement saving to pay for college. The idea was that students could borrow for college but that parents can't borrow for retirement.

Additional stories:

• ISU Students Average $29,480 in Debt (The Des Moines Register -- March 30, 2006)
  

• Burden of Student Loans Increases, Even for Affluent (Gannett News Service -- March 24, 2006)
  

• Sticker Shock (Inside Higher Ed -- March 21, 2006)
  

• In Debt, Forever (Chicago Tribune -- March 5, 2006)
  

Eye Fungus in Contact-Lens Wearers

I am seeing this story much more often around the country since I last reported it on Al's Morning Meeting. It is a mysterious fungus showing up in a small -- but possibly spreading -- number of soft-contact wearers.

Professional Patients Score Meds

The Modesto (Calif.) Bee reports a story about so-called "professional patients," who scam hospital ERs for pain medication.