Can the value of a college diploma be quantified? Should it be quantified? Many would argue no on both counts. The benefits of better critical thinking skills, a rich network of relationships with professors and alumni, or an enhanced sense of your own bright future and capacity to achieve are very difficult to reckon. Researchers…
Can the value of a college diploma be quantified? Should it be quantified? Many would argue no on both counts. The benefits of better critical thinking skills, a rich network of relationships with professors and alumni, or an enhanced sense of your own bright future and capacity to achieve are very difficult to reckon. Researchers report many multidimensional advantages associated with more years of education: better health, more stability in relationships, increased political and civic engagement, and more peace and happiness, even into old age.
It’s hard to put a price on any of these goods. And yet, high and continuously rising tuition is increasingly forcing would-be students and their families to perform some cost-benefit analysis. A college degree, on average, awards you 60 percent higher earnings (PDF), which more than offsets the average $23,000 in student loans that graduates stack up.
But the relative advantage of the degree has been growing for a generation not because college graduates are earning more and more, but because high school graduatess are earning less and less—20 percent less for young men compared to the 1970s. In fact, it might make more sense to speak of a non-college penalty than a college reward.
Then there’s the question of what happens to the 43 percent of college students who, for one reason or another, don’t finish their degree within six years of their freshman year. They may have student loans but no degree to show for it.
Or what about those who graduate into a recession, like the one going on right now, with very high loan burdens? Graduating into a poor job market can reduce your lifetime earnings by 10 or 15 percent—and it’s a disadvantage that never really goes away.
The measure they’re using is how the college’s graduates handle their student loans. If too many of your students leave school with an unreasonable ratio of debt to income (defined as more than 8 percent of total earnings), or if they don’t pay back their loans at all, then presumably they didn’t get enough bang for their buck.
For now, the “gainful employment” standard is being applied only to trade schools, which are usually for-profit. But it’s not a bad question to ask no matter what the status of the college. One would think that this guideline could strike fear into the hearts of the philosophy department at, say, Middlebury College (price tag, $208,600; starting salary, about $35,000) or, for that matter, the film school at USC (price tag, $100,000+; starting salary, $0 to $100,000).
Everyone has a favorite sandwich, often prepared to an exacting degree of specification: Turkey or ham? Grilled or toasted? Mayo or mustard? White or whole wheat?
We reached out to five food historians and asked them to tell the story of a sandwich of their choosing. The responses included staples like peanut butter and jelly, as well as regional fare like New England’s chow mein sandwich.
Together, they show how the sandwiches we eat (or used to eat) do more than fill us up during our lunch breaks. In their stories are themes of immigration and globalization, of class and gender, and of resourcefulness and creativity.
A taste of home for working women
Megan Elias, Boston University
The tuna salad sandwich originated from an impulse to conserve, only to become a symbol of excess.
In the 19th century – before the era of supermarkets and cheap groceries – most Americans avoided wasting food. Scraps of chicken, ham or fish from supper would be mixed with mayonnaise and served on lettuce for lunch. Leftovers of celery, pickles and olives – served as supper “relishes” – would also be folded into the mix.
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The versions of these salads that incorporated fish tended to use salmon, white fish or trout. Most Americans didn’t cook (or even know of) tuna.
Around the end of the 19th century, middle-class women began to spend more time in public, patronizing department stores, lectures and museums. Since social conventions kept these women out of the saloons where men ate, lunch restaurants opened up to cater to this new clientele. They offered women exactly the kind of foods they had served each other at home: salads. While salads made at home often were composed of leftovers, those at lunch restaurants were made from scratch. Fish and shellfish salads were typical fare.
When further social and economic changes brought women into the public as office and department store workers, they found fish salads waiting for them at the affordable lunch counters patronized by busy urban workers. Unlike the ladies’ lunch, the office lunch hour had time limits. So lunch counters came up with the idea of offering the salads between two pieces of bread, which sped up table turnover and encouraged patrons to get lunch to go.
