Latest news with #Georgetown
Washington Post
a day ago
- Climate
- Washington Post
Umbrella shredded, canoe flipped: The Potomac wind gust no one saw coming
Out of nowhere, a violent gust tore through the Washington Canoe Club in Georgetown — shredding an anchored umbrella, hurling Adirondack chairs into the Potomac and flipping a canoe. Moments earlier, it had been a perfect Sunday in the low 80s with sunshine and gentle breezes. The whole scene, caught in dramatic surveillance footage, lasted barely 20 seconds but was powerful enough to leave damage in its wake. We estimate gusts may have topped 45 mph
Bloomberg
2 days ago
- Politics
- Bloomberg
Bloomberg Law: Federal Workers Can Promote Religion
Stephanie Barclay, a professor at Georgetown Law, discusses the Trump administration memo encouraging proselytizing in the federal workplace. Justin Henry, Bloomberg Law reporter, discusses the young lawyers who left lucrative jobs because of their principles. David Voreacos, Bloomberg legal reporter, discusses lawsuits over the Trump administration's maneuvers to keep Alina Habba as the top federal prosecutor in New Jersey. June Grasso hosts.
Hindustan Times
5 days ago
- Business
- Hindustan Times
It's a Tough Job Market for New College Grads. Is an Advanced Degree Worth It?
The current job market is making a good case for recent college graduates to consider going to graduate school. But is it really worth it? Uncertainty around the potential impact of higher U.S. tariffs is tamping down hiring. And even before tariff stress hit the job market, new college grads faced headwinds. The unemployment rate for recent graduates (those ages 22 to 27) was 4.8% in May, the latest data available for that age group, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. That's up from 4.3% in May 2023. The overall unemployment rate, meanwhile, rose to 4% from 3.5% during the same period. (The overall employment rate stands at 4.2% for July.) Add to that the growing debate over whether artificial intelligence might eat a chunk of entry-level, white-collar jobs, and tacking on an advanced degree seems like a sound competitive strategy. The Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce projects that the number of jobs requiring graduate degrees will be 14% higher in 2031 than it was in 2021. The question is: Will the potential for improved employment prospects and higher long-term earnings outweigh the cost of obtaining a graduate degree, especially if you have to take on debt to pay for it? The answer depends on what specific degree you are pursuing—and how much of a salary boost you can expect from it—and how much of a burden your total debt load would be. 'It is totally valid to go to grad school when the job market is not great, because we know that it does make a difference when you enter the labor force,' says Artem Gulish, senior federal policy adviser at Georgetown's education and the workforce center. 'But you still have to exercise due diligence that it is going to be beneficial and not just a way to stay out of the labor market.' An earnings premium, but… There is an alluring earnings premium that typically comes with a graduate degree—18% on average for someone with a master's degree compared with someone with just a bachelor's degree, according to the Georgetown center, and more than 60% for medical, law and doctoral degrees. The problem is the earnings premium has pretty much stayed around 18% over the past 30 years, while median borrowing for graduate school has increased by nearly 50% (in inflation-adjusted 2022 dollars) between 2000 and 2020 alone, according to the Georgetown center. That means if you intend to take out loans to pay for grad school, more of any additional earnings are likely to be eaten up by debt repayments. So where should students draw the line on borrowing? The Georgetown center recommends that student-loan repayments should be no more than 10% of discretionary income, to make it possible for borrowers to juggle debt repayment with current living costs and savings goals. But that may be a tough mark to hit. While only a minority of graduate programs report detailed earnings and debt information to the federal College Scorecard database, the Georgetown center found that among those programs that did report, 41% of master's-degree programs and 67% of professional-degree programs (doctor, dentist, lawyer) sent graduates out into the job market with repayment burdens above the 10% benchmark. Students are feeling the pain. In a 2023 survey of 1,000 graduate students by the Third Way think tank, nearly half of borrowers said their final borrowing tab was more than they expected going in, and more than half said it was going to take more time to repay those loans than they expected. On the earnings side, nearly 75% of respondents said the prospect of earning more was a major motivation for going to graduate school. But among those who had graduated, less than half felt their school did a good job in helping them toward that goal. Changes to federal loans Another factor to consider is the changes to the federal college-loan system under the tax and spending bill recently signed into law by President Trump. The new rules, which take effect July 1, 2026, limit the amount students can borrow from the government for graduate school ($100,000 for master's degrees and $200,000 for professional degrees), eliminating the popular Grad Plus program that had