Articles I missed
Undermining the Pell Grants
The New York Times, November 25, 2004, EDITORIAL
Daunted by soaring costs, as many as a quarter of low-income students with grades and test scores that make them prime college material no longer even apply to college. This is bad news at a time when skilled jobs are moving abroad and a college diploma has become the minimum price of admission to the new economy. The Bush administration, however, could actually make this problem worse by cutting the federal Pell grant program, which was developed to encourage poor and working-class students to pursue higher education.
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Vermont's Country Stores Organize to Face Threats
By KATIE ZEZIMA, The New York Times, November 28, 2004
BRIDGEWATER CORNERS, Vt. - With its ample selection of Australian wines and shelves filled with DVD's and garlic-flavored pita chips, the country store in this tiny south-central Vermont town might appear to have come a long way since it opened in 1839.
But its creaky wood-plank floor, its wall of 19th-century mailboxes cater-cornered to a jar of Marshmallow Fluff and the proudly displayed town hunting ledger suggest that it has not really changed much.
Independent country stores like this one, the Bridgewater Corners Country Store, where customers are urged to sit outside at the wooden tables with a cup of coffee from a bottomless urn and where regulars run tabs, have long been a Vermont way of life. Now, threatened by the minimarts and large grocery chains that have driven some of them out of business in recent years, they have been banding together to help protect themselves.
Of the 100 independent country stores in the state, 55 have become members of the Vermont Alliance of Independent Country Stores. The organization, founded about two years ago, serves primarily as a support network, a sounding board and a marketing tool for owners. It promotes both the vitality and the history of the stores, limiting membership to those built before 1927, when the Winooski River flooded, decimating the state and killing 88 people.
( Read more )
The New York Times, November 25, 2004, EDITORIAL
Daunted by soaring costs, as many as a quarter of low-income students with grades and test scores that make them prime college material no longer even apply to college. This is bad news at a time when skilled jobs are moving abroad and a college diploma has become the minimum price of admission to the new economy. The Bush administration, however, could actually make this problem worse by cutting the federal Pell grant program, which was developed to encourage poor and working-class students to pursue higher education.
( Read more )
Vermont's Country Stores Organize to Face Threats
By KATIE ZEZIMA, The New York Times, November 28, 2004
BRIDGEWATER CORNERS, Vt. - With its ample selection of Australian wines and shelves filled with DVD's and garlic-flavored pita chips, the country store in this tiny south-central Vermont town might appear to have come a long way since it opened in 1839.
But its creaky wood-plank floor, its wall of 19th-century mailboxes cater-cornered to a jar of Marshmallow Fluff and the proudly displayed town hunting ledger suggest that it has not really changed much.
Independent country stores like this one, the Bridgewater Corners Country Store, where customers are urged to sit outside at the wooden tables with a cup of coffee from a bottomless urn and where regulars run tabs, have long been a Vermont way of life. Now, threatened by the minimarts and large grocery chains that have driven some of them out of business in recent years, they have been banding together to help protect themselves.
Of the 100 independent country stores in the state, 55 have become members of the Vermont Alliance of Independent Country Stores. The organization, founded about two years ago, serves primarily as a support network, a sounding board and a marketing tool for owners. It promotes both the vitality and the history of the stores, limiting membership to those built before 1927, when the Winooski River flooded, decimating the state and killing 88 people.
( Read more )