via Linkedin

George Scott

The disgraced former president must repay $4.5 million to the organization -- after agreeing to settlement terms with the New York State Office of the Attorney General.

Scott founded EHS in the late 1980's with the mission of providing low-cost housing to students and faculty at institutions of high-learning throughout the city. He embarked on a far less honorable mission in 2002 when he created Student Services Inc., which he used to funnel money from EHS for years.

SSI secured numerous contracts with EHS from 2003-2009 to provide cable, internet and telephone services to residents. The sham organization purchased those services from large telecommunication companies and then proceeded to sell them to EHS at ridiculously inflated rates -- services that EHS could've easily purchased directly from the larger telecommunications companies at much lower rates.

In 2008, EHS and SSI agreed to a multi-million dollar telecommunication services agreement that would've ended in December 2013. SSI will forfeit the remaining $2 million it was expected to earn over the remainder of the contract.

Jason Lewis/Village Voice

Students, observers and activists crowded The Great Hall at Cooper Union for last night's summit.

"We're also here in solidarity for the state of education and the country as a whole," Jake Lee, a fifth-year architecture major at Cooper Union, tells the Voice. "Universal access to free education is the vital cornerstone of a functional democracy...Our country is very far from that."

CU students demonstrated their solidarity with students around the world last night by capping off yesterday's protests with a three-hour long summit on the country's student debt crises. Hundreds of people converged on the school's Great Hall to watch students, activists, artists and professors illuminate the burden of rapidly rising tuition costs and ballooning student debt.

"We have gone from, to the extent that we ever were, a welfare state to a debt-fare state...We're having to pay for very basic needs -- that should be available to all of us -- with debt," Amin Husain, a lawyer and social activist with ties to Occupy Wall Street, said. "This idea of debt is a way to maintain the status quo of chaining us into an economic system that further transfers wealth."

Well, it looks like some legislators in the House are trying to prevent this increase -- by cutting funding to health programs, that is.

Seriously.

If you weren't already bummed that 53 percent of you will likely face joblessness or underemployment upon graduation, or that university is a big waste of time and money, we have even more bad news for you.

Unless Congress gets its shit together -- which it probably won't because it's Congress -- interest rates for federally backed Stafford loans will totally swell from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent July 1, according to the Associated Press.

For some 7 million U.S. undergrads, that means that tuition would go up $1,000.

Looks like HuffPo, the "internet newspaper," might soon become a term paper mill.

Huffington Post College tweeted late last night: "Want to publish your senior thesis on the Huffington Post? Email rharrington [at] huffingtonpost [dot] com for more details."

(H/T @mylestanzer, a former Voice intern who sometimes contributes to RS).

Sam Levin

City Councilman Ydanis Rodriguez alongside students from Urban Youth Collaborative.

When Runnin' Scared first showed up to the rally, we wondered how all these students -- around 50 or so from elementary to high school ages -- were able to take a break from class and be activists for the day.

But then we realized it wasn't a break from school -- it was actually a break from winter break! For a cause that electeds and students in attendance said is crucial to the future of the city and the public school system.

Spearheaded by the Urban Youth Collaborative, the event marked the official launch of a student-led campaign called "Get Us To College," centered on the troubling statistic that just 13 percent of black and Latino New York City students are prepared for college. One in four throughout the system finish high school college-ready.

Occupy Princeton -- which, yes, it exists -- mic-checked a J.P. Morgan recruiting event on Wednesday and a Goldman Sachs event, above, on Thursday. This is similar to what happened at Harvard recently, though we haven't found a bizarrely pro-Goldman editorial in The Daily Princetonian yet.

nyu4ows.tumblr.com

The course description: