The Business of Education

Only 55 percent of young Americans have jobs, lowest since WWII

2011-09-24T09:58:00.001-07:00

Only 55 percent of young Americans have jobs, lowest since WWII

http://m.yahoo.com/w/news_america/blogs/lookout/battered-downturn-young-americans-put-off-adulthood-160406776.html?orig_host_hdr=news.yahoo.com&.intl=us&.lang=en-us

Seeking a better pay equation | ajc.com

2011-06-26T20:39:00.000-07:00

Seeking a better pay equation | ajc.com

Pattie Maes and Pranav Mistry demo SixthSense | Video on TED.com

2011-06-26T19:10:00.000-07:00

According to the folks at a conference I'm attending, this is how technology will become our "Sixth Sense"....

Pattie Maes and Pranav Mistry demo SixthSense | Video on TED.com

Conrad Wolfram: Teaching kids real math with computers | Video on TED.com

2011-06-26T19:06:00.000-07:00

Saw this at a conference he's at in TN...deals with how to teach Math these days....what do you think?

Conrad Wolfram: Teaching kids real math with computers | Video on TED.com

David Brooks: The social animal | Video on TED.com

2011-06-26T18:53:00.000-07:00

David Brooks: The social animal | Video on TED.com

UGA leads, Georgia Tech trails in diplomas among state lawmakers

2011-06-14T13:15:00.000-07:00

http://blogs.ajc.com/political-insider-jim-galloway/2011/06/13/uga-leads-georgia-tech-trails-in-diplomas-among-state-lawmakers/

U.S. workers need more training - GE chief

2011-06-13T05:12:00.001-07:00

http://money.cnn.com/2011/06/13/news/economy/job_creation_immelt/?section=money_latest

Google Chrome OS Pilot Program Provides Free Laptops to High School Students

2011-02-15T10:44:00.000-08:00

Google Chrome OS Pilot Program Provides Free Laptops to High School Students

By Leila Meyer
02/14/11

Google delivered a truckload of free Cr-48 laptops to Astoria High School in Astoria, OR earlier this month as part of its Chrome operating system (OS) pilot program. Astoria is one of several high schools in the United States selected to be part of the pilot program.

As part of the program, every student and teacher in the pilot schools will receive a free laptop. In return, Google wants the students and teachers to integrate the laptop into their classroom, homework, and personal lives and provide feedback on the experience. Google will use this feedback to refine the Chrome OS before it becomes available to the general public.

Chrome OS is Google's new browser-based operating system. The Cr-48 is a special test laptop designed specifically for the pilot program. It boots in 10 seconds and connects instantly to the Internet through either WiFi or 3G. It is designed for cloud computing exclusively because it does not have an accessible hard drive for installing software and saving documents.

As part of the pilot program, students and teachers at participating high schools will use the Cr-48 laptops and Web apps instead of traditional computers and software. And because every student will have one of these laptops to use in class or at home, teachers can fully integrate the technology into their instruction without worrying about the digital divide.

The ways the laptops can be used in the classroom is limited only by the teachers' imaginations. Teachers can set up online groups using Web apps like Google Groups where the students can interact and collaborate even when they're not in the classroom. Students can e-mail assignments to teachers using online e-mail applications like Gmail. Students can collaborate on projects using Google Docs or other Web apps. Students can start working on an assignment at school, save it to the cloud, continue working on it at home, and then access it again at school the next day, thereby eliminating excuses about forgotten homework. And because students can take the laptops home with them at the end of the day, those who had no home computer or had to share with other family members now have unlimited computer access whether at school, home, or the local coffee shop--anywhere there is an Internet connection.

The Chrome OS pilot program is open to individuals, businesses, schools, nonprofits, and developers based in the United States. For more information and to apply for the pilot program, visit the Chrome OS pilot program Web site.

About the Author

Leila Meyer is a technology writer based in British Columbia. She can be reached at leilameyer@gmail.com.

Is Your City Extreme?

2011-02-12T08:08:00.001-08:00

Is Your City Extreme?

Hottest or coldest, richest or poorest, extreme communities present challenges and opportunities to government and business

By Venessa Wong

Founded by the Spanish in 1565, St. Augustine, Fla., is the oldest city in the U.S. About two hundred miles to the southwest, Largo, Fla., is the city with the oldest population.

A city near Tampa, Largo saw the percentage of residents aged 85 and older nearly double from 3.4 percent in 1990 to 6.1 percent in 2009, according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates. The U.S. average is 1.8 percent for ages 85 and up.

Most cities in the U.S. are able to maintain a reasonable balance between rich and poor, old and young, healthy and unhealthy. Knowing the characteristics of a city help define its economic health and quality of life. It helps local government plan for what kind of services will be needed and what the tax base will be. Furthermore, it also determines what kind of businesses will flourish there and who will want to move there—or move away.

To find out which were America's Most Extreme Cities, Businessweek.com compiled a list of extremes: hottest and coldest, fattest and fittest, oldest and youngest, richest and poorest, and reviewed data from a number of different sources, including the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Surveys (ACS), the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the National Climactic Data Center, and others. The findings were adjusted to ensure that the town or city in question had minimum population requirements and were not skewed by the existence of such unusual institutions as prisons. (Click here to see more extreme places, based on ACS estimates.)

What's Hot, What's Not
How does a city go to extremes? In some cases, the answer is purely geographical. Lake Havasu City, Ariz., is the city with the hottest July temperatures. (Death Valley has higher temperatures, but it is not a city.) To use another example, Williams County, N.D., has the nation's strongest job market, thanks to an economy based on agriculture and oil.

In many other cases, though, the answer is more selective. "We're a country where segregation by economics, race, and ethnicity is part of the landscape," says William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution. In some cases, demographic extremes can result from migration—or lack of migration, he adds, as people tend to want to live with people similar to them.

Supporting communities with huge demographic imbalances can be difficult. As regulators, businesses, and community leaders prepare to meet the demands of a U.S. population that is growing, aging, and struggling to find work, places with extreme demographic disparities will have to address their own outsize needs.

Small Towns, Big Families
One place that exceeds many demographic averages: the village of Kiryas Joel, a Satmar Hasidic community about 50 miles from Manhattan in New York's Orange County, where more than half the residents are younger than 15, a larger portion than any community nationwide with a population of 20,000 or more, according to Census Bureau estimates. (Hildale, Utah, has the highest proportion of children but has a population of only around 1,500.) By contrast, about one-fifth of the U.S. population is under age 15.

As birth control is not practiced and large families are customary, families in Kiryas Joel typically have eight to 10 children, and each year 150 new households are created, according to Ari Felberman, public relations director for the village. Only about one in three Kiryas Joel residents are aged 18 and older, and the village has a median age of 11.9, well below the national median of 36.8, estimates the U.S. Census Bureau.

This growth creates many challenges for elected officials, who are trying to meet ballooning housing, employment, and infrastructure needs. Also, with many single-income households, the village has a high poverty rate (though many trends often associated with poor areas, such as crime and divorce, are rare, due to strong family and community bonds, says Felberman). Median family income is less than one-third the national median, and more than two-thirds of residents live below the poverty level, according to 2005-09 five-year estimates from the Census Bureau's American Community Survey.

Few Jobs, Low Incomes
Poverty is even more pervasive in Escobares, a small border town in Texas, where an estimated one in nine residents lives below the poverty line. Many poor live along the border, but "we have some people who are making it," says Escobares Mayor Noel Escobar. He says he hopes to create more jobs and attract skilled labor to the area by working with nearby schools and colleges, but "this is a very long hill to climb."

Nationwide, the standard of living is generally high, but recent Census Bureau data show that 43.6 million Americans, or one in seven people, lived in poverty in 2009, the highest rate since 1994.

Poverty rates nationwide have only been exacerbated by the recent rise in joblessness. The U.S. unemployment rate, 9.4 percent in December, was higher than in many developed economies, according to the most recent international data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The unemployment rate in Canada was 6.6 percent, in Sweden 7.7 percent, and in Japan 4.6 percent, for example.

Extreme joblessness was most apparent in Imperial County, Calif., an agriculture and government-based labor market where an estimated 28.3 percent of the workforce was unemployed in December. The county also had the highest jobless numbers in the U.S. in 2008 and 2009, and in 2010 it had one of the highest foreclosure rates in California, 6.67 percent, according to RealtyTrac.

"It can be difficult for some places to break negative patterns," says Mark Mather, associate vice-president for domestic programs at the Population Reference Bureau, a nonprofit organization in Washington, D.C. Poor communities, for example, may have trouble retaining residents and attracting businesses due to joblessness and low income.

Blue Collar, White Collar
Even places that are disproportionately well off are not without challenges (of course, their problems are relatively easier ones to handle). In the Boston suburb of Newton, Mass., for example—the country's most educated city, where nearly half of adults have master's, professional, or doctoral degrees—administrators are struggling to protect the jobs of firemen, police, and teachers and keep the unemployment rate at about 6 percent.

It is always possible for a city to become less extreme. Not so long ago Detroit was one of the world's wealthiest cities and New York one of the most dangerous. Today, these realities have been turned upside down. Detroit's economy entered a downward spiral. Improvements to public safety in New York made it one of the country's safest big cities.

Extreme places have challenges that most places do not deal with. Still, if New York and Detroit are any example, the situation anywhere can change drastically. There will always be communities with demographic anomalies—even if they shift around. Who knows, maybe in 100 years, Largo may have the youngest population in the U.S.

Click here to see some of America's most extreme places.

Wong is a lifestyle and real estate reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek.

Study: Too Much Emphasis Placed On Bachelor's Degree As Route To Success

2011-02-02T05:50:00.000-08:00

Study: Too Much Emphasis Placed On Bachelor's Degree As Route To Success.

The AP (2/2, Armario) reports, "The current US education system is failing to prepare millions of young adults for successful careers by providing a one-size-fits-all approach, and it should take a cue from its European counterparts by offering greater emphasis on occupational instruction, a Harvard University study published Wednesday concludes. The two-year study by the Pathways to Prosperity Project at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education notes that while much emphasis is placed in high school on going on to a four-year college, only 30 percent of young adults in the United States successfully complete a bachelor's degree." The AP adds, "The report highlights an issue that has been percolating among education circles: That school reform should include more emphasis on career-driven alternatives to a four-year education. ... US Education Secretary Arne Duncan will deliver opening remarks at the report's release in Washington."

Education Week (2/2, Gewertz) adds the report authors "contend that their vision would expand opportunity for all students, especially those who face the dimmest prospects now because their education stops at high school. Rather than derailing some students from higher learning, their system would actually open more of those pathways, they say, by offering sound college preparation and rigorous career-focused, real-world learning, and by defining clear routes from secondary school into certificate or college programs."

Retirement: Live Long and Don't Prosper

2011-01-28T20:50:00.000-08:00

January 25, 2011, 11:01PM EST

Retirement: Live Long and Don't Prosper
Confusion about the life expectancy of the Baby Boom generation bedevils fiscal planning and retirement planning

By Ben Steverman

As the 79-million-strong Baby Boom generation starts hitting age 65, demographers and medical researchers are increasingly at odds over how long they'll live. It's a question with major implications on a national level, for how much Social Security and Medicare will cost future generations of Americans. On a personal level, life expectancy complicates plans for saving and spending: Live too long and risk running out of money; die young and you can't take it with you.

At least one member of a 65-year-old couple can expect to live for another 23 years, to age 88, according to 2010 Social Security data. That's just an average, however, and there is a 30 percent chance of living past 92. Moreover, those numbers are based on when current retirees—the baby boomers' parents—are passing away.

Medical advances are keeping more people alive for longer than ever. The current life expectancy for an American at birth is 77.9 years—58 percent longer than in 1900, when the average life expectancy was 49 years. According to the most recent data available from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, from 2000 to 2007 the rate of death from heart disease, the leading cause of death, plunged 19 percent, while the rate for cancer, the second-leading cause of death, fell 5 percent. Thanks to medication that controls blood pressure and other advances, 95,000 fewer Americans died of heart disease in 2007 than in 2000, even as the population increased.

If such gains continue, as expected, they will swell the federal tab for old-age benefits. Adding 3.1 to 7.9 years to life expectancy by 2050 would add an estimated $3.2 trillion to $8.3 trillion to Medicare and Social Security outlays above current expectations, according to a 2009 study by the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on an Aging Society.

Obesity Epidemic
But wait. Deteriorating American lifestyles are taking away some of the gains from advanced medicine. The rate of obesity in the U.S. has risen 48 percent in 15 years, and by 2020, 45 percent of the population is expected to be obese, according to a 2009 study in The New England Journal of Medicine. The study concluded that the rise in obesity, if unchecked, could be enough to outweigh all the positive effects from falling smoking rates.

"This longevity explosion that we have been experiencing in America since 1950 may not continue at the same pace because of the obesity epidemic," says Richard Besdine, professor of medicine at Brown University and medical officer for the American Federation for Aging Research. He adds: "Americans are literally killing themselves through their mouths."

In any case, there is a good chance that even as Americans live longer lives, they will spend more years disabled, needing expensive care. That's already happening: Though deaths from heart ailments or cancer have declined, deaths from Alzheimer's disease have increased, from 49,558 in 2000 to 74,632 in 2007, according to the CDC. "The longer you live, the higher the risk" for Alzheimer's, Besdine says, noting the disease has no good treatments. "What we want to do is extend the nondisabled part of old age."

Experts say there are steps baby boomers can take to protect their portfolios from uncertainty about both the length and cost of their retirements. On the most basic level, retirees and pre-retirees could stay on top of longevity projections. A Society of Actuaries survey in 2005 found two-thirds of retirees underestimate the average life expectancy at their age, with 42 percent doing so by five years or more. The Social Security website has a life expectancy calculator and other tools for estimating government retirement benefits.

Annuities' Appeal
Still, even individuals' well-informed guesses can be wrong by a decade or more, says Anthony Webb, research economist at Boston College's Center for Retirement Research. To guard against this risk when planning for retirement, many more Americans should be buying annuities, he says. Insurance companies structure annuities in a variety of ways; one common option is an annuity that pays out a regular income stream that ends when the recipient dies. For most Americans, especially healthy people who expect long lives, it makes sense to lock in an annuity at age 65 rather than later in retirement, Webb adds.

Despite longevity risks, relatively few Americans buy annuities. A Society of Actuaries survey released Jan. 5 found just 20 percent of Americans age 45 to 70 have plans to buy an annuity or similar financial instrument. One reason may be the costs and complexities involved in annuity products. Or, Webb says, it could be the reluctance to pay for a investment product that, if they die too young, retirees might never collect on.

Also, by delaying Social Security payments until age 70—instead of 62 or 65—retirees can increase monthly payments and make the program a far more valuable income stream late in life.

One obvious way to finance a longer retirement is to save more, either by spending less or working longer. If maximum life spans extend to 100 years or even past 110, longer careers will be easier for older Americans and might even be psychologically beneficial, says Steven Austad, a professor at the University of Texas Barshop Institute for Longevity and Aging Studies in San Antonio. "The retirement age of 65 makes no sense whatsoever anymore," Austad says.

Steverman is a reporter for Bloomberg News.

Facebook to let advertisers republish user posts | ajc.com

2011-01-27T09:45:00.000-08:00

Facebook to let advertisers republish user posts | ajc.com

Americans Are Still Overwhelmed by Excess

2011-01-14T18:04:00.000-08:00

January 13, 2011, 5:30PM EST

Americans Are Still Overwhelmed by Excess

A lack of moderation by U.S. consumers has made an abundance of everything from food to technology too much of a good thing. Where does all this excess come from?

By Venessa Wong

America is the land of plenty. Unfortunately these days, that often means plenty of foreclosures, bankruptcies, childhood obesity, greenhouse gases, stress, and even plenty of debt. We have so much debt that on January 6, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said that Congress needs to raise the federal debt level beyond the existing $14.29 trillion ceiling during the first quarter of 2011 or risk defaulting on U.S. debt and losing access to global credit markets.

Whether the solution is for the government to cut spending or raise taxes, the nation has a problem: Americans' eyes are bigger than their stomachs. Given an obesity rate of 34 percent, that's saying a lot. As any Econ 101 student knows, it's not that debt in itself is bad. Credit can be a good thing if used carefully to increase purchasing power for such useful things as home mortgages or new factories. The problem is that we have too much. That question of scale applies across the board to everything from food to education to technology to just plain stuff. Too much of anything is bad for us, as individuals and as a society. From a nation of self-sufficient farmers and thrifty merchants we have evolved into a country where we not only want more than we have but too often want more than is good for us.

Our lack of restraint as individuals has contributed to some serious economic, ecological, and social challenges. Compulsive shoppers, for example (the U.S. has an estimated 19 million to 28 million of them, reported stltoday.com), agonize over credit card debt. In 2007 household debt reached nearly 100 percent of gross domestic product, according to Credit Suisse. About one-third of America's adult population qualifies as obese, yet maintains unhealthy eating and exercise practices; only about four percent have much chance of losing enough weight to achieve mere "overweight," status, say Harvard researchers.

As natural and economic limits have expanded—a process fostered by technology—many things that were beneficial in moderation have become problematic in excess.

"Temptations Far More Evolved"
It's not just a matter of greed. "It is a time of extreme affluence and technological empowerment. This empowers all of our desires, including those we don't prefer," Daniel Akst, author of We Have Met the Enemy: Self-Control in an Age of Excess (January 2011, Penguin Press), tells Businessweek.com. "It's not that we have less willpower than we used to, but rather that modern life immerses us daily in a set of temptations far more evolved than we are," he writes in his book.

These temptations drive our economy: Real GDP nearly doubled in the 25 years from 1984 to 2009, according to data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. That boom followed broad awareness of conspicuous consumption in the U.S. In 1955, economist Victor Lebow wrote a seminal article in the Journal of Retailing. "Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfactions, our ego satisfactions, in consumption," he wrote.

Some economists that include 2001 Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz have been trying to identify the limits of GDP as an indicator of economic performance and social progress while developing an alternative way to measure social well-being.

Indeed, greater economic growth does not lead to a happier, healthier, or more successful populace, according to research by the Equality Trust, a London nonprofit that has found no relationship between income per head and social well-being in rich countries. Trends such as increasing stress and declining levels of happiness over the last 30 years suggest that abundance has not contributed to our sense of well-being.

"The Myth of Growth Has Failed Us"
Assumptions about the benefits of increased economic activity must be questioned, says Tim Jackson in Prosperity Without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet (Earthscan Publications, December 2009). "The modern economy is structurally reliant on economic growth for its stability," he writes, and when growth falters, politicians panic, businesses struggle to survive, people lose jobs and homes, and a spiral of recession looms. "The myth of growth has failed us," concludes Jackson.

So if abundance doesn't guarantee well-being, why do we crave more? To start with, economics tells us that human wants are infinite, even though resources are limited.

Moreover, says psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, our fascination with excess results from fear that whatever it is we desire could go away, run out, or be taken by someone else. Our true appetites are sensible, even as many pursue huge appetites in fantasy, he writes in the Guardian. We develop an excess of appetite to protect ourselves from fear of frustration and helplessness.

Akst: Freedom vs. Self-Control
Following years of excess that led to the financial crisis and recession, we have returned to a period of restraint, Akst says, but societies tend to oscillate between indulgence and control. In the future, he expects, "we will see more freedom, not less, which will make [self-control] a greater challenge." As Americans have learned to embrace their desires and break away from stern Puritan traditions, "the only thing left is to avoid killing ourselves with our newfound freedom," Akst writes.

An economy can continue to expand without significant negative repercussions, says Augustine Faucher, director of macroeconomics for Moody's Analytics. But unlimited excess cannot be enjoyed by the majority of people over the long term. "At one level, social progress amounts to making the luxuries of the few the staples of the many," says Sam Pizzigati, associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington. "But at the environmental level, our earth cannot sustain unlimited excess. The planet cannot survive five cars in every garage."

