"For-profit" colleges have come under fire for saddling students with big debts in exchange for dim job prospects. But what about "real" colleges? They're pushing huge debts on students, too. We crunched the numbers to find the worst (NYU).

New York's been seen as a metropolis of cleanliness and progress for the last decade, as superhero crimefighting mayors have cleaned up our city to sparkle against the lawless lands of elsewhere. Turns out we were kinda lying. Whoops!

In June, when we crunched the numbers provided by a Vistage CEO confidence survey showing declining business confidence in the Valley, commenter edmDusty argued, "Most industries are cyclical. I doubt you can find any significant trends just using two quarters." While unlikely to satisfy edmDusty, we can now report that the trend has continued into the third quarter. In the second quarter, the margin between those Northern California business leaders who saw profitability improving versus decreasing was 32%. This quarter it has declined to 27%. Previously, the margin between those who saw revenues increasing versus decreasing was 54%, it is now 44%.

Silicon Valley running out of phone numbers — availability of numbers beginning with the 408 area code might cease come 2010. [Contra Costa Times]

Last week, Newsweek ran a brief "Catch Up on Hot Blogs" column. They suggested that readers check out Perez Hilton's celeb-watching website because "the snarky one gets 105 million page views a month. That's hot." Other articles over the past few months have given estimates for his traffic ranging anywhere from 2 million page views daily (Entertainment Weekly) to 4.5 million page views a day (Globe and Mail) to a whopping 4 million unique visitors a day (Stuff, pictured). He's gotten lots of ink from the mainstream media lately; in addition to reporting on his ongoing legal drama (he's being sued by a number of photo agencies for using their photos without permission), everyone seems to be in awe of his seemingly astronomical traffic numbers. And the kids love him! He's being lauded as, of all things, a musical tastemaker in addition to a gossipmonger. But how much traffic does he really get?

The issue of People with Paris Hilton on the cover sold more than 1.5 million copies at the newsstand and, reportedly, was one of the magazine's top 10 sellers so far this year. If that's true, then People executive editor Larry Hackett sure does sound tepid about it: "I'm pleased. It came in right where it was supposed to be." [WWD]