When canned tuna was introduced in the early 20th century, lunch counters and home cooks could skip the step of cooking a fish and go straight to the salad. But there was downside: The immense popularity of canned tuna led to the growth of a global industry that has severely depleted stocks and led to the unintended slaughter of millions of dolphins. A clever way to use dinner scraps has become a global crisis of conscience and capitalism.
I like mine on toasted rye.
East meets West in Fall River, Massachusetts
Imogene Lim, Vancouver Island University
“Gonna get a big dish of beef chow mein,” Warren Zevon sings in his 1978 hit “Werewolves of London,” a nod to the popular Chinese stir-fried noodle dish.
During that same decade, Alika and the Happy Samoans, the house band for a Chinese restaurant in Fall River, Massachusetts, also paid tribute to chow mein with a song titled “Chow Mein Sandwich.”
Chow mein in a sandwich? Is that a real thing?
I was first introduced to the chow mein sandwich while completing my doctorate at Brown University. Even as the child of a Chinatown restaurateur from Vancouver, I viewed the sandwich as something of a mystery. It led to a post-doctoral fellowship and a paper about Chinese entrepreneurship in New England.
The chow mein sandwich is the quintessential “East meets West” food, and it’s largely associated with New England’s Chinese restaurants – specifically, those of Fall River, a city crowded with textile mills near the Rhode Island border.
The sandwich became popular in the 1920s because it was filling and cheap: Workers munched on them in factory canteens, while their kids ate them for lunch in the parish schools, especially on meatless Fridays. It would go on to be available at some “five and dime” lunch counters, like Kresge’s and Woolworth – and even at Nathan’s in Coney Island.
It’s exactly what it sounds like: a sandwich filled with chow mein (deep-fried, flat noodles, topped with a ladle of brown gravy, onions, celery and bean sprouts). If you want to make your own authentic sandwich at home, I recommend using Hoo Mee Chow Mein Mix, which is still made in Fall River. It can be served in a bun (à la sloppy joe) or between sliced white bread, much like a hot turkey sandwich with gravy. The classic meal includes the sandwich, french fries and orange soda.
For those who grew up in the Fall River area, the chow mein sandwich is a reminder of home. Just ask famous chef (and Fall River native) Emeril Lagasse, who came up with his own “Fall River chow mein” recipe.
And at one time, Fall River expats living in Los Angeles would hold a “Fall River Day.”
On the menu? Chow mein sandwiches, of course.
A snack for the elites
Paul Freedman, Yale University
Unlike many American food trends of the 1890s, such as the Waldorf salad and chafing dishes, the club sandwich has endured, immune to obsolescence.
The sandwich originated in the country’s stuffy gentlemen’s clubs, which are known – to this day – for a conservatism that includes loyalty to outdated cuisine. (The Wilmington Club in Delaware continues to serve terrapin, while the Philadelphia Club’s specialties include veal and ham pie.) So the club sandwich’s spread to the rest of the population, along with its lasting popularity, is a testament to its inventiveness and appeal.
A two-layer affair, the club sandwich calls for three pieces of toasted bread spread with mayonnaise and filled with chicken or turkey, bacon, lettuce and tomato. Usually the sandwich is cut into two triangles and held together with a toothpick stuck in each half.
Some believe it should be eaten with a fork and knife, and its blend of elegance and blandness make the club sandwich a permanent feature of country and city club cuisine.
The club sandwich: A perfect blend of elegance and blandness. Alena Haurylik
As far back as 1889, there are references to a Union Club sandwich of turkey or ham on toast. The Saratoga Club-House offered a club sandwich on its menu beginning in 1894.
Interestingly, until the 1920s, sandwiches were identified with ladies’ lunch places that served “dainty” food. The first club sandwich recipe comes from an 1899 book of “salads, sandwiches and chafing-dish dainties,” and its most famous proponent was Wallis Simpson, the American woman whom Edward VIII abdicated the throne of Great Britain to marry.
Nonetheless, an 1889 article from the New York Sun entitled “An Appetizing Sandwich: A Dainty Treat That Has Made a New York Chef Popular” describes the Union Club sandwich as appropriate for a post-theater supper, or something light to be eaten before a nightcap. This was one type of sandwich that men could indulge in, the article seemed to be saying – as long as it wasn’t eaten for lunch.
