Sorbonne Confidential

Unions call for back to school strike in France September 27, Education Strikes in France

Education: les syndicats du privé appellent à la grève du 27 septembre, une première

via www.lepoint.fr

Five money tips for every college freshman from the Wall Street Journal

Some good advice for college students from Veronica Dagher, of  The Wall Street Journal

Five money rules to remember:

1. Budget (to live like a student)

2. Show your ID to get discounts

3. Get a job to help pay for spring break and dinners out with friends

4. Protect yourself against identity theft : guard your Social Security number; avoid multiple "free" credit cards, don't use shared campus computers or mobile devices to conduct online banking, shred statements, and check your monthly bank and credit card statements

5. Start saving

To view complete WSJ article click here

In France, elite Science Po tries to broaden admissions

In place of the single route to entry, Sciences Po instituted a threefold admissions procedure: French candidates could take an entry exam in their final year of secondary school; international candidates, who at the time made up only a small proportion of the applicants, could submit a dossier including both school grades and scores on either national exams, such as the British A-levels, or standardized tests including the SAT in the United States. French students who achieved unusually high grades on their baccalauréat would also be admitted. Most controversially, Sciences Po approached 85 secondary schools in disadvantaged areas of France and agreed to accept their most able graduates regardless of exam results.

via www.nytimes.com "a Bastion of Privilege No More" - NYTimes.com

Can the Swiss Save the Romansh Language?

Villagers Debate Whether to Stick to Dialects of Ancient Roman Tongue or a Cobbled-Together 'Esperanto via online.wsj.com

"The tiff originated in 1996, when Romansh became Switzerland's fourth official language even though only roughly 60,000 people speak it. But its official status came at a price: There is not one distinct Romansh language, but rather five main dialects scattered across the isolated mountain valleys around Val Müstair. To give Romansh the critical mass to survive—and to cut down on translation costs—Bern quickly adopted as the official language a standardized version cobbled together from various dialects. The result is Romansh Grischun, or RG, as it was immediately dubbed"

"Since 2003, the government has paid village schools 2,000 Swiss francs (around $2,450) per child to stop teaching dialects and convert to RG, with dialects to be phased out entirely by 2020. It even published cartoons in RG in an effort to entice young people to speak it. About half of Romansh villages have converted to RG". for more see WSJ

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Romansh is one of the four national languages of Switzerland, along with German, Italian and French. It is one of the Rhaeto-Romance languages, believed to have descended from the Vulgar Latin variety spoken by Roman eraoccupiers of the region, and, as such, is closely related to French, Occitan and Lombard, as well as other Romance languages to a lesser extent. As of the 2000 Swiss Census, it is spoken by 35,095^[1] residents of the canton of Graubünden (Grisons) as the language of "best command", and 61,815 in the "best command" plus "most spoken" categories.^[2] Spoken now by around 0.9% of Switzerland's 7.7 million inhabitants, it is Switzerland's least-used national language in terms of number of speakers. - Wikipedia