The World in Brief (1/19/06)

Private colleges dish out merit aid to offset high tuition

By Carol Biliczky, Knight… Private colleges dish out merit aid to offset high tuition

By Carol Biliczky, Knight Ridder Newspapers

Joy Bronson had her sights set on the College of Wooster, a private liberal arts school on the cusp of Amish country.

But the $30,000-some price tag was, well, pricey.

Then Wooster stepped forward with a reason to change her mind – 18,000 of them, in fact.

Like many students, the daughter of a minister had stumbled onto a way to dramatically lower the price she paid at a private college – merit aid, or scholarships.

“Essentially, it is a product of increasing competition,” said David Miller, director of financial aid at the College of Wooster. “The challenge is that the state schools have the advantage of taxpayer support. Private schools have to compete.”

While need-based loans or grants still are the greatest source of student aid, merit aid surged in the 1990s.

Kenneth E. Redd, director of research and policy analysis at the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, said merit aid grew 508 percent, from $1.2 billion in 1994 to $7.3 billion in 2004 at both public and private colleges.

While that grew, so did need-based loans, the traditional foundation of student aid – but at a much slower pace, 110 percent, from $18.6 billion in 1994 to $39.1 billion in 2004, Redd said.

The merit awards have become larger and more frequent, especially at private four-year colleges. In Ohio, private colleges typically cost $25,000 to $35,000 a year, as much as twice the cost of tax-supported education.

The awards may recognize the students’ day-to-day accomplishments and test scores. Or the college may use the awards to “shape” a class with a different profile – more students from outside the region or more minorities, for instance.

Abbas finds Arafat’s shoes tough to fill

By Dion Nissenbaum, Knight Ridder Newspapers

RAMALLAH, West Bank – Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, stuck in a job he reluctantly sought and facing a rising tide of criticism, is losing power, credibility and legitimacy after only a year in office.

Trying to succeed the iconic Yasser Arafat as Palestinian leader was an almost insurmountable challenge, and Israeli and American officials as well as millions of frustrated Palestinians are losing faith in a man they’d hoped would rejuvenate the economy, curb official corruption, crack down on renegade street gangs and revive negotiations with Israel on the creation of an independent Palestinian state.

Rafiq Husseini, Abbas’ chief of staff, conceded that 2005 had been a difficult and frustrating year for the president, who’s told associates that he won’t seek a second four-year term.

“He thinks that this one year in office has been the heaviest of his life, which has been very traumatic, very difficult,” Husseini said. “Three more years will be almost as difficult. Therefore, I don’t think any human being – super or not super – would be able to manage any more.”

While Abbas has faced serious challenges, Husseini said, he’s made slow progress by rooting out corrupt government officials, consolidating the diffuse Palestinian security forces that Arafat created and ensuring that violence didn’t derail the Jan. 25 elections.

In perhaps his biggest triumph, Abbas was able to quickly convince most of the hard-line militant groups, including Hamas, to agree to a de facto cease-fire with Israel that led to a 60 percent drop in the number of fatal attacks on Israelis last year.

But the difficult feat won him little goodwill from Sharon, who cut off talks with him last year even before Abbas was sworn in as president on Jan. 15, because of a deadly suicide bombing at the border between Israel and the Gaza Strip.

Although relations between Abbas and Sharon thawed, they never really warmed, and Sharon instead pressed ahead with his unilateral plan to shut down all 21 Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip.

While talks with Israel stalled, Abbas began to lose the goodwill of Palestinians, who had thought that their new president would bring them fresh opportunities.

Degree of fraud in Iraq election “very small,” commission finds

By Dogen Hannah, Knight Ridder Newspapers

BAGHDAD, Iraq – Iraq’s electoral commission said Monday that it threw out less than 1 percent of the ballots in last month’s election because of voting irregularities, an amount not expected to significantly change the outcome.

The announcement moves Iraq a step closer to announcing the final results of the Dec. 15 parliamentary vote, an event expected to trigger intense negotiations among the election’s big winners to form a governing coalition for the next four years.

The Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq received almost 2,000 complaints of fraud or other forms of misconduct in the election. Yet only 58 of those complaints had the potential to change the election’s outcome, according to the commission.

After examining those 58, the commission decided to annul 227 ballot boxes out of the nationwide total of 31,500, said Hussein Hendawi of the commission. The commission found various irregularities, including fake ballots and more ballots than registered voters.

Compared with Iraq’s first parliamentary election a year ago, the degree of fraud was “very, very small,” Hendawi said. Although he wouldn’t specify how the commission’s action would affect the election result, the percentage of annulled boxes is too small to significantly alter the outcome.

Preliminary results show that Iraq’s main Shiite political group, which allied with a Kurdish group to form the current government, again won the largest share of the vote. Sunni groups, which participated in Iraq’s fledgling electoral process for the first time, and secular Shiite groups lodged most of the complaints in the latest election.

Bureaucracy in South Africa leads to frustration, even taking hostages

By Laurie Goering, Chicago Tribune

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa – When 21-year-old Kabelo Thibedi picked up his new national identity document several years ago, he noticed the birth date was wrong.

He soon sent the little green book back for correction, but never saw it again. Over more than two years, he paid dozens of visits to four different offices of South Africa’s Home Affairs Department, searching for news of the missing document. Without it, he had to repeatedly turn down job offers. He couldn’t get into college. He couldn’t get a driver’s license or open a bank account.

Finally, told on his most recent visit that he’d have to continue to wait, the frustrated young Sowetan pulled out a toy gun and held a bureaucrat hostage for five hours until his corrected ID was delivered by police helicopter, a move that instantly transformed him into a national hero.

“I saw the ID. It was the right ID. I touched the ID,” he happily told a local newspaper reporter after surrendering to police.

Battles with bureaucracy are hardly unique to South Africa, as any American who has waited hours in line for a driver’s license can attest. But South Africa’s Home Affairs Department – which issues birth certificates, marriage certificates, identity cards and passports, and handles immigration and other crucial affairs – has won a spot of particular enmity in the hearts of South Africans.

On hearing of Thibedi’s arrest, one Cape Town woman offered to pay his legal fees, noting her daughter had been waiting nine months for her identity card. John Qwelane, a local newspaper columnist, called the Soweto man’s actions “perfectly understandable,” arguing that “the real villains of the Thibedi saga are the good-for-nothing bureaucrats at Home Affairs.”

“The government needs to take urgent and serious note of the unprecedented public sympathy being expressed” for Thibedi, warned an editorial in the Mercury, a Durban newspaper. “The sense of utter frustration that drove him to take such senseless action is shared by tens of thousands of South Africans who have had the misfortune to deal with the Home Affairs Department.”

The embattled department has a tough job. It is taking in 14,000 identity document applications a month but – thanks to understaffing – can manage to issue only 6,000, according to documents released by the government. The laws it is charged with enforcing are sometimes convoluted. Frequently criticized as corrupt and inefficient, its staff members face their own battles trying to sort out legions of fraudulent applicants from those deserving attention.