How to enforce moderation is a thorny issue. Excess is encouraged, Pizzigati says, when the wealthy are given "outrageous rewards to behave outrageously" in business, for example. He notes that U.S. tax rules do not encourage an even distribution of wealth. "We can live decently, as healthy societies, with modest inequality. Extreme inequality, as we have today, endangers us," Pizzigati adds.

Countries with greater income inequality—even wealthy nations such as the U.S.—have higher rates of mental illness, illegal drug use, obesity, and social immobility than do countries with more equal distribution of wealth, such as Japan, according to research by the Equality Trust.

While American indulgence may have caused major imbalances, the bright side is that excess is controllable—though not without difficulty—says Akst.

Parents, religious authorities, and social norms once dictated behavior. Still, there are rays of hope. Americans' personal credit-card debt has declined on average from a high of $5,776 in the first quarter of 2009 to $4,964 in the third quarter of last year, according to TransUnion. If only the federal government could exhibit comparable self-control.

Click here to see 20 good things we may have too much of.

Wong is a lifestyle and real estate reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek.

U.S. Schools Are Still Ahead—Way Ahead

2011-01-14T17:41:00.000-08:00

January 12, 2011, 9:01PM EST

U.S. Schools Are Still Ahead—Way Ahead

America's alarm about international rankings of students overlooks some critical components of our education system, Vivek Wadhwa says

By Vivek Wadhwa

America has an inferiority complex about its education system. You hear the sirens every year, when the OECD Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) releases its annual test results. Finland, South Korea, and Singapore usually come out on top; we start blaming our K-12 teachers for not teaching enough mathematics and science; we begin worrying about the millions of engineers and scientists China and India graduate.

This year the big surprise was that Shanghai garnered first place in the PISA rankings. Then The Wall Street Journal ran a story on the home page of its website titled "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior." The Journal article claimed that Chinese (and Korean, Indian, etc.) parents raise "stereotypically successful kids"—math whizzes and music prodigies. They do this by not allowing their children to attend sleepovers; have a playdate; be in a school play; complain about not being in a school play; watch TV or play computer games; choose their own extracurricular activities; get any grade less than an A; not be the No. 1 student in every subject except gym and drama. The article went on to recount as typical a series of acts that would be considered child abuse in the U.S. (and aren't the norm in India and China).

The Journal article was simply bizarre, yet it is true that education in China and India is very challenging and fiercely competitive. Children are brought up to believe that education is everything, that it will make the difference between success and starvation. So from their early years they work long and hard. Most of their childhood is spent memorizing books on advanced subjects.

American Stereotypes
Meanwhile, the perception is that American children live a relatively easy life and coast their way through school. They don't do any more homework than they have to; they spend an extraordinary amount of time playing games, socializing on the Internet, text-messaging each other; they work part time to pay for their schooling and social habits. And they party. A lot. These stereotypes worry many Americans. They believe the American education system puts the country at a great disadvantage. But this is far from true.

The independence and social skills American children develop give them a huge advantage when they join the workforce. They learn to experiment, challenge norms, and take risks. They can think for themselves, and they can innovate. This is why America remains the world leader in innovation; why Chinese and Indians invest their life savings to send their children to expensive U.S. schools when they can. India and China are changing, and as the next generations of students become like American ones, they too are beginning to innovate. So far, their education systems have held them back.

My research team at Duke looked in depth at the engineering education of China and India. We documented that these countries now graduate four to seven times as many engineers as does the U.S.The quality of these engineers, however, is so poor that most are not fit to work as engineers; their system of rote learning handicaps those who do get jobs, so it takes two to three years for them to achieve the same productivity as fresh American graduates.As a result, significant proportions of China's engineering graduates end up working on factory floors and Indian industry has to spend large sums of money retraining its employees. After four or five years in the workforce, Indians do become innovative and produce, overall, at the same quality as Americans, but they lose a valuable two to three years in their retraining.

Rankings Reconsidered
And then there is the matter of the PISA rankings that supposedly show the U.S. trailing the rest of the world. Hal Salzman, a professor at Rutgers' John J. Heidrich Center for Workforce Development, debunked myths about these in a May 2008 article in Nature magazine. Salzman noted that international tests use different sampling criteria from country to country, so we're not always comparing apples to apples. As well, the tests compare select populations of small countries such as Singapore and Finland, which each have about 5 million people, with the U.S., which has 310 million. These countries achieve the top rankings on the PISA list. Compare these countries to similar-sized U.S. states, however, and you find that some of those states, including Massachusetts (population 6.5 million), produce the top students. Additionally, we're comparing America's diverse population—which includes disadvantaged minorities and unskilled immigrants with little education—with the homogeneous populations of countries like Finland, Japan, and New Zealand.

Much is made of the PISA test scores and rankings, but the international differences are actually quite small. Most of the U.S. ranking lags are not even statistically significant. The U.S. falls in the second rank on some measures and into the first on others. It produces more highest-performing students in science and reading than any other country does; in mathematics, it is second only to Japan. Moreover, one has to ask what the test results actually mean in the real world. Do high PISA rankings make students more likely to invent the next iPad? Google (GOOG)? I don't think so.

Let's keep improving our education system and focus, in particular, on disadvantaged groups. Education is the future of our nation. But let's get over our inferiority complex. America is second to none. Rather than in mastery of facts learned by rote and great numbers of accomplished martinets, its strength lies in the diversity and innovation that arise in an open, creative society.

Wadhwa is a visiting scholar at University of California-Berkeley, senior research associate at Harvard Law School, and director of research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. Follow him on twitter—@vwadhwa

Chinese Companies Expand to U.S. Soil and Markets

2010-12-31T13:56:00.000-08:00

Are you ready for China to both own U.S. debt and run most of its private industry?

Here it comes.

See below

Cory
________________________________________________________________________

Chinese Companies Expand to U.S. Soil and Markets

Companies from China are increasingly setting up shop in the U.S. to avoid trade barriers and to learn better ways to prosper in their fiercely competitive home market

By David J. Lynch

On a spotless factory floor, workers wearing hair nets snap together metal frames, cables, and photovoltaic cells to produce metallic-blue solar panels. This sort of work could be done just about anywhere, yet China's Suntech Power Holdings (STP) as of October has been making the panels in a 117,000-square-foot plant in the Arizona desert. The sand-colored factory, about 20 miles west of Phoenix in the town of Goodyear, brings the company closer to its American customers and into compliance with "Buy American" requirements in some government contracts. The strategy seems to be working: Suntech plans to double its 75-person payroll by the end of next year.

For 20 years, U.S. manufacturers have decamped to China in search of cheaper labor and parts. Now Chinese companies increasingly are setting up shop in the U.S. to escape trade barriers, capitalize on the U.S. government's alternative energy push, and learn lessons that could help them in their home market. "It's a little unusual to see it coming the other way," says Wei Tai Kwok, Suntech's vice-president for marketing.

Through September, Chinese companies invested $2.81 billion in U.S. projects or acquisitions, vs. $1.73 billion in all of 2009, according to Rhodium Group, an economic research firm in New York. It's no longer just state enterprises buying up natural resources to fuel China's ravenous industries. Now the Chinese are investing more broadly in "retail, utilities, and especially new manufacturing," says Thilo Hanemann, Rhodium's research director.

The Chinese government encourages the westward expansion. After President Hu Jintao completes his Jan. 19 trip to Washington, he may visit a Chinese-owned company with American workers, possibly Wanxiang America (000559:CH), an Elgin, Ill., auto parts company, say two business officials involved in the planning.

With unemployment hovering near 10 percent, U.S. officials have put aside concerns about unfair Chinese competition. "Chinese companies, thanks to government-backed loans, monopolies, and preferential treatment, are awash in cash and should be a source for investment in the U.S. economy—investment that would help maintain and create jobs in the U.S.," wrote Jon Huntsman, U.S. ambassador to Beijing, in a diplomatic cable on Jan. 28, disclosed recently by WikiLeaks.

The red carpet treatment marks a sharp turnaround from 2005, when a Chinese state-owned oil company's $18 billion bid for Unocal was withdrawn after some U.S. lawmakers threatened to block Chinese acquisitions of strategically valuable U.S. assets. While some deals, such as a planned $200 million Chinese investment in a Mississippi steel mill, are still triggering opposition, dozens of others are proceeding. Near Corpus Christi, Tex., state-owned Tianjin Pipe next year plans to build a $1 billion steel pipe mill that will employ 500 to 600 people and circumvent 63 percent U.S. tariffs. On Nov. 30, Pacific Century Motors, formed by an affiliate of Beijing's municipal government, acquired General Motors' (GM) Saginaw (Mich.)-based Nexteer Automotive, which makes steering and driveline systems and employs more than 3,600 workers.

China absorbed $7 of outside investment for every $1 it sent to other countries as recently as 2005, according to the International Monetary Fund. Next year the IMF expects Chinese outward investment to exceed the incoming flow for the first time. The yuan's slow but steady rise could be a further spur, making U.S. assets more affordable to Chinese buyers. The currency, up 2.5 percent against the dollar since mid-June, remains at least 25 percent undervalued, says the nonpartisan Peterson Institute for International Economics. "The yuan is going to continue to rise," says Donald Straszheim, senior managing director for ISI Group in the investment management firm's Los Angeles office.

For Suntech, the world's largest producer of solar panels, with headquarters in Wuxi, about 85 miles west of Shanghai, a U.S. assembly line brings big savings on shipping costs and a foothold in a growing market. The company says it received a $2.1 million manufacturing tax credit through the economic stimulus package on an investment of about $10 million and also became eligible to supply solar panels to installers that win government contracts with "Buy American" clauses. Camp Lejeune, a U.S. Marine Corps base in North Carolina, now has one such job out for bid.

Barry Broome, chief executive officer of the Greater Phoenix Economic Council, spent more than two years courting Suntech Chairman Shi Zhengrong, ultimately selling Shi on his vision of Phoenix as the world's solar capital. Goodyear officials chipped in three months of office space in city hall for a nominal $10 fee. The vice-mayor even baked a chocolate cake for Martin Guo, the plant's general manager. Broome now hopes to attract the company's suppliers. Trading with China isn't as controversial in Arizona as it is in Rust Belt states that have bled manufacturing jobs. "The Tiananmen Square hurdle? You don't have that here," he says. More than 1,000 people, including numerous victims of Arizona's housing implosion, turned up at a recent Suntech job fair.

Resurgent Republicans may put the brakes on the Obama Administration's green energy plans, slowing sales of solar panels. Still, 29 states mandate that utilities use renewable sources, says analyst Mark Bachman of Auriga Securities in New York, which has a buy rating on Suntech. Arizona utilities, for example, must derive 15 percent of their energy output from renewable sources by 2025. "All eyes are on the U.S. market at this moment," says Shi. "We have very high expectations and we do believe the U.S. market will grow substantially."

Suntech is using more advanced manufacturing equipment in its Goodyear plant than in Wuxi, allowing 30 Arizonans to produce the same number of solar modules as 100 Chinese. (U.S. production costs are still about 10 percent higher.) "If it works very well, we can integrate the same manufacturing technology in China," Guo says. "This would help Suntech China make [a] manpower reduction." Jobs for Americans and pink slips for the Chinese—just one more turnabout in the U.S.-China relationship.

The bottom line: Chinese companies are investing in the U.S. to bypass trade barriers and take advantage of government clean energy goals.

Lynch is a reporter for Bloomberg News

Google Pushes Education Software Through App Store

2010-12-31T13:22:00.000-08:00

Google Pushes Education Software Through App Store

Google is talking with makers of educational software to help build a marketplace for online learning programs, an industry whose value may approach $5 billion

By Douglas MacMillan

(Bloomberg) — Google Inc. is talking with educational-software companies to help build a marketplace for online learning programs, an industry whose value may approach $5 billion this year.

Games and instructional tools for teachers from companies such as Grockit Inc. and Aviary Inc. are already offered in the Google Apps Marketplace, an online store that opened in March. Google, the world's largest search engine, seeks to lure more educational developers and is stepping up efforts to generate revenue from the project, company executives say.

Software sales for U.S. schools and colleges this year should surpass the 2009 total of $4.6 billion, according to Parthenon Group LLC. That could provide a new growth stream for Google, which gets most of its sales from search advertising. The company works with schools, providing free word processing, e-mail and spreadsheet programs to students and teachers. Now it wants to help outside developers sell applications to educators.

"If we can provide access to education apps to our 10 million users in thousands of schools, then that would be a win all around," said Obadiah Greenberg, Google's business development manager for education.

Most software makers with products on Google Apps Marketplace now collect all revenue from sales generated through the site. In the coming months, Mountain View, California-based Google plans to begin taking a 20 percent share of sales, Greenberg said.

'Google Guru'
Programs in the Apps Marketplace can be operated inside the private Web domains many schools have set up with Google, said James Birchfield, instructional technology specialist at Harwich Public Schools in Massachusetts.

"A teacher logs into a Google Apps account and they can access anything in the marketplace," said Birchfield, who is known by colleagues as the "Google guru." "It gives you a one-stop-shop kind of thing where we know we can integrate it and we know where it's all saved."

Aviary Education, one of the first education apps offered on the site, is a free Web-based tool that lets students edit images and audio recordings in a private environment that can be monitored by a teacher. It's often used by teachers who want students to record class presentations and share them online, said Michael Galpert, co-founder of New York-based Aviary.

"The more that they promote Google services in the classroom, the larger the audience we get," Galpert said. The company now gets most of its new customers through Google's Marketplace, he said.

Middle-School Project
Using Aviary's software, seventh graders at Harwich Middle School created presentations on women's issues in the Middle East, pairing images with narrations and sound effects. Google made the software easier to find and easier to protect students' work, said Birchfield. "That was a big deal for us."

In its first nine months, most customers of the Google Apps Marketplace have been technology administrators at small and medium-sized businesses, who use it to find tools such as collaboration software made by Box.net and Atlassian. Google's Greenberg wants to get school leaders to rely on the marketplace to sign up and buy Web-based learning software.

He also says students with experience using free Google apps in school may be more likely to become paying users when they join the workforce.

Brand Image
Analysts estimate Google will report sales of $21.7 billion this year, based on the average of projections compiled by Bloomberg. More than a potential new source of revenue, the company's push into education could help it build its brand recognition among the next generation of Internet users, said Sandeep Aggarwal, an analyst at Caris & Co. in San Francisco.

Providing "more apps for the education vertical helps them to basically acquire a customer for their whole portfolio of products early on," Aggarwal said. Apple Inc. and Microsoft Corp. have offered discounted prices to schools for 25 years in efforts to "own a new computer user" from the get-go, he said.

Google's online store for education apps could soon face competition from Apple, which has said it will open a version of its popular App Store for Mac computers on Jan. 6.

Apple already has ties to educational-software makers. According to data tracker 148Apps.biz, education apps are the fourth-most-represented category in Apple's App Store, with 24,727 programs, behind apps for books, games and other entertainment.

Apple's History
"Apple has a tradition of serving educators," said Margery Mayer, president of the education division of children's book publisher Scholastic Inc. With one out of six Americans going to school every day, "it makes sense that if you are a technology company you would be interested in a market that is serving such a large part of the population."

Makers of enterprise software have had some early success with the Google Apps Marketplace. Visitors to Atlassian's site are 15 percent more likely to become paying customers if they were directed there by the Google store, said Daniel Freeman, director of product marketing at the Sydney-based company.

Box.net expects 2010 sales of more than $100,000 from new customers that came from the Google Apps Marketplace, according to Aaron Levie, Box.net's CEO in Palo Alto, California.

"That's a pretty good indication that there is some interest in the marketplace," Levie said. "That can grow to become more significant over time."

Google is plotting toward a future where it's the broker of all new technology adopted by a school, said Salman Khan, the founder of the nonprofit educational video series Khan Academy. His organization has received some funding from Google.

"If you want to introduce a new app for students or teachers, the district has to sign up the app once and they won't have to reinstall it for every student," Khan said.

Douglas MacMillan is a staff writer for Bloomberg Businessweek in San Francisco.

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2010-12-14T10:07:00.000-08:00

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2010-12-06T10:34:00.000-08:00

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2010-12-04T09:00:00.000-08:00

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2010-12-01T09:15:00.000-08:00

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2010-11-14T13:00:00.000-08:00

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Future hiring will generate mainly high-skilled or low-paying jobs in service industries

2010-09-07T05:59:00.000-07:00

Future hiring will generate mainly high-skilled or low-paying jobs in service industries

CHRISTOPHER S. RUGABER, MICHAEL LIEDTKE

AP Business Writers

1:21 PM CDT, September 5, 2010

Whenever companies start hiring freely again, job-seekers with specialized skills and education will have plenty of good opportunities. Others will face a choice: Take a job with low pay — or none at all.

Job creation will likely remain weak for months or even years. But once employers do step up hiring, some economists expect job openings to fall mainly into two categories of roughly equal numbers:

— Professional fields with higher pay. Think lawyers, research scientists and software engineers.

— Lower-skill and lower-paying jobs, like home health care aides and store clerks.

And those in between? Their outlook is bleaker. Economists foresee fewer moderately paid factory supervisors, postal workers and office administrators.

That's the sobering message American workers face as they celebrate Labor Day at a time of high unemployment, scant hiring and a widespread loss of job security. Not until 2014 or later is the nation expected to have regained all, or nearly all, the 8.4 million jobs lost to the recession. Millions of lost jobs in real estate, for example, aren't likely to be restored this decade, if ever.

On Friday, the government said the August unemployment rate ticked up to 9.6 percent. Not enough jobs were created to absorb the growing number of people seeking work. The unemployment rate has exceeded 9 percent for 16 months, the longest such stretch in nearly 30 years.

The crisis poses a threat to President Barack Obama and Democrats in Congress, whose hold on the House and Senate appears to be at increasing risk because of voter discontent.

Even when the job market picks up, many people will be left behind. The threat stems, in part, from the economy's continuing shift from one driven by manufacturing to one fueled by service industries.

Pay for future service-sector jobs will tend to vary from very high to very low. At the same time, the number of middle-income service-sector jobs will shrink, according to government projections. Any job that can be automated or outsourced overseas is likely to continue to decline.

The service sector's growth could also magnify the nation's income inequality, with more people either affluent or financially squeezed. The nation isn't educating enough people for the higher-skilled service-sector jobs of the future, economists warn.

"There will be jobs," says Lawrence Katz, a Harvard economist. "The big question is what they are going to pay, and what kind of lives they will allow people to lead? This will be a big issue for how broad a middle class we are going to have."

On one point there's broad agreement: Of 8 million-plus jobs lost to the recession — in fields like manufacturing, real estate and financial services — many, perhaps most, aren't coming back.

In their place will be jobs in health care, information technology and statistical analysis. Some of the new positions will require complex skills or higher education. Others won't — but they won't pay very much, either.

"Our occupational structure is really becoming bifurcated," says Richard Florida, a professor at University of Toronto. "We're becoming more of a divided nation by the work we do."

By 2018, the government forecasts a net total of 15.3 million new jobs. If that proves true, unemployment would drop far closer to a historical norm of 5 percent.

Nearly all the new jobs will be in the service sector, the Labor Department says. The nation's 78 million baby boomers will need more health care services as they age, for example. Demand for medical jobs will rise. And innovations in high technology and alternative energy are likely to spur growth in occupations that don't yet exist.

Hiring can't come fast enough for the 14.9 million unemployed Americans. Counting part-time employees who would prefer full-time jobs, plus out-of-work people who have stopped looking for jobs, the number of "underemployed" is 26.2 million.