allowed loans for the full cost of a graduate degree. They also impose a combined lifetime limit for all federal undergraduate, graduate and professional loans, and cap the amount parents can borrow for their children. And the sole income-driven repayment plan is less generous than prior options. Mark Kantrowitz, an expert on student financing, says the new borrowing limits mean many prospective doctors, dentists and lawyers may need private loans to help pay for their degrees. Some master's-degree students who attend high-cost programs also may need to borrow more than they can from the government. Private loans require either a strong credit score or a cosigner, and their repayment terms generally are far stricter. They also often have higher interest rates. And, says Ann Garcia, a certified financial planner in Portland, Ore., the new limits on federal graduate loans mean less competition for private lenders, which could drive up the interest rates on many private loans. The debt you already have Some young adults also don't fully take into account the cost of their existing undergraduate debt when thinking about graduate school. Payments on federal undergraduate loans generally can be deferred while the borrower is in graduate school at least half time, but if the undergrad loan was unsubsidized, interest continues to build. Some private lenders offer this type of deferment, but interest usually also continues to build in those cases. 'You left undergrad with $27,000' in student loans, Garcia says, 'and in grad school that same debt grows to $41,000 because interest accrues, and that's on top of what you're borrowing for grad school.' Kantrowitz suggests limiting total borrowing (undergraduate and graduate) to no more than what you can expect to earn your first year working. To get an idea of what that will be, you can search employment sites including and which provide general salary ranges. You also can check if a graduate program reports median earnings and debt for graduates to the federal College Scorecard database. If you are pursuing an advanced degree that you expect to qualify for public-service loan forgiveness, borrowing more may be OK, Kantrowitz says. But he cautions that an executive order signed this past March aims to limit the types of businesses and organizations whose employees would qualify for public-service loan forgiveness. The Education Department is working out specific rules. New Orleans certified financial planner Ryan Frailich says a common mistake he sees with clients who took on a burdensome amount of debt is that they tended to 'make the grad decision first and how to pay for it later, as though they are two separate decisions.' He suggests moving the repayment question into the decision process. 'It's not a 'Should I go to grad school' question,' he says. 'It's a 'Should I go to this grad school if I have to repay X dollars.' ' Carla Fried is a writer in Tenerife, Spain. She can be reached at reports@
Mint
5 days ago
- Business
- Mint
It's a tough job market for new college grads. Is an advanced degree worth it?
The current job market is making a good case for recent college graduates to consider going to graduate school. But is it really worth it? Uncertainty around the potential impact of higher U.S. tariffs is tamping down hiring. And even before tariff stress hit the job market, new college grads faced headwinds. The unemployment rate for recent graduates (those ages 22 to 27) was 4.8% in May, the latest data available for that age group, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. That's up from 4.3% in May 2023. The overall unemployment rate, meanwhile, rose to 4% from 3.5% during the same period. (The overall employment rate stands at 4.2% for July.) Add to that the growing debate over whether artificial intelligence might eat a chunk of entry-level, white-collar jobs, and tacking on an advanced degree seems like a sound competitive strategy. The Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce projects that the number of jobs requiring graduate degrees will be 14% higher in 2031 than it was in 2021. The question is: Will the potential for improved employment prospects and higher long-term earnings outweigh the cost of obtaining a graduate degree, especially if you have to take on debt to pay for it? The answer depends on what specific degree you are pursuing—and how much of a salary boost you can expect from it—and how much of a burden your total debt load would be. 'It is totally valid to go to grad school when the job market is not great, because we know that it does make a difference when you enter the labor force," says Artem Gulish, senior federal policy adviser at Georgetown's education and the workforce center. 'But you still have to exercise due diligence that it is going to be beneficial and not just a way to stay out of the labor market." There is an alluring earnings premium that typically comes with a graduate degree—18% on average for someone with a master's degree compared with someone with just a bachelor's degree, according to the Georgetown center, and more than 60% for medical, law and doctoral degrees. The problem is the earnings premium has pretty much stayed around 18% over the past 30 years, while median borrowing for graduate school has increased by nearly 50% (in inflation-adjusted 2022 dollars) between 2000 and 2020 alone, according to the Georgetown center. That means if you intend to take out loans to pay for grad school, more of any additional earnings are likely to be eaten up by debt repayments. So where should students draw the line on borrowing? The Georgetown center recommends that student-loan repayments should be no more than 10% of discretionary income, to make it possible for borrowers to juggle debt repayment with current living costs and savings goals. But that may be a tough mark to hit. While only a minority of graduate programs report detailed earnings and debt information to the federal College Scorecard database, the Georgetown center found that among those programs that did report, 41% of master's-degree programs and 67% of professional-degree programs (doctor, dentist, lawyer) sent graduates out into the job market with repayment burdens above the 10% benchmark. Students are feeling the pain. In a 2023 survey of 1,000 graduate students by the Third Way think tank, nearly half of borrowers said their final borrowing tab was more than they expected going in, and more than half said it was going to take more time to repay those loans than they expected. On the earnings side, nearly 75% of respondents said the prospect of earning more was a major motivation for going to graduate school. But among those who had graduated, less than half felt their school did a good job in helping them toward that goal. Another factor to consider is the changes to the federal college-loan system under the tax and spending bill recently signed into law by President Trump. The new rules, which take effect July 1, 2026, limit the amount students can borrow from the government for graduate school ($100,000 for master's degrees and $200,000 for professional degrees), eliminating the popular Grad Plus program that had allowed loans for the full cost of a graduate degree. They also impose a combined lifetime limit for all federal undergraduate, graduate and professional loans, and cap the amount parents can borrow for their children. And the sole income-driven repayment plan is less generous than prior options. Mark Kantrowitz, an expert on student financing, says the new borrowing limits mean many prospective doctors, dentists and lawyers may need private loans to help pay for their degrees. Some master's-degree students who attend high-cost programs also may need to borrow more than they can from the government. Private loans require either a strong credit score or a cosigner, and their repayment terms generally are far stricter. They also often have higher interest rates. And, says Ann Garcia, a certified financial planner in Portland, Ore., the new limits on federal graduate loans mean less competition for private lenders, which could drive up the interest rates on many private loans. Some young adults also don't fully take into account the cost of their existing undergraduate debt when thinking about graduate school. Payments on federal undergraduate loans generally can be deferred while the borrower is in graduate school at least half time, but if the undergrad loan was unsubsidized, interest continues to build. Some private lenders offer this type of deferment, but interest usually also continues to build in those cases. 'You left undergrad with $27,000" in student loans, Garcia says, 'and in grad school that same debt grows to $41,000 because interest accrues, and that's on top of what you're borrowing for grad school." Kantrowitz suggests limiting total borrowing (undergraduate and graduate) to no more than what you can expect to earn your first year working. To get an idea of what that will be, you can search employment sites including and which provide general salary ranges. You also can check if a graduate program reports median earnings and debt for graduates to the federal College Scorecard database. If you are pursuing an advanced degree that you expect to qualify for public-service loan forgiveness, borrowing more may be OK, Kantrowitz says. But he cautions that an executive order signed this past March aims to limit the types of businesses and organizations whose employees would qualify for public-service loan forgiveness. The Education Department is working out specific rules. New Orleans certified financial planner Ryan Frailich says a common mistake he sees with clients who took on a burdensome amount of debt is that they tended to 'make the grad decision first and how to pay for it later, as though they are two separate decisions." He suggests moving the repayment question into the decision process. 'It's not a 'Should I go to grad school' question," he says. 'It's a 'Should I go to this grad school if I have to repay X dollars.' " Carla Fried is a writer in Tenerife, Spain. She can be reached at reports@
Washington Post
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
A dirtbag tour of D.C. with memoirist Rax King
