Money and education
Money and education
Money and the quality of education are today's hot issues, with some people saying that quality does not come free or cheap.
Others say the quality of a product does not always depend on the amount of money one has to fork out for it.
In fact, a number of leading state universities, especially the University of Indonesia (UI) and the Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB), have decided to provide a special channel for the admission of students who could afford to pay higher tuition fees.
This means that it does not matter whether or not a student meets the qualifications required by the state universities. So long as he or she has the money to pay the fees, he or she will have a place in the state universities.
The university is a place for the development of human resources, a place where quality people are developed.
Thus, there is no excuse for any university to mortgage its standards for money.
The pragmatic reason that the special channel is only for financially able students, is by no means acceptable.
As far as quality is concerned, there should be no distinction between rich and poor students, because if leading state universities follow the trend to mortgage their standards for money, it would be the end of the noble objective of education itself.
In this light, the special channel can be called a misleading path.
Nobody wants institutes of higher learning, such as UI, ITB, the Bogor Institute of Agriculture (IPB) and Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta, to compromise the high quality of education in the country. -- Media Indonesia, Jakarta
; ANPAk..r.. Otherop-mosquito Mosquito Time JP/6/ Mosquito Time
Humans -- especially metropolitan humans -- like to think of themselves as living at the top of the food chain. But this is the season when it becomes clear that we're really at the top of the menu. It's mosquito time again. And while the food available to mosquitoes -- us -- hasn't expanded much in the past year, their habitat certainly has, thanks to a June of record rainfall. Every outdoor receptacle, natural or unnatural, that could possibly contain water now actually does. Anything that holds water for the few days needed to incubate mosquito eggs is doing so. The Northeast is a giant mosquito nursery. All those billions and billions of larvae, hanging head down in still water, are just beginning to metamorphose into pupae and adults. We, in turn, are just beginning to itch.
The ancestral fears of yellow fever and malaria have faded away, thanks to vigilant mosquito control. They've been replaced by fears of West Nile virus, spread by mosquitoes that bite birds, and of Eastern equine encephalitis. These diseases remind us that humans aren't the only creatures mosquitoes find delectable. Out in the country, most people fear ticks more than they fear mosquitoes and not only because of the threat of Lyme disease. A tick seems somehow like an extremely slow mosquito. Most of us can't actually see a female mosquito distend herself as she draws in our blood, but a tick makes it plainly visible. We can only be thankful that ticks don't fly. The reason they don't is obvious. That evolutionary niche is already full of mosquitoes. How full, only the summer will tell. -- The New York Times