Manufacturing has shed 2 million jobs since the recession began. Construction has lost 1.9 million, financial services 651,000.

But the biggest factor has been the bust in real estate. The vanished jobs range from construction workers and furniture makers to loan officers, appraisers and material suppliers. Moody's Analytics estimates the total number of housing-related jobs lost at 2.4 million. When you include commercial real estate, the number is far higher.

One of them is Martha Escobar, who last month lost her $13.50-an-hour job cleaning an office tower owned by JPMorgan Chase & Co. in Century City, Calif. She was one of 16 janitors, mostly single mothers, who lost jobs as part of the real estate crunch that's squeezed landlords.

Some of them traveled to New York on Thursday to try to pressure JPMorgan to get its cleaning contractor to take them back, given that the bank earned $8.1 billion during the first half of this year.

"I don't know what I am going to do if I can't get my job back," Escobar, 41, said.

JPMorgan Chase spokesman Gary Kishner said the bank has no say over the layoffs, which he said are handled by the building's cleaning contractor.

On top of real estate-related job losses, manufacturing is likely to keep shedding jobs, sending lower-skilled work overseas. Millions who worked in those fields will need to find jobs in higher-skilled or lower-paying occupations.

"The big fear is the country is simply not preparing workers for the kind of skills that the country is going to need," says Gautam Godhwani, CEO of SimplyHired.com, which tracks job listings.

Sectors likely to grow fastest, according to economists and government projections, are:

— HEALTH CARE

The sector is expected to be the leading job generator, adding 4 million by 2018, according to Labor Department data. An aging population requires more doctors and nurses, physical therapists, home health aides and pharmacists.

Many of these jobs will pay well. Physical therapists averaged about $76,000 last year, according to the department's data. Others pay far less. Home health care aides earned an average of just $21,600.

Home health care and personal care aides are expected to add about 900,000 jobs by 2018 — 50 percent more than in 2008.

Jennifer Gamboa of Body Dynamics Inc., an Arlington, Va.-based physical therapy firm, says the drive to reduce health care costs should benefit her profession, which can treat pain less expensively than surgery. Gamboa plans to add two employees in the next year.

— INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY: Technology could be an economic elixir as computers and online networks expand ways to automate services, distribute media and communicate.

Companies will need people to build and secure those networks. That should boost the number of programmers, network administrators and security specialists by 45 percent to 2.1 million by 2018, the government forecasts. Most of these jobs will provide above-average pay.

Technology pay averaged $84,400 in 2008 — nearly double the average private-sector pay of $45,400, according to an analysis of the most recent full-year data by the TechAmerica Foundation, a research group.

— NEW INDUSTRIES: Deepak Advani, an IBM executive, has a title he says didn't exist five years ago: "Vice president of predictive analytics."

Companies and government agencies have amassed data on behavior ranging from shopping habits to criminal activity. Predictive analytics is the art of determining what to do with that data. How should workers' time be deployed? How best to target customers? Such jobs could grow 20 percent by 2018, the government predicts.

Still, economists say more will be needed to boost job growth. The answer may be some technological breakthrough akin to the personal computer or the Internet.

"Most big booms come from a particular sector that moves the rest of the economy," said Richard Freeman, a Harvard labor economist.

Technology spurred job growth after the 1982 and 1991 recessions. The PC became revolutionary in the early 1980s. Internet use exploded after the Mosaic Web browser was introduced in 1994. Housing eventually lifted employment after the 2001 dot-com bust.

"There's a lack of clarity on what the next big thing is going to be this time," said David Card, an economics professor at the University of California.

Until there is, many people will have to lower expectations and living standards as they enter fields with less pay and less job stability, said Dan Finnigan, CEO of online employment service Jobvite.

"People who are unemployed have to embrace this future that they are going to have many jobs," he said. "We will always be working on the next gig."

God, the Gospel, and Glenn Beck

2010-09-01T14:29:00.000-07:00

God, the Gospel, and Glenn Beck

Monitoring Media: How Can Students Ride the Wave of the Future Without Drowning in a Sea of Distractions?

2010-08-20T05:55:00.000-07:00

Monitoring Media: How Can Students Ride the Wave of the Future Without Drowning in a Sea of Distractions?

Chicago Tribune

August 11, 2010

Every high school freshman in district RE-1 of Weld County, Colo., receives a present on the first day of school: a personal laptop computer. For three years now, the district has handled upgrades, breakdowns and objections from parents unwilling to take in the potentially disruptive houseguest. Director of support services Keith Ouweneel holds seminars to show parents how the system is designed to record the students’ online activity, block social sites like Facebook and shut down at midnight.

But there are always the few who refuse to see technology as anything but a distraction from academics, much to Ouweneel’s dismay.

“Those kids are at a competitive disadvantage if their parents never come around,” said Ouweneel, who keeps his computer labs open after school so that the students without laptops can catch up on assignments. “We tell them, ‘You can’t be a farmer or police officer without computer skills.’”

While it is hard to find tech-free households like the ones in Ouweneel’s district, the Pew Research Center’s “Internet & American Life Project” began in 2006 to see a decrease in the number of parents of online teens who said the Internet had been a good thing for their children _ dropping to 59 percent in 2006 from 67 percent in 2004.

“It’s not always easy when parents don’t recall childhood with the Internet,” said Amanda Lenhart, a senior research specialist at Pew, a nonprofit research organization. “They may say, ‘Why isn’t my child reading as many books?’ It’s hard to step back and see that he or she is reading online. They’re still engaging in writing and text and literature, but just in a different way.”

Since the 2006 Pew study, the wildfire of instant and constant communication has spread through social networking sites, text messaging and online games. The Nielsen consumer report for June 2010 showed that the number of households with HDTV nearly tripled from the start of 2008. And Pew research reports that, at the start of the last school year, half of teens were sending more than 50 text messages a day _ and one-third of them were sending more than 100 per day. Add to this the ever-increasing number of tweens and teens with cell phones, and it’s easy to see why parents have become more apprehensive, discovering that more technology often means more portals to distraction rather than gateways to academic and professional success.

“Parents are really realizing that children are disconnected from the family because they are constantly connected to their devices,” said Dr. Don Shifrin, a member of the council on communications in media for the American Academy of Pediatrics. “It’s up to the parent to ask ‘How can we rebalance?’ The toughest word in parenting is balance.”

The AAP tells us what a balanced technology diet should look like: no more than two hours of “screen time” per day beyond what is needed for schoolwork. Of course, academic and leisurely activities often mix on the computer, where students can click between Microsoft Word, Facebook, Google and iTunes all within the same minute. Pediatricians suggest parents should supervise media multitasking when one- or two-hour assignments are turning into whole nights spent in front of a computer screen.

In a recent study by Iowa State University psychologists, children who exceeded the two-hour screen-time limit were more likely to develop attention problems. The average child in the study spent about 4.3 hours a day in front of a screen.

Shifrin said cell phones are just as guilty as TVs and computers for detracting from studying and family time. He advises parents of distracted teens to ban cell phones during study time to re-create the same climate of concentration they have in the classroom.

But as new media technologies blossom, even educators are hesitant to draw a hard line between those used for academics and those used for social purposes. Sites once viewed as distractions are now enriching the learning experience.

Mike Gilbert, superintendent of the White Oak Independent School District in East Texas, said his students often use Twitter in place of a thesaurus. From a teacher’s desk in Longview, Texas, a student can learn a new word from a kid in New York.

"What we used to call cheating is now called networking,” Gilbert said. Speaking from 30 years of experience as an educator, Gilbert said that the benefits of technology in the classroom are great _ and the potential problems are easy to stop.

The teachers in Gilbert’s district are trained to spot when “networking” turns into disruptive or delinquent behavior. He said the teacher’s eye that once caught note passing and Playboy smuggling now looks out for texting and inappropriate Web browsing.

“We haven’t invented any new sins,” Gilbert said. “We’ve just invented new ways of doing it.”

Many pediatricians and educators disagree _ and say that when it comes to distracting students, technology has created a whole new beast, one that is silent and ever-present.

“There’s a big difference between passing notes and texting,” Ouweneel said. “The audience can be a lot bigger and be in any location. The teachers have to establish ground rules to manage their classrooms.” He reemphasizes the importance of management and supervision to parents when he distributes laptops each fall.

Shifrin reminds parents that they are in ultimate control of their child’s media use. He said he has had to tell parents to stop paying cell phone bills after a child physically refuses to release the device from his grip.

But he cannot give the same advice to every family. Some adolescents find solace from real-life bullying in their social interactions online. Others may exceed the recommended screen time, but still find time to study and maintain a healthy and connected lifestyle.

“One size does not fit all,” Shifrin said. “It’s up to every parent to recognize if things are getting out of balance.”

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

TIPS FOR PARENTS

Simple guidelines for regulating your child’s media use, from Dr. Don Shifrin of the American Academy of Pediatrics:

Monitor: For elementary students, an adult should be in the room during computer time.

Model: At mealtimes, don’t bring cell phones to the table or have the TV on.

Measure: No more than two hours of screen time per day beyond what is required for studying.

Make sure: Don’t put a TV in a child’s bedroom.

For more insight from the AAP, visit its Web site, healthychildren.org, and type in “media.”

Blackboard To Chalk Up Elluminate, Wimba

2010-07-08T12:13:00.000-07:00

Blackboard To Chalk Up Elluminate, Wimba

07/07/10

Blackboard is buying out ed tech developers Elluminate and Wimba, whose technologies are in use by more than 2,600 schools, colleges, and universities in the United States and around the world. The companies have entered into definitive agreements for the acquisition, which will cost Blackboard $116 million in cash, according to information released July 7.

Both Elluminate and Wimba develop collaborative communications technologies designed specifically for education. These technologies, according to Blackboard, will be combined to create a new collaborative learning suite, which has already been dubbed "Blackboard Collaborate," which Blackboard described as "the newest standalone platform in the company's family of education solutions."

However, Blackboard said Elluminate and Wimba customers shouldn't feel any significant impact. "Elluminate and Wimba products will continue to be shipped and supported without change for the foreseeable future," the company told us in an e-mail. "At the same time, the new Blackboard Collaborate team will begin thinking about future innovations in synchronous learning and collaboration in education that can bring more value the work that clients do. As the company brings the talents, technologies and experience of these organizations together, it will share future plans and our progress, which Blackboard hopes to inform with input from clients."

Elluminate is the maker of Live!, an electronic learning, conferencing, and online collaboration tool that includes note taking features, two-way interactive video, archiving and automatic indexing of e-learning sessions, organizational tools for teachers (pop-up announcements, sorting of participants by hand raising, timers, and other features), whiteboarding, and various other collaboration tools. The company also makes Elluminate Plan and Elluminate Publish. Plan is a tool designed to help instructors and instructional designers organize and package content for online sessions prior to the session being conducted live. Publish is a tool used to create reusable learning content from Elluminate Live recordings.

According to information released by Blackboard, Elluminate's technologies are in use by more than 1,900 higher education and K-12 institutions in 81 countries.

Wimba is a developer of interactive collaborative technologies for K-12 schools and post-secondary institutions, including the Collaboration Suite, which includes four of Wimba's communications tools: Classroom (a virtual classroom environment); Pronto (an instant messaging and voice chat tool); Voice (a live audio tool); and Create (a utility for converting Word documents to LMS-friendly formats).
Wimba's tools, according to Blackboard, are in use by more than 700 K-12 and post-secondary institutions in 28 countries.

"We've heard directly from our clients that this technology has become increasingly fundamental to the learning process for the online course experience and beyond," said Michael L. Chasen, Blackboard's president and CEO, in a statement released today. "Collaboration technology is joining the range of solutions that our clients are leveraging to support and improve the teaching and learning experience. We expect this will grow as institutions look for cost-effective ways to encourage social learning and support learning interactions of all kinds."

Ray Henderson, president of Blackboard Learn and formerly of Angel Learning, which Blackboard acquired back in May 2009, will lead the combined team and "set the technology strategy," according to Blackboard.
"Bringing Elluminate and Wimba together allows us to accelerate development of their technologies to better realize the full potential for impacting education--at a rate much faster than any of our organizations could have achieved independently," Henderson said in a prepared statement. "I'm confident in our ability to maintain positive experiences for clients and learners in all contexts, regardless of which learning management system is used. We will continue to support Elluminate and Wimba integrations for open source products and plan to do the same for bridges with other commercial LMS providers as well."

Blackboard said the deal is expected to close in early August.

Failing U.S. Education Will Dumb Down Economic Growth

2010-07-02T16:22:00.000-07:00

Failing U.S. Education Will Dumb Down Economic Growth

Government and business leaders have worried about the economic impact of declining U.S. education. The day of reckoning may be here, says Chris Farrell

By Chris Farrell

The American economy is starting to mend from the Great Recession, the nastiest downturn since the 1930s. The return to growth and better economic numbers is welcome, although a number of nerve-wracking problems lurk in the global economy, especially Europe's sovereign debt crisis and China's slowdown.

Yet assuming that the expansion remains intact, it will still take a long time for the worst labor market in 60 years to show signs of vigor. The unemployment rate is steep at 9.7 percent, based on Labor Dept. data for May 2010. The government's broadest measure of unemployment and underemployment, which includes the officially unemployed, people who want to work but aren't working, and in part-time jobs for economic reasons, is even higher at 16.6 percent.

The future looks a bit better, but unemployment will remain elevated. The consensus opinion of economists surveyed by Bloomberg is that the jobless rate for 2010 will be 9.6 percent, moderating to 9.1 percent in 2011 and 8.0 percent in 2012.

THE LESS EDUCATED BEAR THE BRUNT

That's bad news for the job and income prospects of most workers, but it's especially ominous for members of the labor force who do not have college degrees. The unemployment rate for those with only a high school degree is 10.9 percent. That's more than double the 4.7 percent rate for workers with a bachelor's degree or more. A jobless recovery is disastrous for less educated, low-income workers. The unemployment rate of workers without a high school diploma is 15 percent, and over the past decade the unemployment rate for this group hasn't fallen below 6 percent.

It's hardly surprising that less educated workers have been disproportionately affected by the downturn. But now it appears that the swelling ranks of unemployed and underemployed workers with less than a college degree are themselves a "headwind" slowing the recovery. The U.S. economy has increasingly emphasized college-educated workers, with job losses concentrated among those without degrees. Business is creating job openings, but most require at least some postsecondary education even to apply for a job, let alone get an offer from management.

It's something of a vicious cycle: Business looks for educated workers; job openings go begging; incomes stay low; unemployment remains high; the rebound stays subdued; and so on. Business leaders, think tanks, government agencies, and other blue chip institutions have worried about the economic impact of too many poorly educated Americans. The day of reckoning may be here.

A SLUGGISH REBOUND?

That is a concern raised by a recent report by economists Daniel Hartley and Beth Mowry of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. In "Could Low Educational Attainment Be Slowing the Recovery?", they note that employment in low-degree industries, such as manufacturing and housing, is down sharply over the past 15 years. Manufacturing employment has dropped to about 75 percent of its level in 1995. Construction employment jumped during the late 1990s as the housing boom gathered momentum, but with the subsequent bust, it's down to 1.15 times its 1995 level. Strong job gains have been recorded over the same period in such high-degree businesses as education and health care, a category the Bureau of Labor Statistics says is up 48 percent. The structural shift from a low-degree to a high-degree economy has the scholars wondering if "we may be in for a period of lower productivity, lower wages, and higher unemployment."

They may be optimistic. Downturns often accelerate critical underlying economic transformations. Certainly, the shift to jobs that reward a college education is among the most widely publicized trends in the U.S. economy over the past three decades or so. In 1973, 72 percent of the workforce had a high school diploma or less. By 2007, the comparable figure was 41 percent. Similarly, in 1973 only 38 percent of office workers had some kind of postsecondary education vs. 69 percent in 2007. Even factory jobs require more education, with some 36 percent of workers in manufacturing having at least some time in college, triple the number of three decades ago.

Meanwhile, even as the share of workers with at least some college education rose from 28 percent in 1973 to 59 percent in 2007, the wage premium for advancing up the educational ladder has held up for a long time. For instance, the wage gap between men with a college degree and those with a high school degree was 20 percent and 27 percent, respectively. The gap is now around 44 percent for men and 49 percent for women.

A SHORTAGE OF EDUCATED U.S. WORKERS?

The demand for well-educated workers is only growing, and the effect is cumulative. Powerful economic forces such as the rise of brutal global competition and the spread of sophisticated information technologies will continue to push employers to value better educated workers who are comfortable working in teams, quick to adjust to new tasks, and well-schooled in the latest high-tech gear. At least that's one conclusion to draw from a recent paper by Anthony Carnavale, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. He projects that the economy will create 47 million job openings from 2008 to 2018, made up of 14 million new jobs and 33 million jobs replacing current workers who have retired, become disabled, or died.

The key finding: Most of the jobs demand some postsecondary education, with about 30 million openings requiring at least some college education and 21 million an associate's, bachelor's, or graduate degree. If educated workers aren't readily available, companies will automate the tasks or find educated employees overseas. After all, with many developing economies devoting more resources to university education, America's share of the world's college-level workers has shrunk from some 30 percent to about 15 percent, according to Carnevale and two Georgetown University colleagues, Jeff Strohl and Nicole Smith.

Sad to say, the ranks of poorly educated Americans are growing. The growth in high school graduation rates has slowed since the 1970s. The nation's four-year high school graduation rate hovers around 69 percent, according to the Alliance for Excellent Education, a Washington (D.C.) organization that advocates better high school performance. Some minority groups do even worse, with a 56 percent dropout rate for Hispanics and 54 percent for African Americans.

TOUGHER ROAD FOR DROPOUTS

The Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University calculates that the average high school dropout will have a lifetime negative net fiscal contribution to society of some -$5,200. The average high school graduate generates a positive lifetime number of $287,384. The sharply lower figure for dropouts aged 18 to 64 reflects lower annual federal, state, and local tax payments, higher cash and in-kind transfers, and the costs of incarceration relative to a high school graduate. (The comparable figure for a college graduate with only a bachelor's degree is $793,079.)

Following the Great Depression and World War II, it appeared that the U.S. and other major industrial nations had banished the well-known phenomenon of mass unemployment. Most workers, including those who labored on a factory floor, lived a middle-class lifestyle, and the unemployment rate largely moved up and down with the business cycle.

But the specter of mass unemployment once again haunts the U.S. The Great Recession is exposing the cumulative effect of a three-decade shift toward high-education jobs and a failing education system. The trend has always been morally wrong—and financially stressful for low-income households. But now the swelling numbers of less educated unemployed-and-underemployed working-age adults is starting to call into question whether the U.S. can mount a sustained, robust economic recovery. Years of subpar growth and high unemployment would be a bitter lesson for Americans, college-educated or not.

Farrell is contributing economics editor for Bloomberg Businessweek. You can also hear him on American Public Media's nationally syndicated finance program, Marketplace Money, as well as on public radio's business program Marketplace. His Sound Money column appears on Businessweek.com.

The Next Generation of Digitally Enhanced Learning

2010-06-24T15:45:00.000-07:00

The Next Generation of Digitally Enhanced Learning

06/24/10

Are we too easily jaded by the progress of technology, always demanding the next the big thing even as the last one is barely out of the box? Or will the innovators and entrepreneurs of the global technology arena forever (or at least for the next century or so) keep us on our toes as their vision, and the resulting gadgets and apps, continually expands at a geometric rate?

In his lecture at the Ed Tech Summit at the InfoComm 2010 conference in Las Vegas, Mark S. Valenti, founder and president of Pittsburgh-based technology consulting firm The Sextant Group, delved into the myriad of ways in which advancing technology will continue to enhance, improve, and expand education--both K-12 and post-secondary education--as well as the shifts in priorities and attitudes such advancements will likely cause.

