Okay-- point taken if you are encouraging the letter writer to seek out a fully funded PhD program that won't put him into further debt, and avoid those costly, underfunded or unfunded programs which are apparently full of -- your words--"untalented vanity degree" seekers.

If the LW fails to secure admission to a fully funded program, by all means he should realize that he is one of the "untalented" and understand that if he takes out additional loan money to pursue a "vanity degree," he will foolishly be subsidizing the truly talented and deserving PhD students as they inch closer toward a career that he will be forever precluded from.

My original point was and remains, if the letter writer (like most educated people who are smart but not necessarily among the elitist of the chosen elite), turns out to be one of these untalented vanity degree seekers, he should try to work his way through the program rather than take on additional student loan debt. And even if he is accepted into a funded program, he should take pains to complete his work in a timely manner and keep his cost of living down to avoid additional debt. Perhaps you will acknowledge that even a $25K living stipend in most large cities will barely put a person at the poverty line.

It was body bags.

Americans should be exposed to the sober realities of wars fought overseas. The press should never have been censored in the first place.

Karl Rove is consciously dishonest.

My grinning 13 month old did something similar to arrest my sobbing the morning our local news broke the story of the 3407 Crash. He was waiting for me to turn on Caillou, I think.

Excuse me, breathe.

You Wrote:

You don't mention the time period in which you completed your grad work, but if it was anytime in the last 20 years, you would have been fully funded at any of those schools you mention--if you were in a Ph.D. program. Likely, you received an M.A., J.D., or something other non-Ph.D. degree. Professional degrees are mostly unfunded because they offer real earning opportunities, and many grad programs subsidize their Ph.D. funding by making untalented M.A.s pay through the nose for a vanity degree.

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The breadth of your arrogance is only matched by the depth of your misinformation. But I think you truly believe what you are saying. What rarefied air you must breath.

You would think that simply rinsing out the condoms would satisfy whatever additional precautionary needs a man felt he needed to take to avoid an unwanted pregnancy. I would not begrudge a man who was not ready to become a parent taking extra precautions. It is unfortunate that he wouldn't trust his girlfriend enough to believe she wouldn't attempt to impregate herself on the sly with sperm from a used condom, but many people begin a sexual relationship with someone they don't yet fully trust. And I could buy someone with OCD washing out the condoms.

But hot sauce and OCD? Not buying it.

The hot sauce adds another layer of maliciousness. Because, in theory, it wouldn't just kill the sperm, it would punish the sly woman who inseminated herself by making her insides burn.

It is like putting Exlax in someones cookies. Delicious and malicious.

I have never heard of the hot sauce thing. But I don't think that the level of suspicion, that a man would fear that a woman would impregnate herself secretly, is beyond the pale.

If you decide to stay with this guy, make sure you are on the same page when it comes to having kids (or not) in the future. Once your married and TRYING to get pregnant, you really don't want a husband who will sabotage your efforts.

Rogues gallery? LOL. True you need an M.D. to be a professor of dermatology. Many medical researchers have M.D. and Ph.D. credentials, but the PhD isn't always required. The reason I mentioned dermatology in particular was because I had read an article in the Wall Street Journal yesterday which made mention of a professor of dermatology at Columbia earning over $4 million per year. So it was fresh in my mind as an example of what disciplines are financially valued in academia.

http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2009/02/23/highest-paid-college-employees-mostly-mds/

Otherwise, nothing in my first post with respect to student loans or graduate school funding was untrue. I went to graduate school at Stanford and my cousins completed graduate programs in the humanities at Columbia, Cornell, Duke and Yale. We are not an old money family, we are among the third generation of an immigrant family that gradually worked its way up from the unskilled labor class one generation at a time. Our "connections" are local, not national or international.

And our educations were financed by student loans. Contrary to popularly mythology, these schools do not guarantee you a massive financial payoff and lucrative career at the end of your studies. The truth is much more complicated than that, and you have so much arrogance in your voice than I can only surmise that you are currently IN a graduate program at a prestigous (and pricy) private university, given your disdain for public schools. But I could be wrong.

Good luck to you. Oh, and for the record-- earning a PhD from a reasonably priced state school is no barrier to success in academia. What matters is what you do with your degree, what you publish, and what you do with the opportunities that present themselves along the way.