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There will be poor always, and then some

20.05.12

The bottom contract for: “At least 2.2 million more Americans, a 33 percent jump since 2000, red-hot in neighborhoods where the poverty rate is 40 percent or higher,” Bloomberg says.

The Midwest and South were hardest hit, affliction from manufacturing job losses and the housing bust. Extreme poverty doubled in Midwestern metropolitan areas from 2000 to the while of 2005-2009 and rose by a third in the South, according to the Brookings report.

Bloomberg notes the biggest increases in the reckon of concentrated poverty occurred in the Great Lakes metro regions of Toledo, Youngstown and Dayton.

The findings for the Great Lakes metro areas “take the decline of the Detroit-based auto industry,” says Dr. Hill, dean of CSU's Levin College of Urban Affairs . A recoil in the industry since 2009, and a revival in steelmaking to supply parts for shale gas research, is causing some manufacturing jobs to return, Dr. Hill tells Bloomberg.

The money-making downturn increased the ranks of those who earn less than half the federal poverty plane, which is $22,314 for a family of four in 2010. About one in 16 American workers made less than half the indigence rate in 2010, a 12.6% increase from 2007, according to a Bloomberg criticism of census data.

We need more Republicans like U.S. Rep. Steve LaTourette , who on Wednesday was among 40 GOP House of ill repute members who signaled support for revenue increases in urging a congressional supercommittee seeking a $1.5 trillion due-reduction deal to aim for cuts of $4 trillion.

A letter signed by the 40 Republicans and 60 Democrats “demonstrates viable Republican support for revenue increases that have been a sticking point for the bipartisan, 12-colleague debt-reduction panel,” Businessweek.com reports. “Democrats have been unwilling to over cuts in spending on entitlement programs such as Medicare without agreement from Republicans to exhilarate more tax revenue.”

Rep. LaTourette might get in trouble with some people in his party, but he's admirably realistic when he says this: "It's things to put the (no-tax) pledges in a bonfire. I'm not a big fan of tax increases, but anybody that thinks we can get to $4 trillion to $6 trillion (in shortfall reductions) without discussing revenues and taxes and entitlements is crazy.

Source: Crain's Cleveland Business (blog)

Chris Rickert: What is a UW-Madison degree worth?

20.05.12

In a current interview in this newspaper, UW-Madison interim chancellor David Ward acknowledged that disposition at the university has been hurt by comparatively low faculty pay.

"Having said that," he continued, "I regard as everybody has to recognize that outside the university, it's not seen as a problem. In a recession, looking at a rather high-paid, upper-middle-class occupation, if you're in a rural community or if you're in Racine, or even perhaps the East Side of Madison, there's something odd about this."

Gee, ya muse on?

It's nice Ward realizes more funding for his university might not be at the top of many priority lists, and the university might call for to rely on "self-help" and a possible "resize" of its staff, to use his politically irascible terms.

Less clear is how far the university might be willing to go to prove itself in tangible terms — like what, just, a UW-Madison degree is worth.

According to exit interviews, 59 percent of bachelor's to a considerable extent recipients last year planned to work full time; another 7 percent planned to employment part time.

Yes, the university is rightly revered as a place for important research, preparing students for upright-graduate work and creating what Ward described to me as the "complete person." But when you bump into b pay up down to it, it appears that most 18-year-olds who enroll in the university — and their parents — suppose a good job at the end of those four years and a base price of $80,000.

The university and the nonprofit higher training generally has been resistant to this measure of effectiveness.

For example, they oppose being subjected to the "moneymaking employment" rule mandated by the U.S. Department of Education last summer for for-profit colleges and most nondegree certificate-granting programs. It will make schools to effectively show their graduates have been able to get well-paying jobs by looking at whether they can refund their student loans.

Ward told me he feels a "moral pressure" to prove UW students do well after graduation, but, rationally speaking, it's "very hard to do."

The American Council on Education, which represents colleges and universities and where Minor was president before returning to UW, takes a similar position.

"The problems of getting and maintaining error-free data are very, very difficult," said Terry Hartle, a senior vice president with ACE's Separation of Government and Public Affairs.

But not impossible. Steve Schroeder, assistant dean with the m center at the UW-Madison School of Business, said the school "tracks all of our graduates." The College of Engineering's occupation services office also provides pretty detailed information about what its grads do.

Letters and Skill, the largest of the schools, doesn't. Being a liberal arts grad myself, I can see why; we aren't specifically being snatched up by Goldman Sachs.

Yet this seems like even more reason why those budding English majors should have some principle of what they're getting into when they decide to take, say, "Indigenous Literature of the Great Lakes."

Rather than the hard facts, university officials seem to wish to make the hard sell part of their plea for better treatment.

In the unedited rendering of his interview, Ward wonders how legislators and the general public might be made to have a "better dexterity" of the university's plight.

Similarly, the president and CEO of the UW Foundation, Michael Knetter, in a falsehood in The Capital Times last week, pointed out that only about 10 percent of UW alumni give to the drill in any given year and that "part of what we need to do is convince those in a position to be giving that maybe what the university did for them is usefulness" supporting.

My wife and I have never given any money to our alma maters, although we value our educations. I presume if either of us had six-figure salaries (we don't) and could reasonably trace them back to what we learned in college (not so much), we'd probably be ecstatic to spread a bit of the wealth around.

As it is, there are a lot of other things on the priority list ahead of two large, publicly supported institutions staffed by well-paid discipline and staff. Indeed, about 90 percent of graduates didn't give to their alma maters in 2010, according to the Consistory for Advancement and Support of Education.

Absent more compelling evidence to the contrary, people might put faith they already know what their universities are worth.

And in a democracy, their opinions carry as much weight as the experienced university officials who think they know better.

Contact Chris Rickert at 608-252-6198 or crickert@madison.com , as well as on Facebook and Simper (@ChrisRickertWSJ). His column appears Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday.