The hot topic on campus is financial aid, and everyone’s asking the same question: is Cornell going to follow the other Ivies’ lead and come out against student loans?

With Harvard, Yale and Princeton eliminating all loans in favor of grants, and Dartmouth, Columbia and Penn promising debt-free packages to low-income students, we’re sticking out like a Big Red sore thumb in continuing to offer loans instead of grants to struggling undergrads. This may all change within the next 36 hours, however, following President Skorton’s announcement last night that the University would unveil a more “robust” plan for financial aid.

Robust or not, the new plan may amount to too little, too late.

It wasn’t only in the foyers and living rooms of fraternities and sororities that rush took place last week, but also on computer screens across campus, as a website posting offering rankings and descriptions of Cornell’s various Greek houses made it all the way to Facebook.

The rankings, posted by a Cornell student under the pseudonym, cornellrushweek, sought to “present a general Cornell consensus about each house rather than a personal one,” in the poster’s words. For the most part, cornellrushweek posited, “people in the Greek system who read these will agree with my descriptions and rankings.”

And from the comments found below the initial blog — 285 responses on 19 pages — a consensus indeed emerged.

My first encounter with John Trentacoste ’08 was in the classroom. As two of the only freshmen in our introductory Spanish class, “Juan” and “Roberto” as our samba-wearing pony-tailed professor, Pedro, called us — we were seated next to one another, often flanking the object of our mutual affection, a senior named Jackie, who, as Cornell’s student-elected trustee, tried to prevail on our agitated debates on anything from abortion to school policy (these did not take place in Spanish).

Tomorrow we depart from house and from dorm

From a long autumnal season, too globally warm

Came the first flake of snow just a few days ago

And whence we return, winter’s pain we shall know

Yet on the Eve of Thanksgiving, there’s good news to tell ya …

… after those rocky Lehman years, we’re amidst Pax Cornellia:

We can be thankful, most of all, for our global expansion

No locale’s too far from Skorton’s Cayuga Heights mansion

He’s jetsetting to China, making moves in Qatar,

The Big Red Empire is extending afar!

And while we’re at it, let’s say thanks for our budding endowment

We’ve got much more cash than we’ve up-until-now spent:

Last June we had but four-point-three billion in the bank

We seniors find ourselves, to quote Churchill, at the “end of the beginning” — a transient junction in life most observable here at the Ithaca airport, where students in suits shuttle to New York each week to plan the “beginning of the end.” Though the worlds they’re leaving and entering are dauntingly different, they’re increasingly marked by a similar phenomenon: a culture of debt.

If I were such a student in a suit (I prefer pajamas), I wouldn’t be feeling very optimistic at the moment. As the result of backing mortgage-lending companies’ dubious loans to homeowners with low levels of credit, the nation’s largest banks are facing serious write offs and having to cut jobs in their investment banking sectors.

It’s not everyday that gross human rights abuses overseas are willfully ignored by the American people, as is the case in the ongoing genocide in Darfur. Sometimes, atrocities in foreign lands are so covered up by oppressive regimes that the Western world hardly hears about them. But in the case of Burma, what is happening there has been happening for more than a half century, and the story is available right here in Ithaca. So listen up.

In a nation so embattled that even its proper name is disputed — the U.N. recognizes it as Myanmar, but pro-democracy states like the United States and Great Britain prefer the original Burma — the fight for freedom, in the form of 100,000 protesters led by Buddhist monks, is on the march.

Halloween came early this year, with much premature fanfare and costumed fraternizing across campus on Saturday night. For traditionalists who celebrate All Hallow’s Eve tomorrow, on its rightful date of Oct. 31, there’s another opportunity for scantily clad coeds to turn a trick (or treat).

If you’re short on ideas (or threewishes.com isn’t offering express shipping), there’s a semester’s worth of Cornell happenings to Halloweenize tomorrow night. My friend Yaya Chang ’08 was generous enough to illustrate our favorite pairs of outfits.

In Olin Café last week, a freshman girl pondered aloud her academic future: should she pursue her studies in Spanish or switch to international relations? “Double major,” her friend suggested, “you can work for the Spanish government.” Having overheard the conversation, a senior cautioned the wide-eyed newcomers against overextending themselves, as in his words, “The most important thing you can graduate with is a high GPA.” (My response was a girlfriend.)

Evidently, it’s not just civic knowledge that depreciates during our four years in Ithaca, but also youthful idealism.

Last week, Thomas Friedman dubbed us “Generation Q” — the Quiet Americans, so plugged in (and tuned out) that our idealism stops at the computer monitor. With so much interconnectedness among the Facebook-YouTube-MySpace cohort, and so much wrong in the world, Friedman wonders why our generation looks so complacent.

The twentysomethings fire back that their technological moving and shaking is being mistaken for indolence; as a recent Sun editorial argued, activism has “transformed from sensationalized 1960s tear-gas rallies to online petitions and Internet discussion boards.”

The Achilles heel of the Cornell experience is our lack of a core curriculum.

This emerging truth is being confirmed and reconfirmed from inside and outside the University by a flurry of evidence that can no longer be ignored.

While many of our competitors are embracing core curricula with greater intensity, we are backing away from a nucleus of essential knowledge. Columbia hails its core curriculum as the “cornerstone of a Columbia education”; Yale’s Directed Studies program is overflowing with more applicants than it can hold; and next year, N.Y.U. will offer General Studies as a major in its Arts & Sciences School for the first time.