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A Mississippi student is suing her high school after a cheerleading coach demanded her Facebook password, then used it to access and disseminate private email.
According to the lawsuit the coach, Tommie Hill, told the Pearl High School cheerleading squad that they would all have to give her their Facebook passwords. Several squad members responded by deleting their accounts from their cell phones, but sophomore Mandi Jackson complied with the request.
The suit claims that Hill accessed Jackson’s account later that day, and forwarded Jackson’s private Facebook messages to at least four other school officials. The officials then “publicly reprimanded … and humiliated” Jackson, suspended her from cheerleader training, and banned her from other school events.
Jackson’s attorney, Rita Nahlik Silin, told the Student Press Law Center that Hill’s actions were “a blatant violation of her right to privacy, her right to free speech, her right to free association and her right to due process. It’s egregious to me,” she said, “that a 14-year-old girl is essentially told you can’t speak your mind, can’t publish anything, can’t be honest or have an open discussion with someone without someone else essentially eavesdropping.”
As Lee Baker of the Citizen Media Law Project notes, this incident reflects a not-uncommon belief on the part of authority figures that “they have the right to invade others’ privacy and eavesdrop on private or semi-private conversations merely because these conversations take place online.” In Baker’s words, “asking for a student’s Facebook password in order to read private messages is akin to asking the student’s permission to install a wiretap on his or her phone.”
A new report on student loan debt finds the proportion of community college students saddled with debt at graduation has skyrocketed in the last five years.
The report, a College Board analysis of the U.S. Education Department’s National Postsecondary Student Aid Study, found that nearly half of 2007-08 community college graduates took out education loans to pay for school, up from thirty-seven percent in 2003-04. Of those students who did take out loans, half accumulated debts of more than $10,000.
Borrowing rose from 30% to 38% of graduates of public community colleges, and from 90% to 98% of graduates of for-profit two-year schools. The debt burden among those taking out loans was higher at the private two-years, too — 43% had debts of more than $20,000, compared to just 13% of public community college grads.
All told, 59% of college graduates left school with at least some educational debt in 2007-08, up from 55% just four years earlier. Students’ median debt rose from $13,663 to $15,123 in the same period, an 11% rise.
These figures exclude credit card debt and loans from friends and family, by the way, so the true numbers are even higher.
Update: As the Chronicle of Higher Education notes, debt burdens for four-year college grads vary dramatically by college type too. They point out that “10 percent of students at four-year public institutions had $40,000 or more in loans, while 22 percent of graduates of private four-year institutions and 25 percent of students graduating from for-profit four-year institutions had that level of debt.”
Facebook Ain’t Cool With The Kids No More.
That’s the headline on a post at CrunchGear this morning, claiming that “social networks simply aren’t cool anymore among the 15-to-24-year-old crowd.” That post was based on an article in this morning’s Guardian, a British newspaper, titled “It’s SO Over: Cool Cyberkids Abandon Social Networking Sites.”
So is it true? Are young people abandoning social networking sites in droves? Have the youth of today written off Facebook as uncool?
Well, no.
The CrunchGear and Guardian pieces were both based on a report from the UK media regulatory agency Ofcom. Specifically, they were based on a single piece of survey data from page 289 of that report.
According to Ofcom, social networking use by British youth aged 15 to 24 held steady at 50% from the third quarter of 2008 to the first quarter of 2009, after dropping from a high of 55% in the first quarter of 2008.
That’s it. That’s the whole story. A five point drop in social networking use a year ago among British youth.
Note that there’s nothing here about which young people are dropping out of social networking, or why, or how sure the pollsters are that they actually are. Nothing about the poll’s margin of error, which I wasn’t able to find in the report. And nothing, of course, about “coolness.”
And here’s one other thing. The Guardian article says “part of the reason” that “the kids don’t like social networking anymore … appears” to be “that older users do.” The US trade magazine Billboard dropped the hedge, saying that “adults’ love of social networking sites is driving away teens.” But there’s nothing — literally nothing — in the original report to suggest this. The report said social networking use in Britain dropped a little among 15-to-24s, and that went up a little among older people, but that’s it. There’s no support in the data for any sort of cause-and-effect relationship.
Next up: Mashable’s post on “Why Teens Don’t Tweet.”
I haven’t posted much about the Russell Athletic story this last while, but I got an email yesterday from United Students Against Sweatshops that demonstrates that their work has really been moving forward.
When I posted last, in early May, USAS had won fifty-seven campus disaffiliations from Russell over the course of the spring semester in protest of the apparel company’s labor policies in Honduras, specifically its decision to close a newly-unionized factory Jerzees de Honduras factory in the wake of its unionization.
Since then, nearly thirty more campuses have joined the Russell boycott, bringing the total to eighty-four. New recruits to the cause include merchandising bigwigs the University of Arizona, Brown, Louisville, the University of Florida, and North Carolina State. USAS is now calling this “the largest collegiate boycott of an apparel company in history.”
You can follow the story as it develops at USAS’s Boycott Russell Athletic blog, which I’ve added to our blogroll today.
The Washington DC Council is considering a set of reforms to the district’s elections that would have the effect of encouraging youth voter turnout — and allowing some currently ineligible teens to vote in primary elections.
Among other things, the Omnibus Election Reform Act of 2009 would:
- Allow 16-year-olds to “pre-register” to vote.
- Grant the vote in primary elections to 17-year-olds who would turn 18 by the time of the general election.
- Establish same-day voter registration, eliminating a deadline that’s currently a month in advance of election day.
Each of these reforms is designed to get young people (and, in the case of the third, not-young people too) engaged with electoral politics. The evidence shows clearly that if you register, you’re likely to vote, and that if you vote once, you’re likely to vote again.
Eliminating barriers to voting is the biggest step we can take toward higher turnout, and all of these proposals are worthy of adoption in DC and throughout the nation.
studentactivism.net 
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