working moms

Highly skilled women will lose about a quarter of a million dollars, or as much as a third of their lifetime earnings, by choosing to have a child, making the prospect of raising a family a far more expensive one for college grads than their less-educated counterparts, a new study shows.

It's a sad truth: Debt forces people into choices they'd rather not make. A survey conducted by Sallie Mae subsidiary Nellie Mae found that 21% of student borrowers had delayed having children because of their loans, and 14% delayed getting married because of their student debt loads.

A growing list of companies have jumped on the "happiness coaching" bandwagon. To its practitioners, it is a proven method that can lead to changed lives. But to its detractors, its just another gimmick for squeeze more work out of dispirited employees.

Those 5.7 million jobs lost since December 2007 have been almost overwhelmingly lost by men (about 80 percent of them). So while the overall unemployment rate in April was 8.9 percent, it broke down between adult men and women decidedly in the favor of the fairer sex; men had a jobless rate of 9.4...