A point Valenti was quick to make was that, with the growth of communication technologies, institutions, especially those of higher learning, are seeing a rapid decline in their power to set the agenda for how, when, and where people learn. "Higher ed," he said, 'is the only industry that believes it can offer its service at a time, in a place, and in a style of its own choosing." But the validity of that belief, he assured his audience, is rapidly coming to an end.

He referred to the book Transforming Higher Education: A Vision for Learning in the 21st Century, by Michael G. Dolence, an analysis of the future of education in the Internet age, in his assessment. "Schools and colleges in teaching knowledge," Dolence wrote in 1995, "will yield to individual learning by millions of knowledge seekers in all walks of life. Worldwide networked learning will replace place-bound teaching."
In Valenti's "big picture" view of the next stage of education, there will be several significant changes, some of which we are already witnessing, that will alter the entire landscape for "providers" of education and related services, e.g., colleges and universities, vocational and trade institutes, public and private K-12 schools, etc., as well as for teachers and students:

The process will continue to become more technology-dependent;
There will be increased demand for access, in terms of user capacity, frequency, transmission speed, and content capacity, leading to increased demand for bandwidth;
Information will become increasingly media rich, which will also impact bandwidth demand; and
The individual will increasingly become both a consumer and a producer of information, leading to shifts in the dynamic between educators and the educated.

The Economics of Bandwidth

Valenti proceeded to discuss bandwidth as "the fourth utility," similar to energy in that manufacturers will continue to develop new bandwidth-driven products to drive up demand; consumers will continue to demand more and more bandwidth for an ever-growing litany of products and uses for those products; both manufacturers and consumers will see no limits to what they can do with more and more bandwidth, as long as the supply keeps growing; and providers will continue to devise ways to increase the supply to meet the demand, seeing no limits on the market for their utility.

By way of example, Valenti pointed to the growth in the bandwidth market in the last decade alone, which, if we look at the 1990s as the era of dial-up, was really the first full decade of the market's existence. In 2000, wireless networks, also known as WLANs or WiFi networks, had a total market in the United States of about $400 million. Today, he estimated, the domestic market is at about $12 billion, with more than 30 million WiFi networks currently in operation.

That, of course, covers bandwidth exclusively. The total wireless economy, which includes networks, computer equipment, mobile devices, services and infrastructure, is closer to $500 billion a year and growing exponentially.

Small World After All?

But what does it all mean for education? Like many advances in information and communications technology through the years, the big breakthroughs usually make their way to the education community, and that process has definitely sped up in recent years. Valenti identified tactile (touch screen) displays, 3D video, and virtual worlds with avatar representation as three key areas of technology that will soon be enhancing education.
Virtual worlds, the most popular of which is currently Second Life, with more than 5 million members, bring people together using avatars, digital illustrations of individuals as they'd like to present themselves to others, to represent them in all facets of a virtual life mirroring a real one. To date, such an environment as fostered commerce, social networking, pursuit of shared interests, and exploration of other people and cultures. But virtual classrooms with avatar students seem a natural fit for bringing people together from all parts of the world and educating them as though they were all in one place. And any existing concerns that distance learning eliminates the critical social component of attending school can head for the exits.

"We're seeing the merging of real space and virtual space in places like Second Life," he explained. "There's a lot of investigation into what it's like to learn in that environment. People are asking, can we create a satisfactory student experience, teacher experience, and overall learning experience in a virtual space?" He pointed to the nascent concept of distance team teaching, which presents both a lecturer and a group of students at each end of a video link. All of the attendees can benefit from both instructors' knowledge and expertise, while the instructors themselves can facilitate the process, even with thousands of miles separating the two classrooms.

Tactile displays and 3D high-definition displays are also gradually working their way into the classroom. Valenti explained that few things will engage and envelop a child's attention so completely as being literally immersed in the reality of what they are learning. From historical events, such as a war or the signing of the Declaration of Independence, to a "hands-on" exploration of the human anatomy, the 3D experience will prove a quantum leap in both conceptual and practical education, allowing students to leave behind the pen and paper and even the keyboard and dive head first into the experience itself. Already, Valenti noted, medical students are learning some of the "how-tos" of their profession with the help of virtual operating room theaters.

Finally, such technology will lead to a rethinking of the architecture of learning spaces themselves. "Collaboration across time and space will drive facility design [in the coming years]. We're seeing technologies like Skype become commonplace. We're seeing major investments from companies like Cisco in things like TelePresence, which is a prime example of cross-collaboration." Valenti said he believes that, in the long run, in addition to the changes in teaching and learning methods, the physical space that accommodates learning will also change. Classrooms driven by multimedia, virtual hands-on combinations of laboratories and lecture spaces, and the aforementioned virtual operating rooms are all examples of the digitally enhanced learning spaces on the horizon.

About the Author

Scott Aronowitz is a freelance writer based in Las Vegas

China watchdog OKs giant Agricultural Bank IPO

2010-06-09T16:39:00.000-07:00

China is now raising capital via IPO's in addition to having massive influence on the U.S. vis-a-vis owning a ton of our debt.....anyone else see a pattern here?....

Cory

China watchdog OKs giant Agricultural Bank IPO

By ELAINE KURTENBACH
The Associated Press

9:58 a.m. Wednesday, June 9, 2010

SHANGHAI — China's stock regulator has approved Agricultural Bank of China's plans for an initial public offering in Shanghai and Hong Kong worth well over $20 billion that may be the world's biggest ever, despite current market doldrums.

The China Securities Regulatory Commission reviewed the plan Wednesday and announced in a brief notice on its website that it had been approved.

Beijing-based Agricultural Bank, which serves mainly rural customers, is the last of the country's "big four" state-owned banks to seek a share listing. It plans to sell a total of up to 53 billion shares in separate listings on the two exchanges, with trading expected to begin by mid-July, state-run newspapers reported Wednesday.

The bank had denied reports the offering might be delayed due to recent market turmoil, which has dragged share prices to 13-month lows.

Expectations of strong government backing for the IPO, and other possible market-boosting measures, prompted a rebound in shares Wednesday, with the benchmark Shanghai Composite Index gaining 69.92 points, or 2.8 percent, to close at 2,583.87.

Agricultural Bank, which is issuing shares worth 15 percent of its equity, chose Goldman Sachs Group Inc., JP Morgan Chase & Co., Macquarie Group Ltd., China International Capital Corp., and Deutsche Bank AG. to run its IPO in Hong Kong. CICC and three other Chinese brokerages were chosen to advise on its share sales in China.

The bank has yet to set an IPO price for its shares, which are expected to raise between $23 billion and $30 billion. That would exceed the world record previously set by Industrial & Commercial Bank of China, whose $21.9 billion dual Hong Kong-Shanghai IPO in October 2006 helped make it the world's biggest bank by market value.

Bank of China and the China Construction Bank also held multibillion dollar IPOs as part of their transformation into fully commercial banks.

Though the Agricultural Bank is gargantuan, with more than 24,000 branches and more than 350 million customers, it is considered relatively weak given its focus on rural lending. In a report late last year, Fitch Ratings give the lender an "E'', its second lowest rating.

However, analysts note that the bank's margins on its loans and deposits are relatively wide given its near-monopoly in the countryside, where borrowers have little bargaining leverage.

Unlike its peers, the bank has not taken on any foreign strategic investors, though it has received 15 billion yuan ($2.2 billion) from the country's Social Security Fund as part of its restructuring.

China's share markets often suffer from fears that massive inflows of new shares might overwhelm demand, dragging prices lower.

Given the recent malaise in markets, other major companies have pulled back on fundraising plans of their own, perhaps giving the Agricultural Bank greater leeway for its own share offering.

___

June 09, 2010 09:58 AM EDT

Shoppers Check Out of Stores Via Cell Phone

2010-05-22T08:27:00.000-07:00

Shoppers Check Out of Stores Via Cell Phone

Credit-card issuers are testing "contactless commerce" that lets consumers pay for purchases with a chip affixed to their cell phones

By Olga Kharif

At the Rochester, Ind., Dairy Queen, more than 350 customers can wave special stickers fixed to the backs of their cell phones at a scanner in the store, thereby banking loyalty points and qualifying for free cones and Blizzard sundaes. Customers have come back to the store more frequently as a result, helping sale rise more than 3 percent in the past year, says co-owner Dave Reasner. "It's something that's working," he says.

The radio frequency identification technology behind DQ's loyalty cards, similar to warehouse inventory tracking systems, is starting to work on behalf of consumers at the cash register. Discover Financial Services (DFS), Citigroup (C), and Visa (V) are introducing "contactless payment" technology that lets consumers pay for purchases by waving chips attached to their cell phones. Instead of swiping a credit or debit card, consumers can wave or tap phones—items that are nearly always handy—equipped with specially encoded stickers, or holsters, on receivers at the checkout counter.

Card issuers also hope that handset makers will embed the RFID chips into phones, then create smartphone applications to help shoppers manage payments. "Everything you store in a leather wallet will migrate to a mobile handset," says Barry McCarthy, a general manager at First Data, which processes transactions for 2,000 card issuers worldwide.

This summer, Citigroup will start issuing contactless payment stickers to some customers, says managing director Liza Landsman. Later this year, some Discover Card customers will be able to wave or tap two-inch-square stickers glued to the backs of their iPhones (AAPL) at McDonald's (MCD), 7-Eleven, and Home Depot (HD) stores. Discover Network, which issues the cards, plans first to test the technology with users of its iPhone app for viewing statements.

On May 4, Visa and contactless device vendor DeviceFidelity briefly posted online—and then removed—a press release that said the companies are building a contactless microSD payment card, coupled with a protective case that fits iPhones. Consumers could use the technology to pay at fast food outlets, in taxis, and at train stations, the press release said. Visa spokeswoman Elvira Swanson later declined to comment on any aspect of the information, as did DeviceFidelity co-founder Deepak Jain.

Convenience increases transactions

The card issuers' goal is to decrease the use of cash, still involved in half of all point-of-sale transactions. Each purchase conducted with a contactless card affords issuers a small fee. The financial institutions also share in late charges consumers can accrue on their credit cards. "For us, it's real growth if we can be more competitive with cash," says James Anderson, a vice-president at MasterCard (MA).

Because of the convenience they offer, mobile wallets can boost consumers' purchases. When Discover tested the stickers with more than 700 employees last year, the company saw "a good uptick" in how frequently participants charged purchases, says Farhan Ahmad, a general manager at Discover Network. He declined to detail the results of the trial.

North American consumers paid for less than $100 million worth of goods in 2010 using a type of mobile contactless payment chip technology that is known as Near Field Communication, according to telecom industry analysis firm Juniper Research. By 2012, the total could rise to $5 billion. NFC chips, made by companies that include NXP Semiconductors and Inside Contactless, contain tiny antennae that communicate with in-store scanners. Outfitted with these accessories, phones can function as electronic wallets.

NFC technology is one of several wireless payment options currently available for phones. A company called Square, started by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, makes a small credit-card scanner that merchants can attach to their iPhones to accept payments. Obopay lets users of its smartphone application transfer money with their phones.

Contactless payments have long been popular in Japan and other Asian countries.Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) on Mar.23 said it would launch a contactless commerce service for mobile operators to offer person-to-person payments. There have also been contactless trials in cities including New York, London, and Vienna. And Nokia (NOK) builds NFC chips into at least one phone it sells directly to consumers.

Contactless scanners rare in U.S.

In the U.S., contactless payments have been limited to small trials because of wireless carriers' reluctance to build NFC chips into their phones. Carriers, handset makers, and banks are still figuring out how they would divide related fees, say analysts.

An inadequate number of scanners for reading the chips in stores has been a further obstacle to adoption. Only about half a million merchants in the U.S. accept contactless payments, according to First Data.

Security has also been a concern, although consumers typically have to enter passwords or PINs to complete purchases made via NFC devices. "It's probably more secure than your traditional wallet," says Howard Wilcox, a senior analyst at Juniper Research.

Technology vendors committed to contactless commerce are working to develop enabled devices. Contactless payment chips could also serve as health cards that contain insurance information and health records or as security badges enabling entry to office buildings.

The contactless payment industry is also hoping for a boost from Apple. Based on recent patent filings, Apple may be working on a phone that facilitates contactless payments. "If Apple were to do it, the race for all the carriers to have [NFC-enabled] phones could become significant," First Data's McCarthy says. Apple spokeswoman Teresa Brewer didn't return a request for comment.

Kharif is a reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek in Portland, Ore.

Education IT To Grow $2.5 Billion This Year

2010-05-19T11:49:00.000-07:00

Education IT To Grow $2.5 Billion This Year

By David Nagel

05/19/10

Technology spending in education is seeing a surge in 2010. According to information released by IT research firm Gartner, worldwide enterprise IT spending in education will grow 4.1 percent, or about $2.53 billion, over 2009.

According to the report, "Forecast Alert: Enterprise IT Spending by Vertical Industry Market, Worldwide, 2008-2014, 1Q10 Update," worldwide enterprise IT spending across all vertical segments is forecast to increase by $96.7 billion to nearly $2.43 trillion in 2010.

The overall average growth rate will be 4.1 percent, the same as the forecast growth rate for education. That follows a decline of 5.6 percent in overall worldwide IT spending from 2008 to 2009.

Government, retail, banking/securities, and communications media/services are leading the way in terms of IT spending growth in 2010. IT spending in government (national and international) is forecast to grow 6.2 percent in 2010 to $248.73 billion, by far the greatest growth of any sector in the last year. IT spending in retail will grow 4.7 percent to $149.22 billion. And IT spending in banking and securities will grow 4.6 percent to $396.87 billion.

Education itself is the smallest of the vertical segments tracked by Gartner. In 2009, total IT spending in education was $61.46 billion. By the end of this year, will make up 2.64 percent of the overall vertical enterprise IT market worldwide, or $63.99 billion, consistent with its share of the overall picture in 2009.

Gartner cautioned that growth could be curtailed by a potential "double dip" in the recession, "based on uncertainties in the economic environment."

5-Year-Old YouTube Tops Networks’ Primetime With 2 Billion Views

2010-05-18T05:00:00.000-07:00

5-Year-Old YouTube Tops Networks’ Primetime With 2 Billion Views

By Eliot Van Buskirk

America’s Funniest Home Videos may have pioneered the YouTube concept, but as the site reaches the five-year mark, its audience size is no laughing matter. YouTube’s viewership now exceeds that of all three networks combined during their “primetime” evening time slot, with more than 2 billion views per day, Google announced Sunday.

Granted, YouTube’s numbers come from worldwide views, while ABC, CBS and NBC broadcast their primetime channels within the United States. But this is a significant milestone nonetheless, and hints at an eventual tipping point when the internet could become the world’s dominant video-delivery system, Mark Cuban’s predictions aside.

Google also trumpeted some other key stats: People upload over a day’s worth of video to YouTube every minute; the average user spends only 15 minutes a day on the site, which YouTube would like to increase in part by renting full-length films; and YouTube has broadcast live sports to more than 200 countries.

To celebrate its fifth birthday, YouTube asks the site’s users to upload videos of how the site has affected their lives, some of which will appear on a specially curated channel. In addition, celebrities including Conan O’Brien — whose best next career move might be to become official curator of YouTube — marked the occasion by posting a playlist consisting of their favorite videos (view his above).

Should the networks really be worried about being overtaken by YouTube? Yes and no. They own their content, YouTube has professed a wish to lengthen viewing times. Licensing currently-airing full-length network television shows (in addition to the older shows they currently license) would be a great way to do that. And the networks are in a more favorable negotiating position than the record labels were when they made similar deals, due to Hulu (ABC and NBC) and CBS.com already attracting large audiences for that content.

Perhaps a more serious threat to the networks is that YouTube is changing our viewing behavior, and that our viewing habits on the computer will soon migrate to the living room.

Plenty of set-top boxes already play high-definition and even 3-D YouTube videos on a television set. When Google unveils its next-generation set-top box, possibly as soon as Wednesday’s I/O Conference, in partnership with DishNetwork, Intel and/or Sony, YouTube will assume an even greater presence on the television. Even if the networks continue to hold back their full episodes of new shows from on YouTube, users could come to prefer a higher percentage of direct-to-internet content on their televisions.

As paidContent founder and editor Rafat Ali tweeted Monday morning, Conan O’Brien seems “a lot funnier on the internets” than he did on network television, and O’Brien recently joked with a roomful of Google employees about a world without television networks. Who knows, five years from now, O’Brien could be hosting his own show on YouTube, rather than fretting about his terminated NBC contract.

“I don’t know what television’s going to be five years from now. There’s a lot of people that think you’re just going to experience it all through your server, and people don’t even know how the business is going to change,” said O’Brien, who should know, as a longtime television host and writer-producer of the Simpsons.

“There might not be really network television as we know it — wouldn’t that be sweet.”

College for All? Experts Say Not Necessarily

2010-05-14T06:47:00.000-07:00

College for All? Experts Say Not Necessarily

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 5:03 p.m. ET

COLUMBIA, Mo. (AP) -- In a town dominated by the University of Missouri's flagship campus and two smaller colleges, higher education is practically a birthright for high school seniors like Kate Hodges.

She has a 3.5 grade-point-average, a college savings account and a family tree teeming with advanced degrees. But in June, Hodges is headed to the Tulsa Welding School in Oklahoma, where she hopes to earn an associate's degree in welding technology in seven months.

''They fought me so hard,'' she said, referring to disappointed family members. ''They still think I'm going to college.''

The notion that a four-year degree is essential for real success is being challenged by a growing number of economists, policy analysts and academics. They say more Americans should consider other options such as technical training or two-year schools, which have been embraced in Europe for decades.

As evidence, experts cite rising student debt, stagnant graduation rates and a struggling job market flooded with overqualified degree-holders. They pose a fundamental question: Do too many students go to college?

''College is what every parent wants for their child,'' said Martin Scaglione, president and chief operating officer of work force development for ACT, the Iowa-based not-for-profit best known for its college entrance exam. ''The reality is, they may not be ready for college.''

President Barack Obama wants to restore the country's status as the world leader in the proportion of citizens with college degrees. The U.S. now ranks 10th among industrial nations, behind Canada, Japan, Korea and several European countries.

But federal statistics show that just 36 percent of full-time students starting college in 2001 earned a four-year degree within that allotted time. Even with an extra two years to finish, that group's graduation rate increased only to 57 percent.

Spending more time in school also means greater overall student debt. The average student debt load in 2008 was $23,200 -- a nearly $5,000 increase over five years. Two-thirds of students graduating from four-year schools owe money on student loans.

And while the unemployment rate for college graduates still trails the rate for high school graduates (4.9 percent versus 10.8 percent), the figure has more than doubled in less than two years.

''A four-year degree in business -- what's that get you?'' asked Karl Christopher, a placement counselor at the Columbia Area Career Center vocational program. ''A shift supervisor position at a store in the mall.''

At Rock Bridge High School, one of Columbia's two high schools, 72 percent of the class of 2008 moved on to four-year colleges, with another 10 percent attending community college. That college attendance rate is consistent with national statistics.

Only 4 percent of Rock Bridge students chose technical training like the Oklahoma welding school where Hodges is headed.

Roughly 1,200 students from central Missouri take classes at the career center, supplementing their core high school courses with specialized training in automotive technology, culinary arts, animal science, robotics, landscape design, electrical wiring and more.

Hodges has been set on a welding career since she was 13. She craves independence and has little patience for fellow students who seem to wind up in college more from a sense of obligation than anything else.

''School is what they've been doing their whole lives,'' she said. ''So they just want to continue. Because that's what they are used to.''

Sue Popkes doesn't hide her disappointment over her younger daughter's decision. At the same time, she realizes that Hodges may achieve more financial security than a college degree could ever provide.

