Archive for May 2024

Of the students who graduated with a bachelor’s degree in the 2021–2022 school year, 49% graduated from public, four-year schools with an average federal debt burden of $20,700 and 52% graduated from private, nonprofit, four-year schools with an average burden of $22,200. The companies servicing those loans, which have seen dozens of lawsuits accusing them of coercing, harassing, and misleading borrowers, stacked the deck against student debtors even more. Exorbitant interest rates leave others making payments on a debt that just keeps expanding.

OSU Assistant Professor in the College of Social Work Dr. Smitha Rao said the research is meant to be a conversation starter about how older adults are faring, and a launching point for area agencies on aging to help determine who is most vulnerable.

Saskatchewan’s Ministry of Social Services says its mobile outreach team is doubling in size. A total of 20 social workers will now provide services in the community rather than from a government office.

While many people immediately picture young adults when thinking about the current addiction and overdose epidemic, this crisis is affecting all generations. In fact, more than 7 million older Americans struggle with substance use disorders. Opioid use disorder, in particular, has skyrocketed among Medicare beneficiaries, with opioid overdose death rates rising higher among people 65 and older than in any other age group.

More than a decade after her death and 34 years since she left Downing Street, Margaret Thatcher continues to haunt us. After Liz Truss’s cosplay as the Iron Lady, Rishi Sunak has drawn comparisons between “the grocer’s daughter and the pharmacist’s son”. In December last year, Keir Starmer admiringly said that Thatcher “set loose our natural entrepreneurialism”. All this suggests a very British mixture of muddle and masochism: her spirit, it seems, must be summoned so we can be magicked out of our current mess, even if so many of the UK’s crises began with what she did.