J. Scott Applewhite/AP

Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy talks with reporters as debt limit negotiations sprint into the final stages, at the Capitol in Washington, May 25, 2023.

High-stakes negotiations over the debt limit are intensifying between House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and President Joe Biden as the clock ticks down toward default on the country’s record national debt. 

Though there are growing signals that they are getting closer to a deal, conservative Republicans are threatening to block it. All of which begs the question: Why is the country increasingly finding itself in this risky dance with default? 

If Congress does not increase the amount the country is allowed to borrow, a step Mr. McCarthy said he will support only if paired with significant spending cuts, the United States could default as soon as June 1. The standoff has underscored the gravity of America’s current finances – and just how broken the mechanisms are for getting the nation’s fiscal house in order. 

In recent years, budget measures have been passed largely along party lines, using a congressional loophole to get around the filibuster. Although the budget process still leaves some room for bipartisan negotiating in a divided government, recent history has left many conservative lawmakers feeling that bargaining over the debt limit is one of the few ways to tame spending.

“The debt limit is a horrible mechanism for addressing our debt problems,” says Shai Akabas, director of economic policy for the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington. “The reason why I think we continue to have these debt limit fights is because the budget process is fundamentally broken in Congress.”

Now some are pushing to eliminate the debt limit, given the grave risk these increasingly politicized standoffs pose not only to the U.S. economy but to the global economy as well.

Mary Altaffer/AP

A man looks up at the National Debt Clock in midtown Manhattan in New York, May 25, 2023.

Fiscal jam ahead

Both sides agree the fiscal issues are real. If interest rates continue to rise, the U.S. could be forced to put 50% to 100% of its annual tax revenue toward paying interest on the national debt within several decades – leaving not a dollar to pay off debt, let alone fund myriad government programs from defense to Social Security. But they diverge over how to address the record national debt, and the deficit spending that’s fueling it.  

“There’s got to be some mechanism to tell Washington that you can’t keep printing money that you don’t have,” says House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, a Louisiana Republican. 

Democrats have an answer for that: increase revenue, including through taxes on corporations and the ultrawealthy.

They see Republicans as hypocritical, blaming Democratic spending without noting the impact of 2017 Trump tax cuts. Those cuts were projected by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office to add $1.9 trillion to the national debt over a decade, though a 2021 conservative analysis using updated data argued they were on track to pay for themselves. 

Democrats add that during the Trump administration their party supported three debt ceiling hikes without demanding concessions, as the GOP is now demanding from Mr. Biden. 

Last month, the House GOP passed a bill along party lines that raised the debt ceiling in exchange for bringing spending back to 2022 levels, but the bill has virtually no chance of clearing the Democratic-held Senate. 

“A real solution is a bipartisan one that can pass the House and the Senate,” said Rep. Susan Wild, a Pennsylvania Democrat from a swing district, on Tuesday. She called on her GOP colleagues to moderate their position in order to “avert a crisis that is going to hurt every single hardworking American.”

Long history of debt decisions

Prior to 1917, Congress had to approve each instance of the U.S. government incurring debt. It eased those rules during World War I to give the Treasury more flexibility to finance the war. In 1939, Congress established the first debt limit, at $45 billion, and steadily raised it to $300 billion to accommodate spending on World War II, according to a timeline compiled by the Bipartisan Policy Center.  

Congress has raised, extended, or redefined the debt limit nearly 80 times since 1962, almost twice as often under GOP presidents as under Democratic presidents, according to the Treasury Department. 

For decades, the debt limit has been used to extract concessions over spending, with substantial success. But whereas it was once something Congress used as a check on the executive branch, it has increasingly become a tool wielded by one party in Congress against the other. 

And whereas both parties used to agree to short-term extensions of the debt limit to give themselves a window to work out a broader deal, now Republicans are using the risk of national default as additional leverage to get the spending cuts they seek.

J. Scott Applewhite/AP

Steve Ricchetti (left), counselor to the president, and Shalanda Young, director of the Office of Management and Budget, the top negotiators for President Joe Biden on the debt limit crisis, enter the Capitol in Washington, May 23, 2023.

Some see that as craven politicking, with no regard for the good of the country. But others say that’s what is needed to restore the country’s fiscal strength, and thus its ability to do good for its citizens and partners abroad. 

An Obama-Trump boom in debt 

The national debt now stands at more than $31 trillion, with an increasingly rapid trajectory at current spending levels and interest rates. A little over half that debt was accrued during the Obama and Trump administrations. 

The debt has continued to grow under President Biden, fueled by deficit spending on additional COVID-19 relief bills as well as the Inflation Reduction Act. It is now at 98% of gross domestic product – roughly four times greater, proportionally, than 50 years ago, according to the Congressional Budget Office. 

CBO historical data also shows that revenue levels as a proportion of GDP have grown during that time by about 2 percentage points while spending has grown by about 7 percentage points, lending credence to the GOP claim that the growing debt is due not to abnormally low taxes but to increased spending.

“The increases of spending that we’ve seen in the last couple of years have been insane,” Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, a Florida Republican on the Appropriations Committee, told journalists outside the House this week. “There’s a reason why we have the highest inflation in 40 years.”

In addition to growth in discretionary spending, entitlement programs like Social Security continue to get more expensive, particularly as baby boomers retire.

Even under the GOP bill passed last month, spending would still exceed revenues by about $1.5 trillion per year, further adding to the debt. 

Representative Wild agrees there need to be bipartisan discussions about responsible cuts to federal spending. But that should be done separately from raising the debt limit to accommodate spending that has already been approved, she told the Monitor in a brief interview.

“The debt limit is not something that’s negotiable,” she says. “I can’t call Mastercard and say, ‘Sorry, I was just told that I can’t pay my bill.’”

The politics – and possible solutions

To the frustration of congressional Democrats, Speaker McCarthy and his fellow Republicans seem to have gained the upper hand in messaging to the American public, about 6 in 10 of whom agree that spending cuts should accompany an increase of the debt ceiling, according to several recent polls. Part of the reason the GOP may be getting through is because it’s putting it in terms of household finances.

Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

Activists hold signs as House Democratic Whip Katherine Clark of Massachusetts speaks at a press conference held by Courage for America, which faults far-right Republicans for the debt limit standoff, in front of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, May 23, 2023.

“If you gave your child a credit card and they kept hitting the limit, you wouldn’t just raise their credit limit – you’d sit down and help them figure out where they could cut back on spending,” tweeted Speaker McCarthy last month – a point he’s been reiterating in his frequent gatherings with reporters. 

White House negotiators, by contrast, have largely avoided giving press conferences – leaving congressional Democrats to try to fill the messaging gap. 

On Tuesday, Democratic Whip Katherine Clark of Massachusetts and some of her colleagues joined forces with the activist group Courage for America to push back on the GOP messaging.

“The MAGA majority wants the American people to make an impossible choice: accept devastating cuts or a devastating default,” Representative Clark said. “They manufactured a crisis so they can bully and threaten the very people they were sent to Washington to represent.”

If American voters are pointing fingers at a dysfunctional Congress, however, some of those fingers are pointing back at them – and their choice of whom to elect. 

“When you support nonsense, you get nonsense,” says former Sen. Kent Conrad, a North Dakota Democrat who helped negotiate a resolution to the last major debt limit crisis in 2011 as Senate Budget Committee chairman. “So hey, maybe it’s time for the American people to look in the mirror and say, ‘Gee, how did these people get into office?’”  

One possible solution, says Mr. Akabas of the Bipartisan Policy Center, would be reintroducing the 2021 Responsible Budgeting Act, which would raise the debt limit for the fiscal year in which a budget is passed. Another, proposed by the House Problem Solvers Caucus, would be to extend the debt ceiling through 2023 and appoint a commission to get U.S. finances on a more sustainable path.  

“When I speak to members on both sides of the aisle, they’re just sick and tired of these fights,” says Mr. Akabas. “And they realize that we don’t get much more out of them than we would if they were held over some other policy tool.”

