Media clips
-
Critics of the contemporary reform regime argue that these initiatives, though seemingly sensible in their original framing, are motivated by interests other than educational improvement and are causing genuine harm to American students and public schools. Here are some of the criticisms: the reforms have self-interest and profit motives, not educational improvement, as their basis; corporate interests are reaping huge benefits from these reform initiatives andspending millions of dollars lobbying to keep those benefits flowing; three big foundations (Gates, Broad, and Walton Family) are funding much of the backing for the corporate reforms and are spending billions to market and sell reforms that don’t work; ancillary goals of these reforms are to bust teacher unions,disempower educators, and reduce spending on public schools; standardized testing is enormously expensive in terms both of public expenditures and the diversion of instruction time to test prep; over a third of charter schools deliver“significantly worse” results for students than the traditional public schools from which they were diverted; and, finally, that these reforms have produced few benefits and have actually caused harm, especially to kids in disadvantaged areas and communities of color. (On that last overall point, see this scathing new reportfrom the Economic Policy Institute.)
The Atlantic April 26, 2013 -
Elise Gould, a health care economist at the Economic Policy Institute, said she expects the effects of the employer mandate to be minimal.
“I don’t think that it is going to lead to much job loss,” she said. “There may be some shifting in hours to avoid the mandate. I think that would be small though.”
Gould also added that she expects employers to take many different factors into account when considering expansion, with the insurance requirement being just one small factor.
Medill News Service April 24, 2013 -
Recent college graduates faced an average unemployment rate of 8.8 percent fromMarch 2012 through February 2013, according to the Economic Policy Institute, and an underemployment rate of 18.3 percent. A January report from the Center for College Affordability and Productivity found nearly half of all college graduates are working jobs that don’t require a degree.
The Huffington Post April 24, 2013 -
Unfortunately, for many students, earning a college degree does not guarantee a job in one’s field of study after graduation.
A May 2012 Economic Policy Institute report on the labor market for young graduates revealed that approximately 54% of recent college graduates are either unemployed or underemployed. Underemployment refers to those with higher education in positions that do not require a college degree.
USA Today College April 24, 2013 -
A series of new reports from Washington think-tanks this month detailed the costs Millenials have borne during the Great Recession.
The first, by the Economic Policy Institute, examined the state of the labor market for this year’s graduating high school and college seniors. Young workers, on the whole, face an unemployment rate of 16.2 percent, more than double the national average. But those with only a high school degree fare worse: Nearly one-third are unemployed, and more than half cannot find as much work as they would like. Prospects are even bleaker for graduates of color.
Campus Progress April 24, 2013 -
The report, released in March, came as Congress was in the thick of debating immigration reform legislation. The blueprint that Congress came up with includes a new “W visa” program for low-skilled jobs, which would let workers switch jobs and eventually petition for a green card, explains Daniel Costa, an immigration policy analyst at the Economic Policy Institute.
But Costa doesn’t expect there will be a requirement to provide healthcare. Farmworkers will likely only be given health insurance “if the employer provides it.”
In These Times April 24, 2013 -
Expanding access to college education is a key mechanism for building a strong middle class. The college wage premium—the percent increase that a college graduate earns compared to a similar worker without a college degree—is approximately 45 percent, according to data from the Economic Policy Institute. Furthermore, the overall middle class has shrunk as the supply of highly skilled workers hasn’t kept up with the demand for those skills. Approximately one-third of the rise in income inequality since the late 1970s is due to the rising college premium.
Center for American Progress April 24, 2013 -
If you use visa demand as a kind of proxy for labor demand, it’s not hard to grasp how businesses view the problem. There just aren’t enough visas to hire all the foreign workers employers want. But some labor economists see nothing particularly special about foreign workers, aside from their cost, that should recommend them more highly compared to their American counterparts.
“The positions these workers fill are entry-level positions,” said Daniel Costa, an immigration lawyer at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington. “They’re cogs in a machine.”
National Journal April 17, 2013 -
Yet critics of the H1B program say the visas put many foreign workers at a deep disadvantage. They tend to get paid less and cannot easily leave the companies that brought them to the United States unless they obtain green cards. In addition to proposed higher wages, the Senate plan seeks to protect U.S. workers by prohibiting U.S. companies from displacing Americans with foreign employees.
The Washington Post April 17, 2013 -
Is it conclusive? One response has been to argue that the causation is backwards, or that slower growth leads to higher debt-to-GDP ratios. Josh Bivens and John Irons made this case at the Economic Policy Institute. But this assumes that the data is correct. From the beginning there have been complaints that Reinhart and Rogoff weren’t releasing the data for their results (e.g. Dean Baker). I knew of several people trying to replicate the results who were bumping into walls left and right – it couldn’t be done.
Salon April 17, 2013