''It's sad to know she's going to miss that mind-opening effect of an undergraduate degree,'' Popkes said. ''To discover new ideas, to become more worldly.''

Ohio University economics professor Richard Vedder blames the cultural notion of ''credential inflation'' for the stream of unqualified students into four-year colleges. His research has found that the number of new jobs requiring college degrees is less than number of college graduates.

Vedder's work also yielded something surprising: The more money states spend on higher education, the less the economy grows -- the reverse of long-held assumptions.

''If people want to go out and get a master's degree in history and then cut down trees for a living, that's fine,'' he said, citing an example from a recent encounter with a worker. ''But I don't think the public should be subsidizing it.''

Margaret Spellings, former federal education secretary under George W. Bush, remains a strong proponent of increased college access. She points to research showing that college graduates will on average earn $1 million more over a lifetime than those with only high school degrees.

''It is crucial to the success of our country and to us as individuals to graduate more students from college,'' she said at a National Press Club forum earlier this year. ''We Americans greatly believe that education is the great equalizer.''

For many, the dream of earning a college degree -- and the social acceptance that comes with that accomplishment -- trumps a more analytical, cost-benefits approach.

John Reynolds, a Florida State sociology professor, found that unrealized educational expectations do not lead to depression or other long-term emotional costs.

"'Rich kids, poor kids, 'A' students, 'C' students -- we really didn't find any lasting impact on not getting the degree,'' he said.

Scaglione suggested that nothing short of a new definition for educational success is needed to diminish the public bias toward four-year degrees. He advocates ''certification as the new education currency -- documentation of skills as opposed to mastering curriculum.''

''Our national system is, 'Do you have a degree or not?''' he said. ''That doesn't really measure if you have skills.''

Software Aiming to Curb Texting While Driving - InsideTech.com

2010-05-03T16:02:00.000-07:00

Software Aiming to Curb Texting While Driving - InsideTech.com

Survey: For First Time, More People Would Do Without Television Than the Internet

2010-04-28T05:32:00.000-07:00

Survey: For First Time, More People Would Do Without Television Than the Internet

Adrian McCoy and Rob Owen/Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
April 09, 2010

If you had to choose between watching TV and surfing the Web, which would it be?

For the first time, the Internet is the winner by a narrow margin: 49 percent said they would drop television, and 48 percent said they’d give up their Internet connection, according to a survey released Thursday by Arbitron Inc. and Edison Media Research. The survey included 1,753 Americans aged 12 and older.

The Internet led all media as the “most essential” of all media in the survey.

The last time Arbitron and Edison posed this question in a survey was in 2001, when 72 percent of respondents said they could do without Internet and 26 percent said they’d give up TV.

“The shift over these nine years has been steady and profound,” said Edison Research president Larry Rosin.

Although it’s a photo finish, the new survey — “The Infinite Dial 2010: Digital Platforms and the Future of Radio” — shows that the way Americans use media has reached a tipping point, especially in terms of TV’s former dominance over other media, new and old.

“There’s very little TV programming you can’t watch on the Internet,” said Tom Webster, Edison Research vice president/strategy.

The shift is most evident among younger viewers between the ages of 12 and 44. “These are people who are watching ‘House’ and ‘Glee’ and enough NCAA basketball to bring the Internet to its knees,” Mr. Webster said.
Despite the survey results, Pittsburgh still is among the nation’s heaviest TV viewing markets, according to The Nielsen Company. More than 70 percent of Pittsburgh homes tuned in during each quarter hour of prime time in the 2008-009 TV season: it tied for fifth place with Greensboro, N.C., and Spartanburg, S.C. In all-day viewing, Pittsburgh ranks 16th among the top 50 TV markets.

But some viewers definitely are changing their habits. Patti Schmidt, 48, of Munhall, for example, has cut the cable cord completely because of the abundance of TV programming online.

“I use Hulu mostly,” she said, also mentioning PBS.org and websites associated with cable’s A&E and History, when viewing on the Internet. “The cool thing about watching over the Internet is that you can watch anything you want whenever you want.”

Hulu.com and other sites offer new and old TV shows on the Web. There’s the convenience of streaming movies through services like Amazon, iTunes and Netflix. Wireless Internet connections and set top boxes like Apple’s iTV let viewers watch Web video on their large TV screens instead of a computer monitor. Most U.S. households now have high-speed broadband Internet access, which is needed to stream large amounts of data like video and movies.

Tom Haddad, a 35-year-old software engineer who lives near Coraopolis, also has dropped his cable. He keeps up with 20 TV shows. Some he watches on TV, but as many as half he relies on websites to view.

His new approach to TV consumption improved his budget’s bottom line. “My bill for Internet, cable, cell and land line in New Jersey was $200,” he said. “Now I pay just under $100 for cell and Internet service.”
For Leah Shreckengast of Squirrel Hill, a junior at Point Park University, TV or Internet isn’t just a hypothetical question. She doesn’t have cable, uses the Internet to watch TV episodes and Netflix for movies, and listens to music online.

Not everyone in her generation feels the same way. “I don’t enjoy sitting at my computer,” said Rachelle Rosensteel of Hampton, a Point Park University junior who says she buys CDs rather than downloading music online and doesn’t spend much time on social networking sites.

Others are perfectly content to give up their Internet privileges. “When I get home, it’s more relaxing to watch TV,” said Linda Sikora of Forest Hills. Sue Toth of Greenfield would give up Internet “in a heartbeat.”
Nationally, viewership of all kinds is growing on home screens large and small. According to the Nielsen Three Screen Report, people are spending more time watching on different platforms: In the last quarter of 2009, the typical American watched almost 35 hours of TV a week, two hours of timeshifted TV, 22 minutes of online video, four minutes of mobile video, and four hours on the Internet.

With so much more content online — and fewer commercial interruptions — is it any wonder that viewers would pick the Internet over TV?

Brad Adgate, senior vice president of research at New York ad buying firm Horizon Media, was not surprised by the results of the Arbitron/Edison research.

“There’s just more content, more components on the Web,” he said. “I think that makes it a generational thing. Younger folks are light viewers of TV. They are the first tech savvy generation and they grew up totally connected.”

He said television networks could see which way the wind was blowing and that’s why they’ve made their content available on multiple platforms, including online. “The networks did that just because eyeballs are moving that way,” Mr. Adgate said in a phone interview Thursday. “In the future, [access] will move outside the home, it will be wireless. The networks had no choice. They were caught napping with [the rise in] cable and they didn’t want to be caught flat-footed again.”

Of course, the online world is made up of more than just video sites, and there’s been the suggestion this television season that social media sites have helped traditional television. Ratings for big events — the Super Bowl, March Madness, ABC’s Oscar telecast — were up, perhaps in part due to the ability to commiserate about the programs in real time online.

“A lot of people are on Facebook talking about these shows,” he said. “You can look at it as a complement [to TV viewing] or as a frenemy as opposed to just a competitor.”

What a week for new jobs in Georgia | ajc.com

2010-04-23T15:20:00.001-07:00

What a week for new jobs in Georgia | ajc.com

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Blogger Buzz: Blogger integrates with Amazon Associates

2010-04-18T10:48:00.000-07:00

Blogger Buzz: Blogger integrates with Amazon Associates

Colleges, students use new tactics to find jobs for graduates | ajc.com

2010-04-10T04:15:00.001-07:00

Colleges, students use new tactics to find jobs for graduates | ajc.com

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Study: More Women Embracing Web Communities - InsideTech.com

2010-04-06T18:29:00.000-07:00

Study: More Women Embracing Web Communities - InsideTech.com

AT&T to Offer Dog Collars and Pill Containers for Wireless Hotspots

2010-03-28T11:06:00.000-07:00

Shane McGlaun
March 25, 2010

Typically, wireless carriers like AT&T are associated with mobile broadband, mobile phones, and high early termination fees. AT&T isn’t typically though of for pet supplies and as a way to remind the elderly to take their medications.

AT&T sees big money in these sorts of products though, especially when it comes to man’s best friend. AT&T executives were showing off a prototype dog collar at CTIA reports Reuters that is designed to connect to the AT&T wireless network and alert the pet owner when the animal strays from a specific area.

The alerts would come in the form of a text message and the collar would be able to help the owner find the pet if it gets lost. Along with the dog collar, AT&T also expects to start offering pill containers that remind people to take medications, e-readers, and a device that tracks shipment pallets of bulk goods.

“We see opportunities in dogs, in pallets, in cars and how you take your pills,” Ralph de la Vega, the head of AT&T’s mobile business, said at the CTIA annual wireless trade show.

AT&T reports that it is almost ready to start selling the dog collar to consumers. So far, the wireless provider has not offered a firm ship date or any indication of how much the device will sell for and what the service will cost users. AT&T has stated that it expects products like these to add an additional $1 billion in annual services in the next five years. The collar was developed by a company called Apisphere in California.

Study: Third of Americans Use Library Computers

2010-03-26T05:36:00.000-07:00

Study: Third of Americans Use Library Computers

Donna Gordon Blankinship
March 25, 2010

SEATTLE – A third of Americans – about 77 million people – use public library computers to look for jobs, connect with friends, do their homework and improve their lives, according to a new study released Thursday.

It confirms what public libraries have been saying as they compete for public dollars to expand their services and high-speed Internet access: library use by the general public is widespread and not just among poor people.

But researchers found that those living below the federal poverty line – families of four with a household income of $22,000 or less – had the highest use of library computers. Among those households, 44 percent reported using public library computers and Internet access during the past year.

Among those aged 14 to 24 in poor households, 61 percent used public library computers and Internet for education purposes, though young people were the biggest library computers among all demographic groups.
Nearly half of the nation’s 14- to 18-year-olds – about 11.8 million people – reported using a library last year and a quarter of teens used the library at least once a week.

The study was paid for by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and conducted by the University of Washington Information School, which gathered information in three ways:
- A random national telephone survey of 3,176 people from April to August.
- In-person interviews with library patrons in Baltimore, Fayetteville, Ark., Marshalltown, Iowa, and Oakland, Calif.
- An online survey that was answered by 45,000 people after they logged on to use a public library computer.

The most common uses for library computers included gaining access to government agencies, searching for jobs and filling out applications, doing homework, communicating with friends and family, banking, seeking health advice, running a business, completing online courses and seeking financial aid for college.

The researchers were intrigued to find that people across all age and ethnic groups used library computers, said Michael Crandall, one of the principal authors of the study and chairman of the Master of Science in Information Management at the University of Washington Information School.

Some of the findings were surprising, he said.

“In the health area, over 80 percent of the users said they made a change in their diet after using library computers,” Crandall said, adding that he did not know if the change was permanent.

The most unexpected finding, according to Crandall, is that two out of three of the people who use library computers said they are using the computers to help friends or family, such as scanning job databases or looking up information for others.

“In terms of library services, we’re deeply undercounting,” he said, referring to the others benefiting from library computer searches conducted on their behalf.

Crandall said he was also interested to learn that one in four Americans use public library computers while traveling.

Stitching together paychecks a struggle for many | ajc.com

2010-03-24T18:25:00.001-07:00

Stitching together paychecks a struggle for many | ajc.com

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5 Top New Sites to Swap Items Online - InsideTech.com

2010-03-24T17:25:00.000-07:00

5 Top New Sites to Swap Items Online - InsideTech.com

Young Learners Need Librarians, Not Just Google

2010-03-24T08:13:00.000-07:00

Young Learners Need Librarians, Not Just Google

Mark Moran, 03.22.10, 3:00 PM ET

A year ago The New York Times presented a multimedia, packaged gift to school librarians everywhere. With its profile of Brooklyn, N.Y., school librarian Stephanie Rosalia, at long last, a major newspaper had chronicled the 21st century school librarian’s role as Web curator and information literacy specialist.

The article made the Times’ "most e-mailed" list for days and was featured on more than 100 blogs, as educators and parents everywhere recognized the need for media specialists to guide students. In a School Library Journal article that deemed Rosalia "The New Poster Girl for School Libraries," Rosalia said she was "awestruck at how this article has struck a nerve all over the country with people who are not librarians." Yet she was also surprised by a school board director who was "absolutely clueless" about how important school librarians are to student success.

Cut to the present, and librarian blogs tell a different story. Many absolutely clueless administrators still believe that a search engine is an adequate substitute for a trained research teacher. With the nation's schools budget-strapped, librarians--and even libraries--are being cut from coast to coast. Even President Obama, whose creation of a National Information Literacy Awareness Month suggests he should know better, left additional funding for school libraries out of his FY 2011 budget proposal.

In the libraries of old, the Dewey Decimal System got you started on research. But there is no card catalog 2.0. To use the Internet as a library you need new research skills: the ability to pick out reliable sources from an overwhelming heap of misinformation, to find relevant material amid an infinite array of options, to navigate the shifting ethics of creative commons and intellectual property rights and to present conclusions in a manner that engages modern audiences.

As a former corporate lawyer, I owe much of my success to effective research skills that evolved, with the help of skilled trainers, as new tools came along. As a former executive officer at a company that had 1,200 employees in 29 countries worldwide, I know that without adequate media literacy training, kids will not succeed in a 21st-century workplace. The "old school" ways of communicating won’t cut it; I’ve mastered those, and yet now spend each day re-learning how to communicate effectively in this new world order. And as the founder of a company whose mission is to teach the effective use of the Internet, I have pored through dozens of studies, and recently oversaw one myself, that all came to the same conclusion: Students do not know how to find or evaluate the information they need on the Internet.

In a recent study of fifth grade students in the Netherlands, most never questioned the credibility of a Web site, even though they had just completed a course on information literacy. When my company asked 300 school students how they searched, nearly half answered: "I type a question." When we asked how students knew if a site was credible, the most common answers were "if it sounds good" or "if it has the information I need." Equally dismal was their widespread failure to check a source’s date, author or citations.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The issue extends beyond homework. The Internet defines the way that young people learn, communicate, and create. A recent report by the Youth and Media Policy Working Group Initiative at Harvard’s Berkman Center stated that "[m]edia literacy skills overlap with safety skills." In addition to learning how to phrase a search query, students need to learn how to protect themselves online, and how to share their work through wikis, videos, and other interactive media. Without a dedicated guide, they end up, in the words of professor Henry Jenkins, as "feral children of the Internet raised by the Web 2.0 wolves."

While not every school librarian is yet adapting to the new reality of what is demanded of the role, thousands of other dedicated librarians I have met are turning their school media centers into "learning commons" where students seamlessly use state-of-the-art Web tools to consume and produce content. Students at many elite schools are learning critical 21st century skills while librarians are eliminated from budget-stressed school districts. The result? What a University College of London study called a "new divide," with students who have access to librarians "taking the prize of better grades" while those who don’t have access to school librarians showing up at college beyond hope, having "already developed an ingrained coping behaviour: they have learned to 'get by' with Google." This new divide is only going to widen and leave many students hopelessly lost in the past, while others fully embrace the future. Already Tufts University has begun to accept student-produced Web videos as a supplement to admissions applications.

Some officials have started to catch on. Kentucky, in becoming the first state to adopt the Common Core State Standards Initiative, recognized the importance of new technology and research expectations, and it cited school librarians as a key part of its future initiatives.

Before parents accept the wisdom of a school board to cut school librarians, they should ask: Will my child graduate with a 21st century resume, or a 19th century transcript? Can he use collaborative technology, such as wikis? When a search engine returns 105 million results, can the student find the five that will set her paper apart? With the Web evolving by the minute, can classroom teachers alone, stressed by assessment testing and ever-growing paperwork burdens, help students figure this all out? As the information landscape becomes ever more complex, why does a school district want to abandon its professional guides to it?

Mark Moran is CEO of Dulcinea Media, a Web publisher that offers free content and tools that teach students how to use the Web effectively.

Atlanta moves to 9th largest US Metro area | ajc.com

2010-03-23T20:46:00.001-07:00

Atlanta moves to 9th largest US Metro area | ajc.com

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Teacher pay plan stalls, could be headed for more study | ajc.com

2010-03-22T16:37:00.001-07:00

Teacher pay plan stalls, could be headed for more study | ajc.com

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The Perils of Market Research

2010-03-20T05:15:00.000-07:00

The Perils of Market Research

It can be a powerful weapon in any company's strategic planning arsenal. But it can also backfire. Steve McKee offers five essentials to consider

By Steve McKee

My colleagues and I conduct quite a bit of market research, both for our own company and on behalf of our clients. We've seen it used both for good and for ill. Here are a handful of thoughts that can keep your research from causing you pain.

1. There are things you can measure and things you can't. Don't mix them up.

How much do you love your wife? What's the value of poetry? What is a life worth? Ask most people these questions, and you'll get a funny look—or get into a metaphysical discussion. Some things just can't be quantified. Yet in business, we often act as if everything can.

In a 2008 Wall Street Journal story, Adrian Van Hooydonk, director of design at BMW (BMW:GR), explained how the carmaker evaluates vehicle prototypes: "We don't use customer clinics. They will be judging it based on the world today. Design needs to look good in eight years' time. You can't ask a customer whether he will like the design of the car in 2018." Van Hooydonk and his team must be onto something, because BMW has arguably been the most stylish and best-performing car company of the past two decades.

Research can't predict the kind of cars we will be interested in five years from now, how an ad concept will be received three months from now, or what the next hit movie or popular fashion trend will be. Yet we still hold onto hope that somehow statistics and spreadsheets will enable us to foresee the future. They won't. They can't.

Of course, it is possible to track events that have already happened, and that can provide valuable information. Such things as purchase patterns and visit frequency are historical, concrete events subject only to the laws of forgetting (I may not remember how I heard of your product) and deceit (I may not want you to know that I saw your ad in my wife's Glamour magazine). By and large they can be reliably tracked. But when we try to quantify attitudinal attributes—or assume that the past will accurately predict the future—we can get into trouble.

2. Just because you can't measure it doesn't mean it's not real.

When was the last time you responded to a TV ad—or any form of advertising, for that matter? That, of course, depends on the meaning of the word "responded." It's easy to think of "response" strictly as a measurable action, such as an inquiry or purchase. But there are many different ways consumers respond to ads, from the concrete (Web visits, phone inquiries, transactions) to the more abstract (preference, likability, identification). And the higher-involvement the purchase decision, the more likely a brand will need to generate a number of abstract responses before it sees anything concrete.

In 2003, Advertising Age ran a provocative story about advertising ROI—or the lack of it. The publication said that according to research, "Media advertising does the worst job of any marketing discipline in proving return on investment, and network TV is the worst of those media…."

The study was fielded among leading national advertisers—people who ought to know. But what, exactly, did it demonstrate? Not that network TV didn't generate ROI, but that it was the hardest medium with which to prove ROI. That's a significant distinction.

If network TV didn't work for advertisers, there would be no network TV. As business people, we know that TV works because it works on us as consumers. We may not be able to measure it with precision, but anyone who recognizes the Mac vs. PC guys, the Aflac Duck (AFL), the E-Trade Baby (ETFC), or the Budweiser Clydesdales (BUD) can't deny it. Passing judgment based only on what's easily measurable is myopic.

3. The best research is the real world.

Two words: New Coke. Possibly the most pretested new product launch ever, New Coke nevertheless failed in the marketplace. The story has been told many times, and there's no need to repeat it here, but basically what it came down to was that despite an unprecedented amount of market research, the brain trust at Coke (KO) didn't anticipate the monstrous emotional backlash they would engender by replacing their original formula. They couldn't know it until it happened.

Google (GOOG) once asked users how many research results they'd like to see on one screen. Since conventional wisdom says more is always better, people naturally said "more." When Google tripled the number of results, however, it found that traffic actually declined. Not only did the results take a fraction of a second longer to load, but having more options led people to click on links that were less relevant. The respondents in Google's research didn't intentionally lead researchers down the wrong path; they just didn't understand the real-world implications of their choices.

For any research to be scientifically reliable, every variable other than the one being tested must be controlled. But in most marketing research it's impossible to control all the variables, which means a certain amount of error is in every study. Where that error lies, and how significantly it affects the outcome, is always a mystery. That's what makes it so dangerous.

4. People lie.

"I will never have a cell phone." That's a direct quote from my wife, who also said she'd never use the Internet. Today she sent me a text message complaining that Facebook is acting funny again.

She didn't mean to lie. She's just not an early-adopter. And she can't predict how she will respond to new developments in the future. None of us can.

Harris Interactive (HPOL) recently conducted a survey about personal consumer behavior. Unlike most studies of this type, Harris split its panel between telephone and Internet respondents. The results demonstrated that online respondents tended to be more honest, whereas phone respondents were more likely to provide what they thought was the "correct" answer.

For example, more than twice as many people told telephone interviewers they were weekly churchgoers, while fewer admitted they gambled. People interviewed via phone were also more likely to say they give money to charity, exercise regularly, and brush their teeth twice a day. (What a wonderful world that would be.)

Sometimes people won't accurately describe their wants, needs, or behavior, and sometimes they simply can't. As David Lewis, chief designer at Bang & Olufsen (BO:DC), put it in a 2008 Wall Street Journal profile, "You can't go out and ask people what they need or want, because they don't know. The whole trick is to come out with a product and say, 'Have you thought of this?' and hear the consumer respond, 'Wow! No, I hadn't.' If you can do that, you're on."

5. If you blindly follow the research, you'll lose.

Swedish Vodka? Can't happen. Vodka is Russian.

Yep, research said that Absolut (PDRDY) would flop. Instead, it radically changed the spirits industry.

In a 2001 column, World magazine publisher Joel Belz called relying too much on research "the fallacy of false precision." Precision is what Ford (F) was seeking when it famously passed on launching the minivan. Hal Sperlich, who ended up taking the concept to Chrysler, recounted in a 1994 Fortune article that Ford balked because research couldn't prove there was a market for such an unprecedented vehicle. "In 10 years of developing the minivan we never once got a letter from a housewife asking us to invent one." Call it a hunch, call it intuition or insight, call it whatever—Sperlich and his team were correct, regardless of what the research said (or didn't say).

As is animated movie studio Pixar (DIS), time after time, as it churns out one hit after another. Andrew Stanton, director of Finding Nemo and WALL-E, admitted in a 2008 Wall Street Journal column, "We selfishly make movies for ourselves that happen to be juvenile enough that they cover the kids' interests.We've learned to trust our own instincts about what we like and not rely on, or trust, what the outside world tells us is going to work." Apple's (AAPL) Steve Jobs is cut from the same cloth."We do no market research," Jobs told Fortune in a 2008 interview. "We just want to make great products." I think he has proven his approach works.

The bottom line? Market research is a compass, not a map—it can give you a sense of where you are, but it can't tell you where to go. Measure to guide, don't measure to lead, and when you do talk to customers, remember you can't always go through the front door—sometimes you have to sneak in through a window to find out what they really think. Figuratively speaking, of course.

I'm a big fan of market research. But only research done right. Bang & Olufsen, BMW, and Apple are among the most innovative companies on earth, yet they refuse to be slaves to a spreadsheet. So should we all.

Developer eyeing Bartow County, Georgia as site of huge ski dome development

2010-03-18T07:10:00.000-07:00

The Daily Tribune News

March 18, 2010
LOCAL NEWS

Developer eyeing Bartow as site of huge ski dome development

Joe Hiett
Managing editor
Thursday, Mar 18, 2010

This artist’s rendering from the Web site of SRW International, LLC, shows the proposed Falls at Lanier Highlands indoor ski park that would have included a huge indoor ski dome. SRW INTERNATIONAL/Special

It sounds too good to possibly be true -- a million-square-foot indoor ski dome coming to the Red Top Mountain area in Bartow County.

Steven Winters of SRW International, LLC, is lobbying to get a law passed in the Georgia General Assembly that would give new tourism attractions special tax incentives and on Tuesday promoted his ideas at the state capitol.

In a video aired Tuesday night on WSB-TV Channel 2, Winters said the ski dome would be about 1 million square feet in size, about four times the size of a ski dome at Ski Dubai in the Middle East.

Winters evidently is eyeing a 750-acre tract on Red Top Mountain on the shore of Lake Allatoona and is promoting the fact that tourists could both water ski and snow ski in the same day. The development would include three hotels, restaurants and shops.

"We were made aware of the project," County Administrator Steve Bradley said Wednesday afternoon. "We're really interested, if it comes about, that it would create up to 2,000 jobs. It would stimulate the economy tremendously.

"We're hopeful the legislation they are requesting can pass and the governor will sign it this time. One bill, the way I understand it, would have the first 25 percent of the sales tax go back to the developer to offset the cost of their capital investment," Bradley said.

He added that Winters has not asked for anything from the county government at this time.

Winters said in the WSB-TV video that the development could put one-third of the people to work in Bartow County who presently are unemployed.

Winters was at the state Capitol again Wednesday afternoon and was about to go into a committee meeting there when called by The Daily Tribune News.

Referring to the tax incentives bill being proposed by District 164 Rep. Ron Stephens, R-Savannah, Winters told WSB, "I don't see how we can do the project in this day and age without a bill of this type."

Stephens is one of the sponsors of House Bill 1239, known as the Georgia Tourism Job Creation Act. According to language in the bill, it would "provide for a program of tax refunds for companies creating new tourism attractions."

Stephens' bill is similar to one authored by then-Rep. Jeff Lewis of Bartow County two years ago, passed by both houses of the Georgia General Assembly and vetoed by Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue.

Bartow County is not the first site promoted by Winters for the huge development. In 2007 he proposed Mount Pegasus and the Falls at Lanier Highland in Dawson County. He met with the Dawson County Development Authority on Aug. 29, 2007, and said the development had been in the works for more than seven years. Winters is said to have been a key player in development of Ski Dubai in the United Arab Emirates.

The Falls at Lanier Highland was proposed for 400 acres between Ga. 400 and Ga. 53 at Dawson Forest Road. That preliminary plan also includes residential housing, similar to that in Vail and Aspen, Colo.

FCC unveiling sweeping national broadband plan

2010-03-16T05:02:00.000-07:00

FCC unveiling sweeping national broadband plan

By JOELLE TESSLER, AP Technology Writer Joelle Tessler, Ap Technology Writer

Mon Mar 15, 6:04 pm ET

WASHINGTON – More corners of the country would have high-speed Internet access and existing connections would become much faster under a sweeping proposal to overhaul U.S. broadband policy that is being unveiled Tuesday.

The plan from the Federal Communications Commission is meant to guide the government's strategy on broadband for the next decade and beyond. It reflects the Obama administration's concern that the nation that invented the Internet is in danger of falling behind the development of online applications in other countries that have faster broadband speeds at lower prices.

Yet it's not certain the FCC can find the corporate support and legal clearance to carry out the entire plan.

Already, broadcasters oppose one key proposal, which calls for reclaiming some airwaves from TV stations and auctioning those frequencies to companies that deliver wireless Internet access. The FCC also wants to rewrite complicated telecommunications rules in order to pay for broadband using a federal program that now mainly subsidizes telephone service in poor and rural areas. Congress and federal regulators already have been trying to modernize that program for years.

Funding could be a question as well. The FCC does not estimate the total cost of the plan. It insists that its proposals could be paid for by auctioning off slices of the airwaves. But the agency will have to persuade Congress that as much as $20 billion from the airwave auctions be set aside for broadband plans and not get routed to other purposes.

That would come on top of the $7.2 billion for broadband included in the 2009 stimulus bill. The Commerce and Agriculture departments are handing out that money now.

Last year's stimulus bill also required the FCC to come up with the broadband plan, which is being delivered to Congress on Tuesday. The plan argues that high-speed Internet access is no longer just a luxury but is critical for economic development, education, health care and other aspects of daily life.

"Broadband is an infrastructure challenge that's very akin to what we've faced in the past with telephones and electricity," FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said in an interview. Genachowski has made the broadband plan his top priority, and his legacy at the commission will be linked to the plan's success or failure.

The proposal sets a goal of connecting 100 million U.S. households to broadband connections of 100 megabits per second — at least 20 times faster than most home connections now — by 2020. Although existing connections are often fast enough to let people watch TV shows or movies on computers, faster connections would open new kinds of services, such as fast-loading, high-definition videos ideal for viewing on big-screen TVs. The FCC also says faster broadband would enable doctors to monitor patients over the Internet and broaden the opportunities for students to take classes online.

The plan also calls for every American community to have at least one "anchor" institution, such as a school, library or hospital, that has ultra-high-speed Internet access. The FCC defines that as at least a gigabit per second, 10 times faster than the 100 megabits per second envisioned for home connections.

In addition, the plan is designed to encourage more people to subscribe to broadband.

About two-thirds of U.S. households have high-speed Internet access now. Many people in the remaining one-third could get broadband but choose not to because they think it's too expensive or because they don't see a need for it. The FCC plan calls for increasing adoption rates to more than 90 percent of the population. One proposal calls for a Digital Literacy Corps to teach people how to use the Internet.

When rural areas lack broadband access, it's often because phone and cable companies haven't found it worthwhile to invest in dragging high-speed lines to remote places that would have few subscribers. One way the FCC hopes to expand broadband use is with wireless technology.

The wireless industry currently licenses about 500 megahertz of the wireless spectrum. In a move akin to adding more lanes to a freeway, the FCC hopes to free up 500 megahertz more over the next decade, both for licensed purposes and for uses that don't require a license, such as Wi-Fi networks. The agency hopes to get roughly 120 megahertz of that spectrum from broadcasters of free, over-the-air TV. It would allow broadcasters to unload frequencies they don't need and share in the proceeds raised by auctioning those airwaves to wireless companies.

That proposal has run into fierce resistance from the National Association of Broadcasters. TV broadcasters already gave up more than 100 megahertz of spectrum when they shut off analog signals last year and began broadcasting only in digital. Many say they plan to use their remaining frequencies to transmit high-definition signals, to "multicast" multiple channels and to deliver mobile TV to phones, laptops and cars.

In a statement Monday, the National Association of Broadcasters said it is also concerned that some aspects of the plan "may in fact not be as voluntary as originally promised."

The FCC plan also lays out a framework for overhauling the federal Universal Service Fund to pay for expanding broadband instead of basic telephone service. The $8-billion-a-year program, financed by a surcharge that businesses and consumers pay on long-distance bills, was established to subsidize telephone service in sparsely populated places.

Tapping this pool of money for broadband could be an uphill push, too, because the long-distance revenue base that supports the Universal Service Fund is shrinking. The FCC plan offers several options to pay for the new broadband programs, including one that would require no additional money from Congress and one that would accelerate the construction of broadband networks if Congress approves a one-time injection of several billion dollars.

The FCC may also need to sort out questions of legal authority. Existing law and policies say Universal Service money can only be used for telephone service, not broadband.

The plan also recommends that Congress spend up to $16 billion over 10 years to build and operate for a nationwide wireless broadband network that would allow police officers, firefighters and other emergency workers to communicate with each other.

Early reactions from the big phone and cable companies that dominate the U.S. broadband market were positive. US Telecom, a trade group that represents phone companies, praised the FCC for recognizing that "it will be through private sector investment and innovation that America's broadband deployment goals will be met."

Financial reform efforts pit US against Europe

2010-03-16T03:01:00.001-07:00

Financial reform efforts pit US against Europe

By STEVENSON JACOBS, AP Business Writer
Tue Mar 16, 12:13 am ET

NEW YORK – U.S. policymakers are struggling to agree on new rules to avoid another financial crisis.

A global consensus? Even harder.
Efforts are raging on three continents, with at least as many ideas about the proper fixes. Unless the U.S., Europe and Asia adopt uniformly strict regulations, banks and high-risk traders will shift operations wherever rules are loosest. Experts warn another crisis could follow.

The global proposals are clashing on several levels. Among the differences:

• The Obama administration wants to restrict banks' size and ability to take risk. European officials have called that plan unworkable in a region with roughly 40 cross-border banks.

• European Union officials want to crack down on financial derivatives, which they blame for worsening Europe's debt crisis. Derivatives are instruments whose value depends on underlying assets, such as mortgages or currencies. U.S. regulators favor making derivatives trading more transparent. But they've resisted calls to restrict it.

• In Asia, Chinese regulators are forcing banks to set aside more reserves to prevent a U.S.-style credit binge. And India has maintained rules that were already stricter than many in the West.

A report last week on Lehman Brothers' 2008 collapse reminded the world of the matter's urgency. The report said regulators missed Lehman's accounting tricks, which made the firm appear stronger than it was. Lehman's bankruptcy, the biggest in U.S. corporate history, shocked global markets and triggered the $700 billion financial bailout.

But 18 months later, no deal on stricter rules is in sight — domestically or globally. Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd proposed his own bill Monday — without Republican support. And the U.S. and Europe seem far apart on such issues as how to oversee bank accounts and mortgages and whether banks can do proprietary trading. That's when they use their own money to make high-risk bets. If those bets go bad and a bank goes under, taxpayers could be on the hook.

The Lehman disaster underscores the "enormous imperative" to tighten international rules, said Kenneth Rogoff, a Harvard professor and former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund. Yet he doubts countries can agree.

"You're dealing with different accounting standards, different political systems and different banking systems," Rogoff said. "It will be very hard to create one-size-fits-all regulations."
A lobbying blitz by Wall Street banks has helped drive the sides apart. Banks argue that some U.S. proposals would give overseas rivals an unfair edge. Especially in their sights is a proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency to oversee consumer products.

The House and Senate plans would create a council to monitor threats to the financial system. Both would also set a "resolution authority" to close large failing firms. But key differences remain. One involves the proposed consumer agency. The House favors a freestanding agency; the

Dodd bill would place it inside the Federal Reserve.

Europe is weighing some similar reforms. The economic bloc would create three authorities: to govern banking, insurance and markets in all 27 member nations. A watchdog would monitor financial stability. It would also look for any financial-asset bubbles or banks embracing too much risk.

But trans-Atlantic discord is flaring. The Obama administration wants to bar the biggest banks from using their own money to make high-risk bets. It would also limit the size of banks.
The European Union has rejected that plan. In Europe, banks already have been getting smaller. Regulators insisted they shrink to compensate for government aid.

"Trying to apply sweeping rules about the structure, content and range of activities of banking entities is too difficult," British Business Secretary Peter Mandelson said this month.
In addition, European officials have threatened to restrict trading of certain derivatives linked to government debt, called "naked" credit default swaps. Naked swaps are a type of insurance in which investors don't actually hold the insured bonds. European officials argue the swaps have worsened Europe's crisis by magnifying bets that Greece and other indebted nations will default.

Many experts disagree. They say ballooning deficits — not derivatives — have weakened confidence in Greece and other EU nations.

Still, EU officials want the U.S. to help crack down on those swaps. The House and Senate bills would likely require most derivatives trades to go through clearinghouses to make them more transparent. But they wouldn't limit their use.

Another conflict is over hedge funds, which are lightly regulated private investment vehicles. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has voiced concern that disclosure rules that Europe is weighing could block U.S. hedge funds and private equity firms from Europe's market.

EU proposals would likely require big funds operating in Europe to regularly disclose their trades and risk exposure. The idea is to prove they don't threaten the financial system.
By contrast, the Senate bill would require only that big hedge funds pay into a resolution fund to pay for dismantling failing firms.

Andrew Busch, a global strategist at BMO Capital Markets, warns that firms would exploit any differences in countries' rules. Risky activities banned in one country could shift to another with friendlier rules.

"You would invite regulatory shopping — really, country shopping," Busch said. "It's as easy as flipping a switch."

Even the banking industry acknowledges the risk.

"You could have a race to the bottom to those countries and jurisdictions that have weaker protections," said Scott Talbott, chief lobbyist for the Financial Services Roundtable, which includes the largest banks.

The banks argue that the U.S. effort risks stifling financial activity and are fighting elements of it.

"There has to be a balance in how you regulate, or you make banks less competitive," Talbott said.

For a model on how to tighten rules, U.S. and European officials may look East. Asia's banks were relatively unscathed by the West's crisis. In part, that was because China wasn't deeply integrated into the global system. In other cases such as India, regulation was already stricter than in the West.

Some Asian countries have further intensified efforts to reduce risk. Chinese regulators in 2008 required banks to hold more reserves to guard against loan failures.

In addition, China wants to increase oversight of banks that were ordered to boost lending last year to back Beijing's stimulus.

"We used to learn from Western developed countries, but later we found their systems had problems, so we'll have to amend our system and hope it will develop in a healthy and steady way," said Wei Tao, an analyst for China Securities Research.

Gary Gensler, head of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, has struck an optimistic note about a global accord on derivatives. He said last week that U.S. authorities are "working well" with overseas regulators.

Others say some disagreement is helpful. Banking analyst Bert Ely said a diversity of regulations can point to flaws in a country's rules and to better solutions elsewhere.
"If everyone adopts the same rules and we're wrong, then we all go running off the cliff together when the next crisis hits," Ely said.

____

AP Writers Jim Kuhnhenn in Washington; Aoife White in Brussels; Bonnie Cao and Joe McDonald in Beijing; Erika Kinetz in Mumbai, India; Jeremiah Marquez in Hong Kong; Jay Alabaster in Tokyo; and Kelly Olsen in Seoul contributed to this report.

NEC Develops "Minority Report" Advertising System - InsideTech.com

2010-03-15T15:54:00.000-07:00

NEC Develops "Minority Report" Advertising System - InsideTech.com

When should kids get cell phones?

2010-03-11T03:01:00.000-08:00

When should kids get cell phones?

Wed Mar 10, 2010 3:05PM EST

Every parent of a young child today knows the dilemma: When is your child old enough for a cell phone? A computer? A TV in their room?

Good questions, and while the scientific and psychological consensus tends to skew toward encouraging later adoption of gadgetry (12 years old is a common figure for My First Cell Phone), parents are decidedly mixed.

To wit, Retrevo just released new research on this topic based on a survey of 1,000 people (which seems to include both parents and the childless). Their results are interesting (and I am posting the results verbatim below):

A Child's First Cell Phone

- 5% of people think kids under 9 should have their own cell phones
- 28% of people think kids should have their own cell phone between the ages of 9 & 12
- 61% of people think kids should be between age 13 & 18 for a phone
- 6% of people thing kids should wait until they're 18 to get a cell phone

A Child's First Computer

- 31% of people think that kids should have their first computer by the age of 9
- 35% of people think that kids should have their first computer between the ages of 9 & 12
- 30% of people think that kids should have their first computer between the ages of 13 & 18
- 4% of people think parents should wait until the kids are over 18

A Child's First TV

- 27% of people think kids should have their own TV by the age of 9
- 20% of people think kids should have their own TV between the ages of 9 & 12
- 30% of people think kids should have their own TV between the ages of 13 & 18
- 23% of people think kids should be over 18 before having their own TV

Pretty strong consensus that around 13 is a good starting point for the phone discussion, while TVs and computers find extremely mixed results. I'm still looking for the answers myself. My seven-year-old daughter already has a computer (with heavy lockdown on what it can do), but she's years away from getting a cell phone. A TV in her room? Unlikely, but she can watch videos on her laptop in a pinch. It's actually never come up in discussion.

What do you think?

How Colleges Are Buying Respect

2010-03-06T08:06:00.000-08:00

How Colleges Are Buying Respect

For-profit education companies are scooping up small schools to gain accreditation—and the financial aid dollars that come with it

ITT Educational Services (ESI) didn't pay $20.8 million for debt-ridden Daniel Webster College in June just to acquire its red-brick campus, 1,200 students, or computer science and aviation training programs.