Arnd Wiegmann/Reuters/File

The logo of Meta Platforms is seen in Davos, Switzerland. The European Union imposed a $1.2 billion fine on the company this week for privacy breaches.

It was, undeniably, eye-catching: a $1.2 billion fine levied in Europe this week against the giant American technology company Meta, the owner of Facebook.

Yet the money, little more than petty cash for Meta, matters less than the message.

That message is about setting enforceable rules in cyberspace: on the internet, on social media platforms like Facebook, on messaging apps, as well as to govern the latest policy challenge, artificial intelligence.

This week’s case was about privacy: the European Data Protection Board ruled that when it moved European users’ content to the United States, Facebook was failing to ensure it wouldn’t be shared with U.S. intelligence agencies.

But this was just the latest signal from the 27-nation European Union of its growing determination to take the lead in broader regulation of cyberspace. The aim? To keep 21st-century technology tools from violating users’ privacy, safety, and other individual rights; or from being used to undermine elections, democratic institutions, or communal and social trust.

The EU is concentrating first on cleaning its own house: collectively it constitutes the world’s second-largest economy.

But EU policymakers know that the reach and complexity of cyber businesses, especially the richest and most powerful among them, mean that successful regulation, and indeed the very future of the Internet, will likely hinge on the two other leading economic powers, China and America.

Patrick Semansky/AP

New York University Professor Emeritus Gary Marcus, center, answers questions from members of a U.S. Senate committee looking into artificial intelligence.

China is vanishingly unlikely to join any effort to set international rules. For Xi Jinping, technology is less about individual empowerment than control. Far from embracing the initial ethos of the internet – as a truly global medium – China has erected a “great firewall” to block foreign sites to which it objects, and is advocating a model in which individual states control their own cyber networks.

So the key to retaining the internet’s global benefits, while also reining in excesses, could well lie in Europe’s efforts to find common cause with the United States.

U.S. lawmakers of both parties share many of the EU’s cyberspace concerns. But at least so far, there’s been little sign of a common Western approach.

And the Facebook fine provided a window into the reasons why.

This is partly a question of different political cultures. The European Union’s bill of rights explicitly protects citizens’ privacy. The U.S. has no constitutional equivalent, and places a First Amendment emphasis on the free-speech prerogatives of online platforms and their users.

At least in the Facebook case, that’s probably resolvable. Other U.S.-based tech giants also hold huge amounts of European content, and EU and American negotiators are finalizing a long-pending data agreement with a view to meeting Europeans’ intelligence-sharing concerns.

Yet the more fundamental difference is over how the tech companies should be regulated.

There are some areas of consensus. Both the EU and U.S. authorities have imposed penalties on their companies for misusing, or failing to secure, personal data.

But a yawning gap has emerged over online content.

Washington seeks to ensure that the tech companies properly regulate this content themselves. The European Union, on the other hand, last year introduced the Digital Services Act (DSA), which obliges two-dozen very large players such as Facebook, Twitter, Alibaba, and TikTok to provide an annual account on how they are combating disinformation, threats to children’s or women’s safety, and election manipulation, among other ills.

They will also have to give European regulators a look at the algorithms that decide what kind of content is sent to which users.

And the maximum penalty, 6% of a company’s global turnover, would dwarf the Facebook privacy fine.

John Thys/AP/File

EU Commissioner for Values and Transparency Vera Jourová criticized Elon Musk for reportedly suspending journalists he did not like from Twitter, and warned of sanctions.

While it is going to take some time to gauge the effect of the new rules – this week’s Facebook fine resulted from a complaint initially filed a decade ago – the EU is emphasizing its seriousness in applying them.

Shortly after the legislation was introduced late last year, the values and transparency chief on the European Commission, the EU’s executive body, upbraided Twitter owner Elon Musk for reportedly suspending a number of U.S. technology journalists from the platform. Calling the move “worrying,” Vera Jourová tweeted out a warning. “EU’s Digital Services Act requires media freedom and fundamental rights. There are red lines. And sanctions, soon.”

For now at least, a similar response from U.S. authorities is unthinkable.

But if the U.S. and Europe do move toward a common approach, the catalyst could be a newer technological worry shared on both sides of the Atlantic: artificial intelligence.

Washington and the EU have voiced their concerns in strikingly similar terms, but a familiar policy difference is on display.

The Biden Administration’s AI Bill of Rights last year took the form of voluntary policy guidance.

The EU’s planned AI Act would impose a raft of explicit requirements on tech companies offering AI applications such as chatbots, facial recognition, and biometric surveillance. And it would ban applications that employ “subliminal or purposefully manipulative techniques, exploit people’s vulnerabilities, or are used for social scoring.”

Still, one lesson that governments have learned from their efforts to regulate the internet could yet encourage greater transatlantic cooperation.

It is not that the tech giants, like banks during the 2008 financial crisis, may have become too big to fail, or even too big to regulate.

It is that it was left too late to regulate them.

Christoph Reichwein/dpa/AP

On the evening of the election in Turkey, supporters of incumbent Recep Tayyip Erdoğan wave flags as they drive their cars through the streets of Duisburg, Germany, May 14, 2023.

Cenk Auth is a Berlin hairstylist with Turkish flair and a German passport.

Born in Germany to Turkish German parents, Mr. Auth is part of a Turkish diaspora spread across Europe that keenly feels the tug of two places. When he’s not running Berlin’s upscale Haarwerk salon, he’s listening to Turkish music and watching Turkish television to stay connected to Turkey.

Yet Mr. Auth also feels uniquely German. “From a national perspective, I see myself as being a Turk living in Germany, but I don’t see Turkey as my homeland because I didn’t grow up there. I don’t think I could live in Turkey – I’m too accustomed to life and integrated in Germany.”

Politically, Turks in Germany are so important back “home” that Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has campaigned in Germany, setting up offices to maintain a physical footprint. While campaigning in Germany a decade ago, Mr. Erdoğan advised this group to “integrate yourselves into German society but don’t assimilate.” Indeed, surveys show Turks abroad are remarkably connected to Turkey politically and culturally.

Turkish Germans in particular are caught between two lands, with many casting votes in one country but residing in another. Only about a quarter million of the more than 3 million Turks in Germany hold German citizenship, according to 2016 numbers from the Federal Statistical Office of Germany. That may be set to change, as the current government has promised to end Germany’s ban on dual citizenship – and along with it, a difficult choice of loyalty forced upon generations of Turks in Germany.

But most Turks also say they feel German society is discriminatory against them.

Will a citizen’s stake in both the second- and third-largest countries in Europe change their experience of the duality of cultures and their concept of “home”?

“It is somewhat of a push/pull phenomenon. On the one hand, they’ve been ‘otherized’ by European society, and I think Germany is the outstanding example,” says Alan Makovsky, a former adviser on Middle Eastern affairs and a senior fellow for National Security and International Policy at the Center for American Progress. “But on the other hand, they retain a strong Turkish identity. They moved away physically, but thanks to technology and other factors, they’ve never really had to move away psychologically or mentally.”

Markus Schreiber/AP

Turkish citizens living in Germany line up in front of a polling station at the Turkish consulate to cast their vote for Turkish the parliament and president election in Berlin, Germany, Thursday, April 27, 2023. Millions of Turkish citizens living abroad have began voting in national elections that will decide whether President Recep Tayyip Erdogan can govern Turkey for another term. Among the biggest contingent of overseas voters are 1.5 million Turks in Germany, who can cast their votes in presidential and parliamentary elections at 16 polling sites across the country until May 9.

A tricky melding of cultures

Mr. Auth’s mother, Ayse Auth, is a hairstylist to celebrities. She became a star herself, with her suave good looks, a shock of dyed blond hair, and a keen media savvy.

But Ms. Auth’s childhood wasn’t such a shining example of Turkish success. Though she was born in Germany, her parents sent her and her twin sister to Turkey to be raised by their grandmother. Growing up, she straddled an internal conflict presented by her authoritarian Turkish grandmother, a father who tried to marry her off in the Turkish tradition, and a faraway Germany that to her teenage eyes presented freedom and opportunity.

