Harvard's tuition only is in the mid 30s now, though it sets the high standard for private institutions. What most people don't realize is that the tuition alone is not enough to put a student through college. Most students at Harvard will not have a job while they attend school there, and thus will be reliant upon loans to finance their living/board expenses. The tuition, plus room, board and student services fee for the current school year (2009-2010) is $48,868.

Cambridge is, in fact, a state-funded university with an extremely large endowment. From Wikipedia:

Comparisons between Cambridge's endowment and those of other top US universities are, however, inaccurate because being a state-funded public university, Cambridge receives a major portion of its income through education and research grants from the British Government. In 2006, it was reported that approximately one third of Cambridge's income comes from UK government funding for teaching and research, with another third coming from other research grants. Endowment income contributes around 6%

While Harvard is obviously an extreme example of cost, many students today are putting themselves through college by taking out loans (both government and private). They often have little financial support from their families and think that life will be all peaches and cream after they get their degree because they will obviously make enough to cover their costs.

University is not the only type of education that is taking monetary advantage of its students though. Some trade schools (notably the Culinary Institutes) are charging $30,000 for a "culinary arts" degree. I had a friend who went to one of these schools for 18 months to get his degree. However, after putting himself through school and working full-time at Trader Joes, he was shocked and amazed to find out that most jobs available to graduates of the program were less than what he was currently making as a grocery handler/stocker. How do you pay back a private $30,000 loan on $9-10/hour and have enough left over to provide for your own living expenses?

Unfortunately, since Danger/Microsoft now own the Sidekick, Bing is now the default GPS/location search program on my device. While I have changed my mobile internet options to search Google rather than Bing, Google does not have a free application that will identify stores and their locations effectively. Navigating to maps.google.com will not work on my device, even on the mobile version. Whether this was intentionally broken by MSFT or is just a failure of mobile internet remains to be seen.

Bing isn't ridiculously terrible, but I really hate Microsoft. I can't wait for my contract to end so that I can get a different phone (that isn't a Microsoft POS).