The Way We Live Now: For the children. Well, for the kids. Well, for the college kids. They're kids, really. They need protection from this cruel, dirty world. And when the colleges go broke? Where will the kids go?

It's happening. Already, it's happening. You can't run a college just on money from college kids, any more. They leave in the summertime—but there you are, the college, with your buildings sucking up electricity and your football field sucking up sprinkler water and your janitors sucking up meager compensation and all your endowment investments plummeting, and all those things cost money, economists tell us. Colleges need revenue to be incoming in the summer fiscal period or else they are going to be broke ass broke in the remaining fiscal period, you see. So everywhere, from Sarah Lawrence to schools full of less sensitive souls than those at Sarah Lawrence, colleges are selling summer wrestling camps and theater camps and jazz institutes and classes for the public and at Sarah Lawrence even, get this, a program called "Summer in the City" which "involves faculty-led excursions to New York City," because who better to show you the gritty underbelly of New York Fuckin City than a Sarah Lawrence faculty member?

People pay for it, is the important thing.

Consider the alternative. Colleges unable to pay their bills. Tuition skyrockets. Kids can't afford to be in college. A year at NYU, for example, already costs more than a mid-grade surface-to-air missile. If kids can't afford to be there, they'll just be wandering around dazed in Washington Square Park. We all know what happens then:

Joseph Bacon, 45, was busted after duping at least eight NYU students with the crack-pipe version of the "dropped glasses" bit — in which he'd bump into strangers, tell them they broke his gear and demand payment, cops said.

If eight of our best and brightest who are enrolled in school can be duped in this crackhead scam, what hope do they have for surviving in the wild? Kindly, wealthy Greenwich Village residents are prepared to pay to put their own army of Rent-a-Cops in Washington Square to protect the wandering kids from the predations of the unwashed, but will it be enough? Please give and give some more, to your local college wrestling camp. Otherwise children will die.