New York City’s Union Club served an early version of the club sandwich that was a hit. Gryffindor, CC BY-SA
‘The combination is delicious and original’
Ken Albala, University of the Pacific
While the peanut butter and jelly sandwich eventually became a staple of elementary school cafeterias, it actually has upper-crust origins.
In the late-19th century, at elegant ladies’ luncheons, a popular snack was small, crustless tea sandwiches with butter and cucumber, cold cuts or cheese. Around this time, health food advocates like John Harvey Kellogg started promoting peanut products as a replacement for animal-based foods (butter included). So for a vegetarian option at these luncheons, peanut butter simply replaced regular butter.
One of the earliest known recipes that suggested including jelly with peanut butter appeared in a 1901 issue of the Boston Cooking School Magazine.
“For variety,” author Julia Davis Chandler wrote, “some day try making little sandwiches, or bread fingers, of three very thin layers of bread and two of filling, one of peanut paste, whatever brand you prefer, and currant or crabapple jelly for the other. The combination is delicious, and so far as I know original.”
The sandwich moved from garden parties to lunchboxes in the 1920s, when peanut butter started to be mass produced with hydrogenated vegetable oil and sugar. Marketers of the Skippy brand targeted children as a potential new audience, and thus the association with school lunches was forged.
The classic version of the sandwich is made with soft, sliced white bread, creamy or chunky peanut butter and jelly. Outside of the United States, the peanut butter and jelly sandwich is rare – much of the world views the combination as repulsive.
Andrew P. Haley, University of Southern Mississippi
The Scotch woodcock is probably not Scottish. It’s arguably not even a sandwich. A favorite of Oxford students and members of Parliament until the mid-20th century, the dish is generally prepared by layering anchovy paste and eggs on toast.
Like its cheesier cousin, the Welsh rabbit (better known as rarebit), its name is fanciful. Perhaps there was something about the name, if not the ingredients, that sparked the imagination of Miss Frances Lusk of Jackson, Mississippi.
Inspired to add a little British sophistication to her entertaining, she crafted her own version of the Scotch woodcock for a 1911 United Daughters of the Confederacy fundraising cookbook. Miss Lusk’s woodcock sandwich mixed strained tomatoes and melted cheese, added raw eggs, and slathered the paste between layers of bread (or biscuits).
As food historian Bee Wilson argues in her history of the sandwich, American sandwiches distinguished themselves from their British counterparts by the scale of their ambition. Imitating the rising skylines of American cities, many were towering affairs that celebrated abundance.
But those sandwiches were the sandwiches of urban lunchrooms and, later, diners. In the homes of southern clubwomen, the sandwich was a way to marry British sophistication to American creativity.
For example, the United Daughters of the Confederacy cookbook included “sweetbread sandwiches,” made by heating canned offal (animal trimmings) and slathering the mashed mixture between two pieces of toast. There’s also a “green pepper sandwich,” crafted from “very thin” slices of bread and “very thin” slices of green pepper.
Such creative combinations weren’t limited to the elites of Mississippi’s capital city. In the plantation homes of the Mississippi Delta, members of the Coahoma Woman’s Club served sandwiches of English walnuts, black walnuts and stuffed olives ground into a colorful paste. They also assembled “Friendship Sandwiches” from grated cucumbers, onions, celery and green peppers mixed with cottage cheese and mayonnaise. Meanwhile, the industrial elite of Laurel, Mississippi, served mashed bacon and eggs sandwiches and creamed sardine sandwiches.
Not all of these amalgamations were capped by a slice of bread, so purists might balk at calling them sandwiches. But these ladies did – and they proudly tied up their original creations with ribbons.
Photo credit: Leigh Prather/Shutterstock.com – Dogs often react with great fear to July 4th celebrations. Border collies such as this dog are especially sensitive to loud noises.
The Fourth of July can be a miserable day for dogs. The fireworks make scaredy-cats out of many canines.