Rax King is not going to steal anything from the Georgetown Brandy Melville. Not today, anyway. But she's eyeing those lace camisoles. 'You, like, pretend to be looking at it, and then you just crumple it in your hand,' she says. The M Street store, she notes, is staffed by a bunch of bored-looking teenagers. 'But you gotta not look around. That is key.' 'Shoplifting from Brandy Melville' is one of the chapters in 'Sloppy,' King's latest book of irreverent personal essays about her history of indulging in bad behavior and vices including cocaine, petty theft and dishonesty. She's sober now, but she isn't about to let that get in the way of a good time. So we're having, in King's words, a 'dirtbag' tour of D.C., her hometown — a journey through highfalutin Georgetown to visit all the places that made King the sloppy broad she is today. 'Are you gonna go shmy around?' That's what King's father would ask her whenever he used to drop her off in Georgetown as a teenager. Shmying — 'Yiddish for, like, wander aimlessly,' she says — is something that King has been doing all her life, professionally, spiritually, existentially. There, near the Key Bridge, is the first place she ever purchased alcohol. Over there, by the canal, is where she used to meet up with her dad for his office smoke breaks. And our next stop is up the hill toward Good Guys, the Wisconsin Avenue strip club — not the same one where she used to work as a dancer, but it will do. 'I don't really have a lot of shame around the sorts of things that I think we are taught to feel shame around,' she says. 'It's not embarrassing to me, really, to talk about times I was blackout drunk, times I hooked up with somebody unsuitable.' Lucky for us. We get to read about it. To misquote Tolkein: Not all who shmy are lost. Maybe they're just collecting material. King, 33, and I have several things in common — careers as writers, a deep love for and long residence in D.C., an affection for Yiddish. We're even wearing a version of the same outfit: black maxi dress with chunky shoes. But I'm like a cheugy, goody-two-shoes, uncool version of her, and I'm losing this game of 'Never Have I Ever,' big time. I have no tattoos. I have never shoplifted or done hard drugs. I've also never been to a strip club. That's about to change. King warns me that the ATMs at the club will charge a fee, so we stop at a bank nearby with machines that somehow, miraculously, dispense singles. The touch screen asks me how many I want. 'The etiquette is you should tip a dollar per dancer per song,' says King, advising me to take out $75. 'It adds up kind of quickly.' Because the machine does not allow you to type in the amount of each bill you want, I begin hitting the plus sign 75 times. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. 'I'll show you how to fold your money' in the club, says King, offering up a Strip Club 101 lesson — the seats right beneath the three stages, called the 'tip rail,' are seats where 'you have to be tipping the whole time,' she says, though not every customer respected the etiquette. BeepBeepBeepBeepBeep. Some guys, she says, 'would do anything to get out of tipping. I had a guy open a newspaper' — The Washington Post, probably, she notes — 'in front of his face once when I came around.' Beep. Beep. Beep. The machine dispenses a pleasingly fat wad of cash. No, it's not her real name. The name 'Rax' sounds like one of the syllables in her given name, and King just sounded good with it, she says. But unlike many authors who use a pen name to maintain a separation between their writerly persona and their real life, Rax King is just who she was always meant to be. 'I don't even think of it as my real name anymore,' she says of her given name, which she has asked The Post not to include here. 'Even my mom calls me Rax.' Though she now lives in Brooklyn with her husband and nearly toothless Pekingese, King can recite her D.C. bona fides: She went to the Field School. She used to go to punk shows at Fort Reno and Mt. Pleasant group houses. King has two D.C. flag tattoos — one between her shoulder blades and another on her upper arm. Her book name-drops old-school D.C. institutions, including boutiques Annie Creamcheese and Commander Salamander. King went to college at St. John's, the liberal arts college in Annapolis, Maryland, known for its Great Books curriculum. Though she loved developing a deep well of literary references, she didn't fit in on campus — 'I found myself at odds with the culture of the place a lot' — and struggled to complete her degree, in part because she was in an abusive marriage, the subject of several of her essays, including 'Love, Peace, and Taco Grease,' her James Beard-nominated essay about how watching Guy Fieri's 'Diners, Drive-ins and Dives' gave her courage to escape her abuser. That essay became a chapter in her first book, 'Tacky,' which examined the pleasures of lowbrow taste — of loving the band Creed, 'The Jersey Shore' and the Cheesecake Factory, and not even in a detached, ironic, guilty pleasure sort of way. She wrote about getting drunk, doing drugs and sleeping around. And then she got sober. It's 4 p.m. on a Monday, which ranks among the most depressing times to visit a strip club. After our eyes adjust to the darkness, it's clear that there are only two other patrons there. Wimbledon is playing on the televisions, and a stripper is gyrating on the stage. King orders a Shirley Temple — 'It's kind of my sobriety drink' — counting seven maraschino cherries in her glass. She tells the bartender that she used to dance but has retired. 'Once a midnight ballerina, always a midnight ballerina,' says our bartender, chirpy in a corset and fishnets. King was not a very good dancer, she writes in the 'Sloppy' essay 'Temple of Feminine Perfection.' She auditioned to become a dancer at a D.C. club — one that has since closed and come under new ownership — for two men who 'never looked any less bored,' only to be told to slow down instead of doing spastic choreography 'like I was leading a Jazzercise class,' and 'sweating and panting with exhaustion before the song even hit its halfway mark.' 