The current brouhaha over the possible increase of federal student loan rates masks a greater problem: We are graduating a generation of people with college-level skills that our companies don’t value. This is the root of the “jobless recovery.” Businesses need capabilities that fresh graduates don’t offer; thus the recent Huffington Post report that half of today’s college graduates are under- or unemployed.

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If your friendly sock puppet is made of recyclable materials, use it now to write a check! The Internet boom is back, but in an interesting new-millennium twist, it is followed closely by the clean technology sector. Earlier this year, the National Venture Capital Association reported that Internet storage company Dropbox received the largest single private investment of the fourth quarter of 2011 with a $250 million funding round.

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How do you e-pledge a sorority? We may soon find out. The world of higher education is changing rapidly, with the number of college students taking face-to-face classes expected to fall from more than 14 million in 2010 to only 4 million in 2015, making it level with the number of online students. The global e-learning market market is ripe for the taking. There will be fortunes made in the delivery of new educational systems.

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Turn on an episode of Seinfeld and return with me to the 1990s! This summer the
National Venture Capital Association released results for the second quarter of this year, showing that $7.5 billion was invested in 966 deals. This represented an increase of 19 percent in dollars and deals over the first quarter and continues a trend of larger deal sizes relative to 2010. Who’s getting the money?

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The final voyage of NASA’s space shuttle program represents the biggest collapse of a national exploration program since China turned inward after the remarkable 15th century voyages of Chinese Admiral Zheng He. The space shuttle descended from the original Kennedy-era response to the Soviet investment in technology development.

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