To ITT, the third-biggest higher-education company in the U.S., the Nashua (N.H.) college's "most attractive" feature was its regional accreditation, says Michael Goldstein, an attorney at Dow Lohnes, a Washington firm that has long represented the Carmel (Ind.) company. Regional accreditation, the same gold standard of academic quality enjoyed by Harvard, is a way to increase enrollment and tap into the more than $100 billion the federal government pays out annually in financial aid.

The nation's for-profit higher-education companies have tripled enrollment, to 1.4 million students, and revenue, to $26 billion, in the past decade, in part through the recruitment of low-income students and active-duty military. Now they're taking a new tack. By exploiting loopholes in government regulation and an accreditation system that wasn't designed to evaluate for-profit takeovers, they're acquiring struggling nonprofit and religious colleges—and their coveted accreditation. Often their goal is to transform the schools into taxpayer-funded behemoths by dramatically expanding enrollment with online-only programs; most of those new students will receive federally backed financial aid, which is only available at accredited colleges.

"The companies are buying accreditation," said Kevin Kinser, an associate professor at the State University of New York at Albany who studies for-profit higher education. "You can get accreditation a lot of ways, but all of the others take time. They don't have time. They want to boost enrollment 100% in two years."

By acquiring regional accreditation, trade schools and online colleges gain a credential associated with traditional academia. Six nonprofit regional associations set standards on financial stability, governance, faculty, and academic programs. Normally the process takes five years and requires evaluations by outside professors. Most for-profits have been accredited by less prestigious national organizations. Students enrolled at both regionally and nationally accredited colleges can receive federal aid, but those at regionally accredited schools can transfer credits more easily from one college to the next.

"CREATIVE ARRANGEMENTS"
For-profit education companies, including ITT and Baltimore-based Laureate Education, have purchased at least 16 nonprofit colleges with regional accreditation since 2004. The U.S. Education Dept., which doled out $129 billion in federal financial aid to students at accredited postsecondary schools in the year ended Sept. 30, is examining whether these kinds of acquisitions circumvent a federal law that requires a two-year wait before new for-profit colleges can qualify for assistance, says Deputy Education Under Secretary Robert Shireman. Under federal regulations taking effect on July 1, accrediting bodies may also have to notify the Education Secretary if enrollment at a college with online courses increases more than 50% in one year. "It certainly has been a challenge both for accreditors and the Department of Education to keep up with the new creative arrangements that have been developing," Shireman says.

Buying accreditation lets the new owners immediately benefit from federal student aid, which provides more than 80% of revenue for some for-profit colleges, instead of having to wait at least two years. Traditional colleges are also more inclined to offer transfer credits for courses taken at regionally approved institutions, making it easier to attract students.

The regional accreditors, which rely on academic volunteers, bestow the valuable credential with scant scrutiny of the buyers' backgrounds, says Barmak Nassirian, associate executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars & Admissions Officers in Washington. While accrediting bodies treat these purchases as changes of ownership, the acquisitions, in reality, create new colleges that should be required to earn certification from scratch, Kinser says.

For accreditation to continue once the college is sold, the buyer must promise not to change its mission, says Steven Crow, former executive director of the Chicago-based Higher Learning Commission, the largest regional accreditation body. Once accreditation is maintained, the acquirer seeks permission, which is usually granted, to start branch campuses and online programs.

Obama Administration officials have recently questioned whether the present accreditation system is effective in protecting academic standards. Accrediting decisions lack transparency and take too long, Education Under Secretary Martha Kanter said in a Jan. 26 speech.

A BARGAIN
Regional accreditation is worth $10 million to a for-profit acquirer, says Michael Clifford, an education investor in Del Mar, Calif., who has participated in purchases of four nonprofit colleges. That's how much it would cost to start a regionally accredited college, a process that can take 10 years and has only a 50-50 chance of success. On top of the $10 million, buyers typically pay $23,000 to $50,000 per enrolled student, making ITT's purchase of Daniel Webster a bargain, Clifford says.

Clifford and his fellow investors popularized the strategy in 2004 by purchasing Grand Canyon University (LOPE), a Christian college in Phoenix. Enrollment has soared to 37,700 as of Dec. 31, up from 1,500 students, with 92% taking classes online. Grand Canyon, which went public in November 2008, derived 82.5% of its revenue from federal financial aid in 2009, according to a company filing.

A 2006 regulatory change fostered online growth and made takeovers more attractive. That year, Congress eliminated a rule prohibiting colleges that offered more than half of their courses online from receiving federal financial aid.

Clifford also participated in the 2008 purchase of Myers University in Cleveland, which was renamed Chancellor University. Chancellor attracted former General Electric (GE) CEO Jack Welch as an investor last year and named its new online management institute after him. Welch collaborated with faculty in developing curricula for a master's program in business administration, Clifford says. "We chose to work with Chancellor University because it gave us the flexibility to start something new," Welch said through a spokeswoman. "As a for-profit venture, we have the resources to invest in the student experience and the very best faculty." Knowledge Universe Learning Group, chaired by junk-bond pioneer Michael Milken, entered into a partnership in 2007 with regionally accredited Sierra Nevada College in Incline Village, Nev., agreeing to provide up to $15 million in return for an opportunity to share in online revenue, according to Geoffrey Moore, a senior adviser to Milken.

The regional associations scrutinize takeovers of nonprofit colleges in advance and then follow up afterward, accrediting officials say. They could recall few, if any, cases in which they refused to continue accreditation.

Corinthian Colleges' (COCO) past difficulties with California state regulators didn't matter to accreditors when it agreed last October to purchase Heald Capital, parent company of Heald College, for $395 million. Corinthian, the country's seventh-largest higher-education company by market capitalization, has more than 100 campuses in North America, and had 106,052 students, including Heald, as of Dec. 31.

Corinthian had paid a $6.5 million settlement in July 2007 to the California attorney general's office over allegedly misrepresenting graduates' job placement rates and salaries. It also agreed to cease enrolling students in 11 programs at nine campuses. Corinthian, based in Santa Ana, Calif., didn't admit wrongdoing.

The Accrediting Commission for Community & Junior Colleges in Novato, Calif., which certifies two-year institutions in California and Hawaii, approved the change in Heald's ownership. "We judge the college we accredit," says Barbara Beno, president of the commission. "It would be unfair to say, 'Heald, you've been bought by a parent corporation that doesn't have as fine a track record as you do. Therefore, we'll condemn you.'"

That "doesn't remotely satisfy the sloppiest of due-diligence requirements," says Nassirian of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars & Admissions Officers. "There is no methodical review of who has bought the college. If the Cosa Nostra applied, you would think you'd take a look."

The Higher Learning Commission, which certifies more than 1,000 colleges from Arkansas to Wisconsin, stiffened its rules on ownership changes last year. Buyers must wait anywhere from one to four years to reapply for accreditation if the college won't remain "the same animal," says President Sylvia Manning. The commission now charges a $10,000 fee for ownership changes to pay for more extensive research, and new owners must be approved by its board rather than at the staff level.

Last year, Mayes Education acquired the assets of Waldorf College, in Forest City, Iowa, an Evangelical Lutheran college with 500 students. The commission, applying its revised rules, stipulated as a condition of approval that Waldorf can't offer online-only degrees at least until the 2011-12 academic year. Mayes, a subsidiary of Columbia Southern University in Orange Beach, Ala., plans to boost Waldorf's enrollment to 2,300 students in three years through programs combining online classes with face-to-face instruction at temporary sites around the country, says company spokeswoman Jessica Brown.

Columbia Southern wasn't the only for-profit that expressed interest in buying Waldorf, says Richard Hanson, Waldorf's former president. Another company that lacked regional accreditation also contacted him: ITT Educational Services.

ITT runs 120 nationally accredited technical institutes with 80,000 students, most of whom pursue associate's degrees. The cost of attending an ITT Technical Institute, including tuition, fees, and off-campus room and board, was $26,775 in 2008-09, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Of students who entered ITT's two-year schools in 2004, 29% graduated. ITT derived 70% of its 2009 revenue from federal financial aid.

ITT Educational Services, which declined to comment for this story, is in the preliminary stages of seeking regional accreditation for its technical institutes through the Higher Learning Commission, which sent a team to visit the company last fall, according to commission spokeswoman Susan Van Kollenburg. The commission has not yet acted on this evaluation, she says.

Daniel Webster is ITT's first regionally accredited campus. It was founded in 1965 as the New England Aeronautical Institute. Over the years the college expanded from flight instruction into training air-traffic controllers and airline managers, as well as computer science, engineering, and business. It has "a longstanding good reputation," said Gary Kiteley, executive director of the Aviation Accreditation Board International in Auburn, Ala., which licenses the college's aviation programs.

With an endowment that peaked at about $3 million in 2008, Daniel Webster relied on tuition revenues, says Robert Myers, the school's former president. The airline industry's downturn after the September 11 terrorist attacks and the collapse of Internet stocks hurt enrollment in aviation and computer science, says former provost Michael Fishbein.

Myers says he was contacted by ITT in December 2008. CEO Kevin Modany visited Daniel Webster the next month, and the parties reached agreement in April. New England accreditor Commission on Institutions of Higher Education approved the sale that same month. "It's in the public interest to have these small institutions continue to function," says Bruce Mallory, a commission member and education professor at the University of New Hampshire. "If a proprietary school can come in, continue to provide the same level of education, and assure viability, that's all for the better."

SECOND THOUGHTS
As Myers negotiated the sale, he says, he came to suspect that the company wasn't being forthright. When he and Rodney Conard, who chaired the college's board of trustees, worked out at a YMCA a week before the June closing, they discussed canceling the deal, Myers said. Conard says going through with the sale was the right decision.

According to Myers and Fishbein, Modany promised to leave Daniel Webster's administrators in charge. At a campus event introducing the ITT CEO to the college community, Modany promised there would be ample employment opportunities. In July, ITT laid off more than 20 Daniel Webster employees, Myers says. It believed they were duplicating functions that ITT's corporate offices in Indiana could provide, two people familiar with the company's thinking said. ITT also replaced Conard and the other trustees.

At the time of the layoffs, Myers was circulating a draft report questioning whether some of ITT's changes were in accord with the standards of the accreditation commission, which call for a faculty role in curriculum and governance. "ITT came in and said, 'We only want faculty to teach,'" Myers says. "We'll develop curricula in Carmel, Ind., and give them to you." On Aug. 5, ITT ousted him, he says. Nadine Dowling, director of the Woburn (Mass.) campus of ITT Tech, became interim president.

"ITT didn't really have much interest in anything other than having acquired a regionally accredited institution," says Myers, now president of the New England Culinary Institute in Montpelier, Vt. "If I had it to do all over again, I wouldn't have gone anywhere near ITT. The fundamental nature of the college has changed." Modany declined to comment.

Like other acquirers of regionally accredited colleges, ITT plans to expand Daniel Webster's online offerings. The company also expects to open more Daniel Webster campuses and to introduce new academic programs including accounting, education, and health sciences. "Regional accreditation was very important" to the company, said Goldstein, the Dow Lohnes lawyer. "I don't think there's any question that was the most attractive element."

AT&T Says Metered Internet is Coming - InsideTech.com

2010-03-03T16:31:00.000-08:00

AT&T Says Metered Internet is Coming - InsideTech.com

Obama seeks money, interventions to stem dropouts

2010-03-01T08:17:00.000-08:00

Obama seeks money, interventions to stem dropouts

By DARLENE SUPERVILLE, Associated Press Writer Darlene Superville,

Associated Press Writer

14 mins ago

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama took aim Monday at the nation's school dropout epidemic, proposing $900 million to states and education districts that agree to drastically change or even shutter their worst performing schools.

Obama's move comes as many schools continue to struggle to get children to graduation, a profound problem in a rich, powerful nation. Only about 70 percent of entering high school freshmen go on to graduate. The problem affects blacks and Latinos at particularly high rates.

Obama described the crisis as one that hurts individual kids and the nation as a whole, shattering dreams and undermining an already hurting economy.

"There's got to be a sense of accountability," Obama said in announcing his latest get-tough school proposal at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

The president's plan would seek to help 5,000 of the nation's lowest-performing schools over the next five years.

"In this kind of knowledge economy, giving up on your education and dropping out of school means not only giving up on your future, but it's also giving up on your family's future," Obama said. "It's giving up on your country."

Obama has been pushing schools — using federal money as his leverage — to raise their standards and prod them to get more children ready for college or work. It is a task that former President George W. Bush and Congress, along with many leaders before them, have long taken on, but the challenge is steep.

Obama's 2011 budget proposal includes $900 million for School Turnaround Grants. That money is in addition to $3.5 billion to help low-performing schools that was in last year's economic stimulus bill.

To get a share of the new money, states and school districts must adopt one of four approaches to fix their struggling schools:

_Turnaround Model: The school district must replace the principal and at least half of the school staff, adopt a new governance structure for the school, and implement a new or revised instructional program.

_Restart Model: The school district must close and reopen the school under the management of a charter school operator, a charter management organization or an educational management organization. A restarted school would be required to enroll, within the grades it serves, former students who wish to attend.

_School Closure: The school district must close the failing school and enroll the students in other, higher-achieving schools in the district.

_Transformational Model: The school must address four areas, including teacher effectiveness, instruction, learning and teacher planning time, and operational flexibility.

The administration also is putting $50 million into dropout prevention strategies, including personalized and individual instruction and support to keep students engaged in learning, and better use of data to identify students at risk of failure and to help them with the transition to high school and college.

Obama announced his plan Monday at an education event sponsored by the America's Promise Alliance, the youth-oriented organization founded by former Secretary of State Colin Powell and his wife, Alma. Obama also planned to discuss ways to better prepare students for college and careers.

Could we see a 77 percent tuition hike at public colleges?

2010-02-25T04:45:00.000-08:00

Could we see a 77 percent tuition hike at public colleges?

3:29 pm February 24, 2010, by Maureen Downey

A week ago, we sat down with UGA president Michael Adams who was concerned about the ongoing hits to higher education in the state budget. His main concern was losing good faculty members to competing schools because of an inability to come up with counter offers. (He said some interesting things about the disparity in high school quality in the state, but I will write that up later.)

But his boss was at the Legislature today with even more dire warnings: It would take a 77 percent tuition increase at Georgia’s colleges and universities to meet the demand for a $385 million cut in the state’s higher education system budget, said Chancellor Erroll Davis.

That was not what lawmakers wanted to hear. They did not want Davis to tell them that the system could not sustain many more cuts or find any real money outside of raising tuition through the roof. “We are in a budget crisis,” state Sen. Seth Harp (R-Midland) told him. “We have got to cut another $200 to $300 million out of your budget. Please, prioritize where those cuts will come or we will do it blindly.”

Lawmakers threw out ideas for how the system could save money, but those cuts would not produce nearly enough in savings. For example, state Rep. Bob Lane (R-Statesboro) asked how much a 1 percent salary cut would save the system. Davis couldn’t answer, but my AJC colleagues checked and found out that a 1 percent cut to the systems’ teaching budget, the overwhelming majority of which goes to salaries, would save $19 million.

It seems the writing is on the wall for a tuition hike. In our visit, Adams noted that Georgia still is considered a great deal in public college tuition, and there is a fair argument for raising it.

A tuition hike at UGA is really a new burden on lottery dollars since so many Athens students are HOPE Scholarship recipients. The lottery folks already have warned of problems meeting demand, so that seems to point to a collision course between supply and demand.

Not sure how this is going to end, but I would suggest that college students start giving up those weekly Starbucks double shots and the iTune purchases. A tuition hike seems apparent unless lawmakers consider raising taxes or “fees” on something somewhere. (I still vote for the cigarette tax.)

Are you ready?

Feds: 100Mbps broadband for everyone!

2010-02-18T09:01:00.001-08:00

Tip: When launching a government initiative, it's good to stick with big, round numbers that everyone can understand.

Case in point: 100 Squared, an FCC endeavor that hopes to connect 100 megabit-per-second pipes to 100 million households in the United States, bringing broadband connectivity adoption from 65 percent of the country to 90 percent.

That's a bold plan, but FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski has offered copious examples of why we should do it, showing how simply adding a high-speed Internet connection to a home or office can increase business sales, improve education and income levels, and even save lives.

Still, the fact remains that getting 90 percent of the country connected with Internet access 20 times faster than what most of us have now isn't going to be easy, and the FCC hasn't offered any sort of timeline for when this all might be feasible.

This isn't the first time national, superfast broadband has been floated. In October the FCC estimated it would cost $350 billion to provide that kind of service across the country. And while the National Broadband Plan (funded by last year's Federal Stimulus Package) is a natural part of this endeavor, as Electronista notes in the linked story above, it's likely that private industry will have to pick up a good portion of the slack to make this really happen. For example, Verizon already offers (very expensive) 50Mbps fiber-driven service in a few select cities and could conceivably hit 100Mbps with a little effort (and money), but it's the game-changing newcomers -- like Google's recently-announced and ultra-ambitious 1Gbps Google Fiber project -- that arguably offer the best hope for boosting us all into the triple digits, speed-wise.

We've got a long road ahead of us, but it's still encouraging to see our fearless leaders taking Internet issues so seriously. Meanwhile, is there a sign-up sheet or a waiting list I can get on? 100Mbps sounds good to me!

Public Perceptions Of Higher Education Declining, Study Finds

2010-02-17T09:59:00.000-08:00

The Chronicle of Higher Education (2/17, Kelderman) reports, "The proportion of people who think colleges are more concerned with their financial well-being than with giving students a quality education continues to grow." This is according to "Squeeze Play 2010: Public Attitudes About College Access and Affordability," a report from the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education and Public Agenda. "A nationwide poll conducted in December found that 60 percent of respondents believed colleges are 'like most businesses and mainly care about the bottom line,' compared with 32 percent who said colleges are mostly interested in 'making sure students have a good educational experience.'" According to Patrick M. Callan, president of policy center, "the results...are the latest indicator that public confidence in higher education is experiencing a long-term decline."

An American Council on Education official called the results "depressingly consistent with the results of our own surveys," according to Inside Higher Ed (2/17, Lederman). In describing the findings, Callan said "It's not malevolent or hostile, necessarily, but people think colleges are just like everybody else." Some experts tied the findings to unhappiness stemming from continually rising tuition costs. "The perceived 'necessity' of a college education appears to outweigh whatever unhappiness the public has with the price and integrity of higher education, said Callan." At the same time, "that doesn't mean higher education leaders should be sanguine about what Callan calls the 'vote of no confidence' in higher education's management and leadership."

USA Today (2/17, Marklein) reports, "David Shulenburger, a vice president with the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, says public opinion may be based on misperception." Shulenburger explained, "It is perhaps too much for a telephone poll to draw the distinction between increases in cost to the student and increases in the cost of providing education. ... Failure to do so, however, tends to reinforce the false notion that public universities have let the cost of providing education get out of control. They have not."

Similarly, the New York Times (2/17, A11, Lewin) quotes Terry Hartle, the senior vice president of government and public affairs for the American Council on Education, who said that "while it is true that colleges and universities could provide higher education for less money...it would require cuts in areas that most people see as fundamental to quality."