She was able to wend her way back to Germany, eventually shed a marriage of convenience, and strike out on her own as an adult in Germany, in a story that played out across media as an example of dual identity. Today, Ms. Auth and her twin sister own and operate successful high-end lifestyle salons across Frankfurt, Munich, and Berlin.

Her son now effortlessly embraces both cultures, which wasn’t as easy for his mother decades ago. With his Muslim mother and a Catholic German stepfather, Mr. Auth was raised to be open to other cultures and religions. That’s not necessarily something promoted by Mr. Erdoğan and his ruling AKP party in Turkey.

The AKP’s “election campaign in Germany is being massively, aggressively conducted and with different voting ads than in Turkey,” says Mr. Auth, referring to the fact that the Turkish population in Germany skews even more conservative than the right-wing AKP in Turkey. “It’s really tough as a migrant to get citizenship here, and it seems it will become even harder in the future. But everybody should vote in the country where they live and participate there rather than elsewhere.”

In Turkey’s presidential and parliamentary elections this month, Turks in Germany showed a record turnout at the polls of more than 50% of eligible voters.

Yet while Mr. Auth acknowledges the delicacy that holding dual citizenship might pose for male Turks who would then be subject to military service, other German Turks might be happy to have access to one of most powerful passports in the world. Most Turks in Germany are there on long-term or permanent residencies, and the diaspora is less likely to hold citizenship compared with their counterparts in France, Holland, and Austria.

And the data shows that citizenship hastens integration, while a ban on citizenship can be “alienating, especially as much of the Western world accepts dual citizenship,” says Mr. Makovsky, the former adviser.

Finding a balance

That sense of alienation plays out in surveys of Turkish communities in Germany; more than 65% have reported feeling discriminated against. A 2019 Federal Employment Agency report found that nearly half of unemployed people in Germany hail from ethnic minority communities, despite comprising only a quarter of the population. Turkish diasporas across Europe show little interest in the politics of their “host” country, with more than three-quarters supporting Turkish football and other sports teams over their Western European counterparts.

Photo courtesy of Cenk Auth

Cenk Auth is the Turkish German owner of the hair salon HaarWerk Berlin.

In Germany, the Turkish population skews more conservative than in other European communities, says Ayhan Kaya, a Turkish sociologist and professor of intercultural politics at Istanbul Bilgi University.

“They’re happy to vote for Erdoğan, [because he] has given them leverage to feel better in Germany or in Europe with their Islamic background, their conservative background, with their traditional values,” says Dr. Kaya. “Because Erdoğan is, according to them, a world leader who has the ability to say hush to the big European leaders. It psychologically empowers these working class-origin people with a ‘revenge-ist’ feeling.”

That kind of sway may make it harder for Turkish communities to integrate culturally and socially. Yet still, there are clear economic reasons for Turks to stay in Germany and other countries in Europe, says Dr. Kaya. Turkey’s economy provides fewer opportunities, and living in Germany benefits their sons and daughters who can access education and health care. “They’re trying to make the most of both sides of the river. It’s a rational choice for them, these transnational communities.”

Germany’s coalition government has promised to take up the ban on dual citizenship, potentially paving the way for millions of Turks to be more institutionally connected to the country in which they live. That would be an antidote to what Dr. Kaya pinpoints as a small group of young Muslims in Germany who are becoming more affiliated with their religious identity as a response growing Islamophobia propagated by far-right German political parties.

“They try to defend themselves as a reactionary measure,” he says. “If dual citizenship ban is [not lifted], I can tell you the Turkish-origin people living in Germany are going to become even more conservative, even more religious, even more connected to their homeland [of Turkey] because they will be pushed. They will feel they’re being pushed by the German state. They will lose their faith in the German state.

“So if you really want to win the hearts and minds of these people, you need to you need to give them carrots – political resources, such as citizenship – so that they will feel integrated and welcome,” Dr. Kaya adds.