'I quickly adopted the same thing as many of my co-workers: just go up, move as little as possible, as little effort as possible,' she says now, watching the girls of Good Guys twirl languidly on the pole. Oh, and the way to fold the bills is longitudinally. 'My theory is that the vertical way, they don't slide out' of a garter belt, King says. Somewhere in Washington, someone orders a burger from the strip club via delivery. We know this because a confused driver walks into the club to procure his customer's order. The staff makes him wait outside. No free shows. Ella, a skinny dancer wearing a crop top that says 'Can U Not' and not much else, comes over. 'Are y'all together?' she asks us. 'Y'all look good together … I'mma come sit with you. I love your tattoo,' she says to King about her collarbone ink, which says 'I can't go on, I'll go on,' from Samuel Beckett. Before Ella is called up to dance, she chats with us about her dog (150 pounds), how she does her lashes ('Get the clusters and put them on underneath'), her ex-boyfriend (a cheater!) and her poetry. 'How did you get out of the stripping? It's addicting, right?' Ella asks, and King agrees — it's how she paid her student loans. But it was stripping that, eventually, rejected her: 'I'd moved to a new place and I auditioned at one club. They didn't want me. I had a shaved head at the time and I think they didn't like it. And then I just kind of gave up.' Ella notices that I'm wearing a wedding ring. 'What's your husband look like?' she asks me. 'If I ever see him in here, I'll kill him.' A girl's girl. Ella! We love her, and it seems like she returns our affection, but King reminds me that it's her job to make every single person feel like she is excited to see them. It was the part of the job she loathed. 'I hated talking to customers,' King says. 'I loved to get off stage and hide.' 'You're the best,' King tells Ella, when we're ready to depart. 'Stop!' Ella says. 'I'm going to cry, baby, I cry every day.' 'Me too!' King says. 'For no reason sometimes.' 'You know what's crazy?' Ella says. 'I've told these girls I haven't cried in years, and I cry every day. I cry, I really cry.' 'Every day there's something to cry about,' King says. It may be true that cutting drugs and alcohol out of one's life helps one become a better person who feels and loves more deeply. That cliché exists for a reason. But it's still a cliché. In 'Sloppy,' King subverts it by being the same person she always was. She still tells lies, and sort of hates having to interact with people. She finds sobriety deeply boring, a feeling she constantly struggles to get past. She still gets sticky fingers: 'The last time I went into a Brandy Melville with an intent to steal was, like, six months ago.' 'She is capable of being so emotionally honest and forthright and raw, and still so incredibly funny. And it is hard to do that in a way that doesn't feel hokey,' says her friend Calvin Kasulke, author of 'Several People are Typing.' 'Talking about recovery and not sounding incredibly trite is incredibly difficult.' 'While your life is supposedly improving, every minute of it is dilating,' she writes in the book's final essay, a meditation on addiction inspired by 'The Wolf of Wall Street.' 'It's not that you never feel good; it's that the good feelings now burble up so slowly to the surface of your bog, leaving you mired in monotony the rest of the time.' She quotes Jordan Belfort, from the film: 'It's so boring I want to kill myself.' The writing isn't boring, though. 'Her sense of humor and her sense of righteousness and desire to engage with the world is all still there and super vibrant,' says comic Josh Gondelman, a former writer for 'Last Week Tonight with John Oliver' and a friend. The same goes for all of the other character-building moments that King revisits for the sake of the book: Growing up the child of alcoholics ('My family are drunks the way other families are Teamsters or actors'). Her smoker father ('A filthy, smelly, weak hero') and his battle with chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder. Her time spent in a psychiatric hospital after a suicide attempt. (Making friends there was 'like speed dating in Jonestown, or doing a fun icebreaker exercise with the hostages during a bank robbery.') 'I still catch myself with these, like, low-life instances and tendencies for no reason at all. There's an essay in that book about lying, and to this day, my husband will ask me, 'What'd you do today?' And there's this little voice in my head, like, lie about it, when I haven't done anything bad, just for sport,' she says. 'Even when you get rid of the substance, the behavior doesn't go away on its own.' 'Sloppy' is, in part, about what it's like to be a screwup in a city of try-hards. It's just as much of a D.C. story as any political memoir, even though King's only interactions with D.C.'s political class have been when they were her customers. 'For all that my book is an unusual piece of D.C. lore,' King says, 'it's not an unusual experience.' After all: People grow up here, and make art, and do drugs, and get in trouble, and work in strip clubs, and fumble around between jobs. The shoplifters, the dirtbags, the midnight ballerinas: It's their city too. They shmy around until they figure out who they are. Or maybe they never do.