That’s because dogs, like humans, are hardwired to be afraid of sudden, loud noises. It is what keeps them safe. Some dogs, though, take that fear to the extreme with panting, howling, pacing, whining, hiding, trembling and even self-injury or escape. And, unlike humans, they don’t know that the fanfare on the Fourth is not a threat. Dogs hear the fireworks and process it as if their world is under siege.
How a dog responds to noises may be influenced by breed, with German shepherd dogs more likely to pace, while border collies or Australian cattle dogs are more likely to show their fear by hiding.
While we veterinarians don’t know exactly why some dogs are afraid of fireworks and others not, many dogs that react to one noise often react to others. Therefore, early intervention and treatment are essential in protecting the welfare of these terrified dogs. Here’s how you can protect your dog from fireworks.
Take your pet to the vet. If your dog is afraid of fireworks, the first step is to have your veterinarian evaluate him or her, especially if your dog’s noise sensitivity is relatively new. One 2018 study found a link between pain and noise sensitivities in older dogs, indicating that muscle tension or sudden movements in response to a loud noise may aggravate a tender area on the body and thus create an association between the loud noise and pain, causing fear of that particular noise to develop or escalate.
Create a “safe haven” in your home with a secure door or gate, preferably away from outside windows or doors. Close the blinds or curtains to reduce outside noises, and play some classical music to help reduce stress by creating a relaxing environment for your dog during the show. A white noise machine or box fan may also help reduce anxiety, along with a pheromone like Adaptil sprayed on bedding, a bandanna, a collar or from a diffuser plugged into the wall.
Consider noise-canceling headphones such as Mutt Muffs to muffle the sounds and further reduce noise sensitivities.
Find a food your pet will love. This could be cut pieces of boiled chicken or squeeze cheese. Sit with your pet and feed him with each boom. You can also use a long-lasting food-dispensing or puzzle toy to release food continuously during the show. This is to help your dog make a positive association with the noises for the future.
Consider anxiety wraps, fabric wraps that exert a gentle pressure on your dog’s body. These may help to lower heart rate and other clinical signs of fear and anxiety, operating on the belief that they swaddle a scared animal and thus calm its fears. These work best, however, in conjunction with a complete behavior treatment plan including medication or behavior modification, or both.
When it comes to comforting your dog, the jury is still out. It is difficult, however, to reinforce an emotional response with comfort. Therefore, it is OK to pet your dog when frightened by a noise event so long as the dog appears to be comforted and not more distressed by the attention.
As Americans flock to beaches this summer, their toes are sinking into some of the most hotly contested real estate in the United States.
It wasn’t always this way. Through the mid-20th century, when the U.S. population was smaller and the coast was still something of a frontier in many states, laissez-faire and absentee coastal landowners tolerated people crossing their beachfront property. Now, however, the coast has filled up. Property owners are much more inclined to seek to exclude an ever-growing population of beachgoers seeking access to less and less beach.
On most U.S. shorelines, the public has a time-honored right to “lateral” access. This means that people can move down the beach along the wet sand between high and low tide – a zone that usually is publicly owned. Waterfront property owners’ control typically stops at the high tide line or, in a very few cases, the low tide line.
But as climate change raises sea levels, property owners are trying to harden their shorelines with sea walls and other types of armoring, squeezing the sandy beach and the public into a shrinking and diminished space.
As director of the Conservation Clinic at the University of Florida College of Law and the Florida Sea Grant Legal Program, and as someone who grew up with sand between my toes, I have studied beach law and policy for most of my career. In my view, the collision between rising seas and coastal development – known as “coastal squeeze” – now represents an existential threat to beaches, and to the public’s ability to reach them.
The beach as a public trust
Beachfront property law has evolved from ideas that date back to ancient Rome. Romans regarded the beach as “public dominion,” captured in an oft-cited quote from Roman law: “By the law of nature these things are common to all mankind; the air, running water, the sea and consequently the shores of the sea.”
Judges in medieval England evolved this idea into the legal theory known as the “public trust doctrine” – the idea that certain resources should be preserved for all to use. The U.S. inherited this concept.