Though parliament has recently been distracted by energy issues and the war in Ukraine, it’s an issue that will be watched closely. While European societies are notoriously grappling with the issue of ethnic communities feeling marginalized, remarks Mr. Makovsky, that divide is something that’s playing out all over the world.

“European societies aren’t based as much as [America’s] on this notion of protean, ever-evolving national culture. And of course, as we know, there are a lot of Americans who don’t like that either,” he says. “We’re still dealing with many issues of majority-minority cleavages.”

Edward Cavaciuti was happy with his old life. For 25 years pre-pandemic, he DJed for a living in Delaware, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, and Maryland. He cleared $1,000 a week – at least – doing what he loved. 

“COVID literally ruined my business,” says Mr. Cavaciuti, a single father to a 15-year-old son. “I needed something a little more reliable with no college required.” 

Mr. Cavaciuti figured why not use the 6’ 2’’, 220-pound frame he was blessed with to earn a living doing security. 

He got hired at Securitas USA in 2022. But to secure his job, he needed to complete a course and a licensure exam. In came Delaware Technical Community College via its continuing education/workforce training program. Mr. Cavaciuti took one course and passed a test, and his license is good for five years.

“There was no prior experience needed as a guard, and I was just looking for something different,” says Mr. Cavaciuti, who admits that he hated school and was never much interested in college.

To fill private and public sector job vacancies, a growing trend in community colleges has been for students to take short-term, less expensive certificate programs. These middle-skill positions could help balance labor shortages and keep workers competitive for life-sustaining gainful employment. Politicians including former President Barack Obama and companies like IBM and Google have called for workplaces to eliminate de facto degree requirements, which take years to earn. 

“Get folks trained ... and then employed”

Today, Mr. Cavaciuti makes a salary comparable to what he earned as a DJ and can earn overtime, if he wants to work more than 40 hours.

“Our goal in the division that I oversee is to get folks trained, get them credentialed, and then employed,” says Paul Morris, associate vice president for workforce development and community education at Del Tech. 

In 2022, Del Tech awarded 4,500 certificates and credentials. Some of the school’s most popular programs are in fields like health care and nursing, welding, HVAC and construction, and heavy equipment operator, Dr. Morris says.

Del Tech, which has partnerships with 650 companies, structures its programs based on job listings in the state and statistics from the Delaware Department of Labor.

Community colleges that offer the most successful certificate programs put in the work to address labor shortages and create opportunities for students to learn marketable skills for in-demand industries, says Joseph Fuller, professor of management practice at Harvard Business School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. They hire teachers for certificates and other programs who have prior industry experience. 

These schools, he notes, track graduate progress by checking with employers to validate if their training prepared them for new jobs. 

Dr. Fuller is a co-author of the recently published study “The Partnership Imperative: Community Colleges, Employers, and America’s Chronic Skills Gap,” based on surveys of community college and business leaders in 2020. 

The study found that educators and employers don’t see eye to eye on what the other contributes to workforce development. Only 21% of community college leaders strongly agreed that their schools were producing work-ready employees that employers needed. Only 26% of employers strongly agreed that community colleges were producing the workers that they needed.

Courtesy of Lorain County Community College

Marcia Ballinger is president of Lorain County Community College in Elyria, Ohio. She says LCCC's short-term certificate programs are helping to meet adult learners where they are.

Dr. Fuller likens the most successful community colleges to major league baseball teams, while less successful schools that never change what they offer, update curriculum, or develop partnerships, are Class A teams.

He says there is “a very real difference” at schools such as San Jacinto College in Houston; Valencia College in Orlando, Florida; or Wake Technical Community College in Raleigh, North Carolina. “The significant majority of schools,” he says, “aren’t as deep or as attuned to employers.”

From nothing to $23 an hour

In 2022, technology giant Intel announced a $20 billion investment to build two chip plants in Ohio, which will create thousands of jobs. It also pledged $100 million toward educational institutions to build employment pipelines. One of those schools was Lorain County Community College in Elyria, Ohio.

