EconAir

UPDATE. In the 15 years since I wrote this, college tuition continues to rise faster than the overall price index, admin costs continue to go up, and full-time faculty number are going down. But the most outrageous change is that as state and federal aid goes down, students are assuming much of the cost of college in the form of student loans. Many were from private colleges that were frauds; some have been closed down. Total student debt is around $1.8 trillion, more than credit card debt. About an average of $40,000 per borrower. A high percent are in arrears or default. And, unlike credit card debt, student debt does not disappear in a personal bankruptcy. Students learn a new,  scary lesson - about compound interest.  A report published on August 16, 2010, using the largest database of information on higher education (IPEDS), has concluded that a major reason for the rapid increase in the cost of higher education has been the increase in the number and cost of administrati...

    Dr. Andrea Dragon   Seaweed Saves England                    Each of the  hundreds of  millions of shells Great Britain fired from thousands of field guns, howitzers and mortars during World War I contained two explosives: cordite, a kind of nitrocellulose (what Americans call smokeless powder) to propel the shell out of the artillery piece and send it flying toward the target, and TNT, the shell's high explosive payload to blow up the target on impact.   In the early months of the war, the demand for cordite far exceeded the manufacturing capacity of Great Britain's explosives factories.  To meet production demands, in October, 1914, the British Army contacted representatives from DuPont and its 1912 spinoff Hercules, who were the leaders of New Jersey's established explosives industry, and signed agreements with them to produce nitrocellulose and cordite, load it and TNT into shells, and...

Written by Andrea Dragon, Ph.D. Dr. Dragon investigates and writes about New Jersey's industrial history. Professor Dragon will be teaching a continuing education course this fall on "New Jersey's Explosives History" at Rutgers - New Brunswick. 1914:  World War I Breaks Out   Russia started to modernize its army in 1913, with substantial French financial and weapons support. The beginning of a five-year plan, one of the main goals was to expand artillery to catch up with Germany. But war broke out.    After the first four months of the war, all combatants realized they were in for a long war with deadly modern weapons. Every country’s strategy of a quick victory through offensive warfare failed. Germany did not defeat France and England in the west, and the Russian offensive against Germany in the east ended in disaster. The result was four years of trench warfare in the west and three years of large-scale but inconclusive warfare in the east. Russia stayed in t...

Written by Andrea Dragon, Ph.D. Dr. Dragon investigates and writes about New Jersey's industrial history. Professor Dragon will be teaching a continuing education course on "New Jersey's Explosive History" at Rutgers - New Brunswick. See details at the end of this essay.    Hiram Maxim and his machine gun Hiram and Hudson Maxim:  Inventors of the Machine Gun and Developers of Smokeless Powder   New Jersey's eccentrically brilliant brothers, Hudson Maxim (1853-1927) and his cantankerous, womanizing older brother Hiram Stevens Maxim (1840-1916)  were both born into a poor, rural Maine family. Hudson claimed receiving his first shoes when he was sixteen. He rarely attended school and was self-taught. Astonishingly, Hudson Maxim's earliest claim to fame was as the author of a popular "teach yourself" book on penmanship. He also possessed a breathtakingly large ego, once bragging that he could write an article on almost any subject in the world without do...