Most states place the boundary between public and private property at the mean high tide line, an average tide over an astronomical epoch of 19 years. This means that at some point in the daily tidal cycle there is usually a public beach to walk along, albeit a wet and sometimes narrow one. In states such as Maine that set the boundary at mean low tide, you have to be willing to wade.
A sign marks the demarcation between public beach and private property in Santa Rosa Beach, Florida. AP Photo/Brendan Farrington
Everybody in!
Early beach access laws in coastal states were largely designed to ensure that workaday activities such as fishing and gathering seaweed for fertilizer could occur, regardless of who owned the beach frontage. Increasingly, however, public recreation became the main use of beaches, and state laws evolved to recognize this shift.
For example, in 1984 the New Jersey Supreme Court extended the reach of the Public Trust Doctrine beyond the tide line to include recreational use of the dry sandy beach. In a pioneering move, Texas codified its common law in 1959 by enacting the Open Beaches Act, which provides that the sandy beach up to the line of vegetation is subject to an easement in favor of the public.
Moreover, Texas allows this easement to “roll” as the shoreline migrates inland, which is increasingly likely in an era of rising seas. Recent litigation and amendments to the act have somewhat modified its application, but the basic principle of public rights in privately owned dry sand beach still applies.
Most states that give the public dry sand access on otherwise private property do so under a legal principle known as customary use rights. These rights evolved in feudal England to grant landless villagers access to the lord of the manor’s lands for civic activities that had been conducted since “time immemorial,” such as ritual maypole dancing.
Like Texas, North Carolina, Hawaii and the U.S. Virgin Islands all have enacted legislation that recognizes customary use of the sandy beach, and courts have upheld the laws.
Sand wars in Florida
Florida has more sandy beaches than any other state, a year-round climate to enjoy them, and a seemingly unbounded appetite for growth, all of which makes beach access a chronic flashpoint.
Along Florida’s Panhandle, pitched battles have erupted since 2016, with beachfront property owners and private resorts asserting their private property rights over the dry sandy beach and calling sheriffs to evict locals. When beachgoers responded by asserting their customary use rights, Walton County – no liberal bastion – backed them up, passing the local equivalent of a customary use law.
Florida’s Legislature stepped in and took away the local right to pass customary use laws, except according to a complicated legal process that only a few local governments have initiated. Critics argue that the law has made it harder for communities to establish lateral public access to beaches and has done little to resolve the ongoing disputes.
“To me, every single minute that beachfront owners have the right to throw up No Trespassing signs on our beaches is a minute too long. Prior to about five years ago, no one even thought about being excluded from any inch of this beach.”https://t.co/5tOBR6Ugsm
— Florida Beaches for All (@BeachesAll) March 6, 2020
What about just adding sand?
Erosion is both an enemy and a potential savior of beach access. As rising seas erode beaches, pressure to harden shorelines grows. But armoring shorelines may actually increase erosion by interfering with the natural sand supply. Adding more sea walls thus makes it increasingly likely that in many developed areas the dry sand beach will all but disappear. And what once was the public wet sand beach – the area between mean high and low tide – will become two horizontal lines on a vertical sea wall.
The sea wall around this Florida Panhandle beach house blocks public movement along the shore. Thomas Ankersen, CC BY-ND
One alternative is adding more sand. Congress authorizes and funds the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to restore beaches with sand pumped from offshore or trucked from ancient inland dunes. States must typically match these funds, and beachfront property owners occasionally collectively pitch in.
But federal regulations require communities that receive these funds to ensure there is adequate access to nourished beaches from the street, including parking. And new beaches built from submerged shorelines must be maintained for public access until rising seas submerge them again.
This requirement, along with more arcane property rights issues, led landowners in Florida’s Walton County to fight a beach nourishment project that would have protected their property from erosion. They took the case to the U.S. Supreme Court and lost.
Beach nourishment, too, is a temporary solution. Good-quality, readily accessible offshore sand supplies are already depleted in some areas. And accelerating sea level rise may outpace readily available sand at some point in the future. Squeezed between condos and coral reefs, South Florida beaches are especially at risk, leading to some desperate proposals – including the idea of grinding up glass to create beach sand.