One of Dr. Fuller’s “major league” schools, LCCC is consistently recognized nationally for student outcomes and successes. It offers 65 free fast-track certificate programs, which can be completed in 16 weeks. More than 1,500 students take a mixture of noncredit and credit offerings, some offered exclusively online. LCCC also offers a one-year Earn and Learn program that combines classroom work and an apprenticeship with a local company. Some of those high-demand industries include automation, cybersecurity, software development, and computer-aided machining. 

“We do a lot of listening and learning from our students, from our graduates, from our employers,” says Marcia Ballinger, president of Lorain County Community College.

Working adults with family commitments and complex lives can’t just enroll in a two-year program, says Dr. Ballinger. Some students also have confidence issues: They think they aren’t college material and doubt they can be successful. 

“We thought, ‘What if we break it up differently so that we can engage them where they’re at?’” Dr. Ballinger says. 

Forty percent of participants in the 16-week program are students of color, double the demographic makeup of the county, Dr. Ballinger says. Recruiting efforts by LCCC have created relationships with local churches; the Urban League; and El Centro, a Latino nonprofit organization. 

The driving question, Dr. Ballinger says, is: “How can we reach adult learners where they are, connect them to short-term programming that we’re going to wrap our arms around them for those 16 weeks?”

After the 16-week program, students can move on to the yearlong Earn and Learn credit program – and then, if they wish, work toward their associate degree and bachelor’s degree. 

One of those students is Joshua Eschke. Now 20, he had a tumultuous first year at the University of Toledo, which included the death of a family member. He went back home to North Ridgeville. He had been offered a scholarship to LCCC after successfully completing college courses there while still in high school.

“I reached out to them and asked if I could get that same scholarship,” Mr. Eschke says.

He got it, and he’s not looking back. Mr. Eschke initially enrolled in the one-year Earn and Learn certificate program in microelectromechanical systems, which he is still completing.

He took classes his first semester and now combines those with work at Rockwell Automation, an industrial automation Fortune 500 company that partners with the school. He works as a quality process technician in a plant where they make circuit boards. 

“I’m in the one-year program, but I think I’m going to end up doing the bachelor’s,” he says.

Mr. Eschke went from nothing to making $23 an hour, which he says he is saving and helping his girlfriend get her degree in early childhood education. His only prior work experience had been making DoorDash deliveries and working as a tour guide.

“For only one semester and a certificate that is pretty amazing,” Mr. Eschke says.

Editor’s note: This story is part of the series Saving the College Dream, from the Education Reporting Collaborative, a group of journalists from AL.com, The Associated Press, The Christian Science Monitor, The Dallas Morning News, The Hechinger Report, The Post and Courier in Charleston, South Carolina, and The Seattle Times, with support from the Solutions Journalism Network.

“Visit, but don’t stay,” the governor of Oregon famously said in the ’70s, and when I arrived from Boston, I figured I’d made it in just under the wire. I didn’t know if I’d be accepted. But people were friendly.

“What brought you here?” they’d ask. Oh. I broke up with my boyfriend, nothing was tying me down, I wanted to shake up my life. All of this was true. That’s not what I said, though.

“A bicycle,” I said. Also true.

People tend to be impressed if you’ve biked across the country. It did take effort, but I had some things going for me. Mainly, I already knew at least a dozen friends who had done it, although most had had the good sense to travel west to east, with the prevailing winds. I was not breaking new ground.

I had no expectation that I’d be backstopped or supported, or that it was even possible. Cash machines and cellphones did not exist, so we were accustomed to running out of money, and our loved ones were accustomed to not being in constant touch with us. We have so much to fall back on now that we’ve grown skittish of failure. We can’t even leave our houses without our phones, and we’ve lost sight of what is truly essential for survival.

OK, that’s just me being a curmudgeon. 

In truth, I can’t say I was familiar with the essentials in 1976, either. But I set out with two men anyway, and with my entire savings: $200 cash. I also had a shiny new Mastercard – it had been only two years since women were allowed to have a credit card in their own name. None of us had trained for this trip in any way. We figured we’d get stronger every day, and we did. 

We chafed in cotton shorts. We didn’t wear sunglasses or sunscreen. Or helmets. Our common sense didn’t take up much room. We had a small tent and a few changes of underwear, and we started pedaling on June 1, 1976. I assumed that if you just kept pedaling, the map would unfurl beneath your wheels until you eventually hit the next ocean over. 

I didn’t worry about anything. That was my mom’s job. I called her collect from a phone booth with an update on where we were about four times over the course of the six-week trip. She was always glad to hear from me. I left out the more worrisome details, but none of them would stop us.

There were the unheeding coal trucks in Pennsylvania, the tornado warning in Iowa, the 115-degrees-Fahrenheit temperatures in Utah’s Bonneville Salt Flats, which we tried to traverse with a single water bottle each. We finally hitched a ride in a pickup truck. There were also the head winds that forced us to travel at night; we’d veer into the ditch whenever a car came up behind us.

By the time we reached the Pacific Ocean in mid-July, I was brown as a nut and had flossable quadriceps, but of course I was still bringing up the rear. The men had gotten stronger, too. We looked like Greek gods and, despite the myth we may have told our friends, we did not ditch our bikes in the drink at the trip’s end. I sold my orange Gitane for five bucks at a garage sale a few years later. I’m sure my friends’ bikes disappeared a lot earlier than that. 

There were still donuts for sale, and I reassembled my former shape in record time.

Years back, people had the courage to step into a veritable bathtub of a boat and sail to an unknown land. They had the pluck to pile their belongings into a prairie schooner and keep going in case they stumbled onto a better deal. They had no way of knowing if they would see or hear from their loved ones again, and nothing was driving them but hope.

At least I had a Mastercard.

In my case, what looked like courage was probably just a mix of youthful ignorance and groundless optimism. I did learn something about perseverance, however. Most of it is about beginning. If you’re learning an instrument or a language, or if you’re starting your life over somewhere new, or taking on any kind of challenge, you won’t persevere if you talk yourself out of starting.

Once you get yourself in the saddle, you’re already more than halfway there. Then you just keep pedaling.

AP

University of Alabama head coach Brad Bohannon, left, was fired in May after a report of suspicious bets involving his team, with the school saying he violated “the standards, duties and responsibilities expected of university employees.”

For decades, New Jersey has been a national leader in the legalization of gambling, from casinos to online sports betting. Now in a state where the percentage of compulsive gamblers is three times the national average and half of middle schoolers gamble, legislators are weighing a bill that would teach high school students the difference between luck and predictable reality.

“We should do everything we can to help these kids understand the risks [of online gambling] and how to make rational decisions,” Assemblyman Dan Benson, co-sponsor of the gambling education bill, told the SportsHandle website. One of the bill’s more rational mandates: provide students with lessons on “probability versus predictability.”

Efforts to help young people change their views about luck would be a timely antidote to the latest survey by the NCAA. The college sports giant found 58% of 18- to 22-year-olds engage in at least one sports betting activity and, among the riskiest players, 70% believe “consistent sports gambling will increase their monetary earnings.”

The NCAA prohibits athletes or coaches from participating in sports wagering on any sports activity. Yet nearly a quarter of male collegiate athletes bet on sports last year. With a majority of states having legalized sports betting since 2018, the NCAA is finding it difficult to maintain what it calls the “purpose and meaning” of sports – let alone support universities in teaching the superiority of reason and knowledge over the superstition of luck. Sports-betting scandals this year at NCAA schools in Iowa and Alabama have further forced the association to beef up education programs aimed at preventing the corruption of games by athletes and staff.

The college scandals have served as a wake-up call for all youth sports. “Let’s maintain the purity of high school sports” from the rise in gambling, said Karissa Niehoff, head of the National Federation of State High School Associations, in a May 24 video.

No other country has so much of its gambling market focused on unpaid amateur athletes, according to the National Council on Problem Gambling. The sudden increase in sports betting among young people has finally led to a rethink of new ways to preserve the honest competition of sports – with its displays of excellence – as well as the teaching of virtue and merit over a belief in luck. If the New Jersey bill passes and students are taught to discern what is predictable and true, the state may become a leader of a different sort.