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Your Letters: The Value Of College; Toronto Raccoons

SCOTT SIMON, host:

Time now for your letters.

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Last week we interviewed UCLA professor Mike Rose about the value of a college education. He said higher education should be measured by more than just future earning power.

Professor MIKE ROSE (Education, UCLA): The idea of intellectual growth that is not just learning things to make a living, but also learning things to enable you to do things with your life, enable you to find interests and pursuits that in some way or another maybe it, you know, expand the way you see things.

SIMON: Michelle Baker writes on our webpage: Professor Rose makes an excellent point. We are a democratic society, and as such we require that our citizenry be well-educated. That's why we instituted free, mandatory public education. But asking our young people to pay for what they did not receive in school, and then offering them no return on their investment points to two major failures in our present infrastructure: a deficient public school system and an economy that's ill-equipped to reward people for performing at their peak.

New Jersey's John Jackson sees another problem. He writes on NPR.org: My son's tuition and student fee at Rutgers University is $12,000. That's 1,650 minimum wage hours just to pay the tuition. The only solution is to borrow the money to attend school. Why do we want to saddle our children with so much debt at the beginning of their work lives?

And Alexandra Nelson of Chicago writes: The discussion is not whether you should spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on an elite school, or only tens of thousands on a public university or community college, but why our society does not support its institutions of higher learning, nor why these institutions get away with calling 7 percent loans financial aid.

Last week's report by Anita Elash on the burgeoning raccoon population in Toronto, the arrest of a man charged with hitting a baby raccoon with a shovel drew responses from many.

David Guinot of Cumberland, Ohio, write: Big city dwellers from Toronto to Tampa are about to discover what country folk have known about raccoons for generations. There is nothing cute about these animals. What I hate about them is that once they invade your property, they don't go away. There's only one way to stop them from coming back - large dogs, preferably two or three. They're also recommended, but the result is even uglier.

James Pippin has a peaceful solution. He writes on our Facebook page: Perhaps if the raccoons would agree to stop wearing those bandit masks people might relax a little bit more.

We welcome your comments. Go to NPR.org, click on the Contact Us link. You can also post a comment on Facebook or Twitter at NPRWeekend. You can send me a tweet directly, nprscottsimon, all one word.

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This is NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.