AP: Southern Co. to get federal loan guarantees for nuclear reactors | ajc.com

2010-02-12T22:48:00.001-08:00

AP: Southern Co. to get federal loan guarantees for nuclear reactors | ajc.com

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GE plans a brighter presence in Atlanta | ajc.com

2010-02-12T22:45:00.001-08:00

GE plans a brighter presence in Atlanta | ajc.com

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Mega-regionalism: A Southeastern economic engine? | ajc.com

2010-01-31T05:21:00.001-08:00

Mega-regionalism: A Southeastern economic engine? | ajc.com

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Poverty moves fast  to suburbs | ajc.com

2010-01-29T14:18:00.001-08:00

Poverty moves fast  to suburbs | ajc.com

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In Digital Combat, U.S. Finds No Easy Deterrent

2010-01-26T02:54:00.001-08:00

January 26, 2010
CYBERWAR
In Digital Combat, U.S. Finds No Easy Deterrent

By JOHN MARKOFF, DAVID E. SANGER and THOM SHANKER
This article was reported by John Markoff, David E. Sanger and Thom Shanker, and written by Mr. Sanger.

WASHINGTON — On a Monday morning earlier this month, top Pentagon leaders gathered to simulate how they would respond to a sophisticated cyberattack aimed at paralyzing the nation’s power grids, its communications systems or its financial networks.

The results were dispiriting. The enemy had all the advantages: stealth, anonymity and unpredictability. No one could pinpoint the country from which the attack came, so there was no effective way to deter further damage by threatening retaliation. What’s more, the military commanders noted that they even lacked the legal authority to respond — especially because it was never clear if the attack was an act of vandalism, an attempt at commercial theft or a state-sponsored effort to cripple the United States, perhaps as a prelude to a conventional war.

What some participants in the simulation knew — and others did not — was that a version of their nightmare had just played out in real life, not at the Pentagon where they were meeting, but in the far less formal war rooms at Google Inc. Computers at Google and more than 30 other companies had been penetrated, and Google’s software engineers quickly tracked the source of the attack to seven servers in Taiwan, with footprints back to the Chinese mainland.

After that, the trail disappeared into a cloud of angry Chinese government denials, and then an ugly exchange of accusations between Washington and Beijing. That continued Monday, with Chinese assertions that critics were trying to “denigrate China” and that the United States was pursuing “hegemonic domination” in cyberspace.

These recent events demonstrate how quickly the nation’s escalating cyberbattles have outpaced the rush to find a deterrent, something equivalent to the cold-war-era strategy of threatening nuclear retaliation.

So far, despite millions of dollars spent on studies, that quest has failed. Last week, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton made the most comprehensive effort yet to warn potential adversaries that cyberattacks would not be ignored, drawing on the language of nuclear deterrence.

“States, terrorists and those who would act as their proxies must know that the United States will protect our networks,” she declared in a speech on Thursday that drew an angry response from Beijing. “Those who disrupt the free flow of information in our society or any other pose a threat to our economy, our government and our civil society.”

But Mrs. Clinton did not say how the United States would respond, beyond suggesting that countries that knowingly permit cyberattacks to be launched from their territories would suffer damage to their reputations, and could be frozen out of the global economy.

There is, in fact, an intense debate inside and outside the government about what the United States can credibly threaten. One alternative could be a diplomatic démarche, or formal protest, like the one the State Department said was forthcoming, but was still not delivered, in the Google case. Economic retaliation and criminal prosecution are also possibilities.

Inside the National Security Agency, which secretly scours overseas computer networks, officials have debated whether evidence of an imminent cyberattack on the United States would justify a pre-emptive American cyberattack — something the president would have to authorize. In an extreme case, like evidence that an adversary was about to launch an attack intended to shut down power stations across America, some officials argue that the right response might be a military strike.

“We are now in the phase that we found ourselves in during the early 1950s, after the Soviets got the bomb,” said Joseph Nye, a professor at the Kennedy School at Harvard. “It won’t have the same shape as nuclear deterrence, but what you heard Secretary Clinton doing was beginning to explain that we can create some high costs for attackers.”

Fighting Shadows

When the Pentagon summoned its top regional commanders from around the globe for meetings and a dinner with President Obama on Jan. 11, the war game prepared for them had nothing to do with Afghanistan, Iraq or Yemen. Instead, it was the simulated cyberattack — a battle unlike any they had engaged in.

Participants in the war game emerged with a worrisome realization. Because the Internet has blurred the line between military and civilian targets, an adversary can cripple a country — say, freeze its credit markets — without ever taking aim at a government installation or a military network, meaning that the Defense Department’s advanced capabilities may not be brought to bear short of a presidential order.

“The fact of the matter,” said one senior intelligence official, “is that unless Google had told us about the attack on it and other companies, we probably never would have seen it. When you think about that, it’s really scary.”

William J. Lynn III, the deputy defense secretary, who oversaw the simulation, said in an interview after the exercise that America’s concepts for protecting computer networks reminded him of one of defensive warfare’s great failures, the Maginot Line of pre-World War II France.

Mr. Lynn, one of the Pentagon’s top strategists for computer network operations, argues that the billions spent on defensive shields surrounding America’s banks, businesses and military installations provide a similarly illusory sense of security.

“A fortress mentality will not work in cyber,” he said. “We cannot retreat behind a Maginot Line of firewalls. We must also keep maneuvering. If we stand still for a minute, our adversaries will overtake us.”

The Pentagon simulation and the nearly simultaneous real-world attacks on Google and more than 30 other companies show that those firewalls are falling fast. But if it is obvious that the government cannot afford to do nothing about such breaches, it is also clear that the old principles of retaliation — you bomb Los Angeles, we’ll destroy Moscow — just do not translate.

“We are looking beyond just the pure military might as the solution to every deterrence problem,” said Gen. Kevin P. Chilton, in charge of the military’s Strategic Command, which defends military computer networks. “There are other elements of national power that can be brought to bear. You could deter a country with some economic moves, for example.”

But first you would have to figure out who was behind the attack.

Even Google’s engineers could not track, with absolute certainty, the attackers who appeared to be trying to steal their source code and, perhaps, insert a “Trojan horse” — a backdoor entryway to attack — in Google’s search engines. Chinese officials have denied their government was involved, and said nothing about American demands that it investigate. China’s denials, American officials say, are one reason that President Obama has said nothing in public about the attacks — a notable silence, given that he has made cybersecurity a central part of national security strategy.

“You have to be quite careful about attributions and accusations,” said a senior administration official deeply involved in dealing with the Chinese incident with Google. The official was authorized by the Obama administration to talk about its strategy, with the condition that he would not be named.

“It’s the nature of these attacks that the forensics are difficult,” the official added. “The perpetrator can mask their involvement, or disguise it as another country’s.” Those are known as “false flag” attacks, and American officials worry about being fooled by a dissident group, or a criminal gang, into retaliating against the wrong country.

Nonetheless, the White House said in a statement that “deterrence has been a fundamental part of the administration’s cybersecurity efforts from the start,” citing work in the past year to protect networks and “international engagement to influence the behavior of potential adversaries.”

Left unsaid is whether the Obama administration has decided whether it would ever threaten retaliatory cyberattacks or military attacks after a major cyberattack on American targets. The senior administration official provided by the White House, asked about Mr. Obama’s thinking on the issue, said: “Like most operational things like this, the less said, the better.” But he added, “there are authorities to deal with these attacks residing in many places, and ultimately, of course, with the president.”

Others are less convinced. “The U.S. is widely recognized to have pre-eminent offensive cybercapabilities, but it obtains little or no deterrent effect from this,” said James A. Lewis, director of the Center for Strategic and International Studies program on technology and public policy.

In its final years, the Bush administration started a highly classified effort, led by Melissa Hathaway, to build the foundations of a national cyberdeterrence strategy. “We didn’t even come close,” she said in a recent interview. Her hope had been to recreate Project Solarium, which President Dwight D. Eisenhower began in the sunroom of the White House in 1953, to come up with new ways of thinking about the nuclear threats then facing the country. “There was a lot of good work done, but it lacked the rigor of the original Solarium Project. They didn’t produce what you need to do decision making.”

Ms. Hathaway was asked to stay on to run Mr. Obama’s early review. Yet when the unclassified version of its report was published in the spring, there was little mention of deterrence. She left the administration when she was not chosen as the White House cybersecurity coordinator. After a delay of seven months, that post is now filled: Howard A. Schmidt, a veteran computer specialist, reported for work last week, just as the government was sorting through the lessons of the Google attack and calculating its chances of halting a more serious one in the future.

Government-Corporate Divide

In nuclear deterrence, both the Americans and the Soviets knew it was all or nothing: the Cuban missile crisis was resolved out of fear of catastrophic escalation. But in cyberattacks, the damage can range from the minor to the catastrophic, from slowing computer searches to bringing down a country’s cellphone networks, neutralizing its spy satellites, or crashing its electrical grid or its air traffic control systems. It is difficult to know if small attacks could escalate into bigger ones.

So part of the problem is to calibrate a response to the severity of the attack.

The government has responded to the escalating cyberattacks by ordering up new strategies and a new United States Cyber Command. The office of Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates — whose unclassified e-mail system was hacked in 2007 — is developing a “framework document” that would describe the threat and potential responses, and perhaps the beginnings of a deterrence strategy to parallel the one used in the nuclear world.

The new Cyber Command, if approved by Congress, would be run by Lt. Gen. Keith B. Alexander, head of the National Security Agency. Since the agency spies on the computer systems of foreign governments and terrorist groups, General Alexander would, in effect, be in charge of both finding and, if so ordered, neutralizing cyberattacks in the making.

But many in the military, led by General Chilton of the Strategic Command and Gen. James E. Cartwright, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have been urging the United States to think more broadly about ways to deter attacks by threatening a country’s economic well-being or its reputation.

Mrs. Clinton went down that road in her speech on Thursday, describing how a country that cracked down on Internet freedom or harbored groups that conduct cyberattacks could be ostracized. But though sanctions might work against a small country, few companies are likely to shun a market the size of China, or Russia, because they disapprove of how those governments control cyberspace or use cyberweapons.

That is what makes the Google-China standoff so fascinating. Google broke the silence that usually surrounds cyberattacks; most American banks or companies do not want to admit their computer systems were pierced. Google has said it will stop censoring searches conducted by Chinese, even if that means being thrown out of China. The threat alone is an attempt at deterrence: Google’s executives are essentially betting that Beijing will back down, lift censorship of searches and crack down on the torrent of cyberattacks that pour out of China every day. If not, millions of young Chinese will be deprived of the Google search engine, and be left to the ones controlled by the Chinese government.

An Obama administration official who has been dealing with the Chinese mused recently, “You could argue that Google came up with a potential deterrent for the Chinese before we did.”

Lottery Tax: Jackpot for States?

2010-01-23T13:06:00.000-08:00

Lottery Tax: Jackpot for States?

Free Checking Could Go the Way of Free Toasters

2010-01-23T02:50:00.000-08:00

January 23, 2010
YOUR MONEY
Free Checking Could Go the Way of Free Toasters

By RON LIEBER
Free checking began as a privilege. Once it spread, customers felt entitled. Eventually, it became a commodity, as most banks felt they needed to offer it. Soon, people took it for granted.

But now, free checking may be an endangered species.

Banks are feeling heat from all sides. This week, President Obama moved to limit the size and activities of the biggest institutions. Last week, he proposed a tax to recover bailout funds.

The biggest impact on checking accounts, however, is likely to come from new regulations governing overdraft protection. Starting in July, banks will need explicit permission from customers before allowing them to use their debit cards to spend more than they have in their bank accounts on a one-time purchase. Similar restrictions will apply to A.T.M. withdrawals.

Banks earn billions in overdraft fees, money that helps pay for free checking.

A chunk of that revenue will disappear when some consumers elect not to sign up for the opportunity to spend more than they have. This week, Bank of America said that $160 million in overdraft fee revenue had already disappeared, because of changes it made in its policies ahead of the new federal rules.

When that money evaporates as other banks comply with the regulations, they’re going to try to make it up some other way, particularly if they’re paying more taxes to the federal government and have fewer ways to trade their way to outsize profits.

So might banks try to do away with free checking entirely? And if so, what would they replace it with?

Some hints lie in the brief history of the offering. In the old days, banks would take in your money, pay you some interest and lend the money to others at much higher rates. Many checking account holders paid monthly or other fees, particularly if they had a low balance. Wealthy clients often paid nothing.

In the 1990s, Washington Mutual brought free checking to the masses. “It was an anchor product that allowed them to get customers in the door,” says Jim Neckopulos, a Hitachi Consulting vice president who worked with Washington Mutual at the time. Then, the bank tried to get customers to sign up for loans and other more profitable services that could subsidize the free checking.

Soon, most every bank had some version of free checking, and they were helped by the rise of the debit card. “People’s behaviors changed dramatically,” says Aaron Fine, a consultant and partner at Oliver Wyman. “They were no longer balancing their checkbook and were overdrawing their accounts with the card. And that’s what allowed it to be profitable.”

How heavily did banks lean on the overdraft fees? Well, G. Michael Flores of the financial services consulting firm Bretton Woods estimates that the average customer paid 12 overdraft or other insufficient-fund charges in 2009, often at $25 or $30 per transgression.

Starting in July, customers who don’t want to tempt themselves can turn off the ability to overdraw in a store or at the A.T.M. Nobody knows how many will do so, but it will probably be enough to make free checking unprofitable for many of the banks that had feasted at the fee trough, particularly those with large networks of branches to support.

Some of the less creative institutions will tack on monthly fees again and hope customers don’t flee. Or they may raise the minimum balance requirements that some banks already have. If you value having access to a particular branch in your neighborhood, you may have no choice but to comply unless you’re willing to go to the trouble of switching banks.

Other banks may try something like what Fifth Third Bank has done with its Secure Checking Account package. The bank charges $7.50 a month, but it throws in identity theft protection, which millions of consumers already pay for elsewhere. Banks could add other services, too, say an hour with a salaried financial planner (who doesn’t push the bank’s own products).

Another option is the à la carte model, where banks offer bare-bones checking for free, but let people pay extra for things they truly value. For a few dollars a month, say, you could use any A.T.M. on earth free.

But the most popular option seems to be to get retailers to pay for a big part of free checking, not bank customers.

Why retailers?

Well, remember our old friend the debit card, which upended the industry a decade or so ago? Banks don’t just get overdraft revenue. They also get a cut of the fees merchants pay when someone uses a debit card, and banks generally get a bigger cut if cardholders sign for their purchase instead of using their PINs.

You see where this is heading, right? If banks can get enough people to use their debit cards and sign for their purchases often enough, it will go a long way toward keeping checking free and even subsidizing better interest rates or rewards. (It may also cause merchants to raise prices to cover those card fees, alas.)

One company, BancVue, has already helped over 500 smaller banks and credit unions set up free rewards checking accounts. With these accounts, you earn interest rates of 2 to 4 percent or so on balances up to, say, $25,000, as long as you meet certain conditions. Using your debit card (and signing for your purchase) 10 or 15 times a month is generally one of them.

Given that using the card that much may cause you to overdraw more, the banks may not be able to afford such outsize interest rates much longer if lots of their customers opt out of overdraft protection and stop paying fees.

Even so, the interest rates are likely to be better than a big bank can offer. So if you maintain large balances in your checking account, these accounts may offer decent value. You can find a list of them at checkingfinder.com by clicking on the small map of the United States in the lower left of the home page.

A new company called PerkStreet Financial offers a different twist on free checking. You pay no fees for your account as long as it remains active, and you get about 1 percent back of every debit card purchase when you sign while buying (and for Web or recurring charges, say for monthly bills). You then redeem that 1 percent in the form of perks (hence the name) like gift cards from Starbucks and iTunes.

For customers with lower balances who don’t need branches, 3 percent interest on a rewards checking account won’t mean much. But earning $150 in rewards on $15,000 a year in annual debit card spending might.

Dan O’Malley, PerkStreet’s chief executive, says overdraft fees are not a big part of his business model; only 40 percent of customers have even signed up for the service. While he won’t say exactly how many debit transactions his customers must make for PerkStreet to break even, he says that 15 a month would probably be plenty.

Meanwhile, he’s not optimistic about his competitors’ ability to maintain free checking or keep him from picking off some of their customers. “As overdraft revenues go away, it will expose the soft underside of many banks’ business models,” he says. “Banks saddled with branch costs are going to introduce monthly fees, and customers are going to have a problem with that.”

Maybe banks will, and maybe they won’t. Not every checking account provider built its business entirely around overdraft fees, after all.

Still, if you bank at an old-line institution, there’s a good chance it’s going to tinker with your checking account soon. And when it does, you’ll have to decide what hoops you’re willing to jump through to keep the letter “r” from falling out of your “free” account.

Medical industry is Atlanta's next growth driver

2010-01-22T09:33:00.000-08:00

Medical industry is Atlanta's next growth driver

By Thomas Oliver

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

11:17 a.m. Friday, January 22, 2010

Sometimes the answer is staring you in the face.

As Atlanta adjusts to the new world order with fewer homes being built and few, if any, speculative high rises -- in short, as we adapt to an economy that isn’t driven by real estate -- we need not despair.

Atlanta is more than land.

Atlanta has a healthcare industry few cities can boast about.

This has nothing to do with healthcare reform, or what's left of it.

This is about a jewel in the crown we fail to acknowledge and promote.

If Atlanta is looking for our next growth industry, healthcare is it.

It is recession proof, bubble proof, and it doesn't require risky financing. It offers well paying jobs and benefits, not the least of which is job security.

For example: At the end of a string of monthly labor department announcements from the state about job losses and rising unemployment, there is a version of this, which was attached to the state’s press release Thursday: “On a positive note, educational and health services added 11,200 jobs over the year.”

According to the department’s number-crunchers, healthcare related employment in metro Atlanta increased an average of 3.6 percent a year over the last 10 years. Even in 2008, during a full year of recession, healthcare employment increased here 2.7 percent. For 2009, it looks like we’ll be back to the 3.6 percent increase range.

The Georgia Hospital Association says metro Atlanta has 47 hospitals employing 66,860 people. Beyond hospitals, metro Atlanta’s healthcare industry employs another 140,000-plus.

As an industry, healthcare is likely one of our top five already.

Four of metro Atlanta’s top 25 employers are related to healthcare, primarily hospitals, but including Emory University and the CDC.

Speaking of which: What city has such centers of excellence as Emory – its university, medical school, hospitals and research institutions; Children’s Healthcare, one of the nation’s premier children’s hospitals and certainly the pediatric leader in the South; and Shepherd Center, a well respected rehabilitation center.

For all its difficulties, Grady’s trauma unit is well-respected, as are Piedmont and Saint Joseph’s cardiologists and Northside’s gynecology and cancer care, not to mention the latter's unofficial designation as Atlanta’s baby factory.

These are known individually, but not as part of a larger metro Atlanta healthcare system. How many of Atlanta’s promoters ever tout the area as a healthcare center of excellence? Perhaps we mention a component, an Emory or a Shepherd, but we fail to promote the whole.

Who but those in Cobb are aware of Wellstar Cobb Hospital’s reputation in neurology or Kennestone’s orthopedic reputation?

Sheila Strand, president of Strand Communication Strategies, a D.C.-based healthcare marketing consultancy that has worked with Atlanta clients, says healthcare providers need to move beyond rivalries to seek common ground from which to promote Atlanta beyond our borders.

We have the critical mass to attract and grow more healthcare enterprises and ancillary businesses. Which in turn will create a magnet for companies unrelated to healthcare.

Excellence will always attract.

Rules for Kids to Follow When Creating Their Online Identities

2010-01-15T16:52:00.000-08:00

Rules for Kids to Follow When Creating Their Online Identities

Who are you? Your best friends may think of you as silly or serious, shy or a real talker. Maybe your teachers think of you as a creative student, a good athlete, or someone who works hard or makes people laugh.

What we’re talking about is your identity _ the way others think of you and the way you think about yourself. Your identity can affect the decisions you make, what you decide to do and not do.

You’re always you, of course, but you probably have different identities depending on the situation or who you’re with. For instance, at school you might keep a quiet profile and stay out of trouble. But at home, you might be known for your practical jokes and silly side.

Who are you online?

If you use the computer to play and talk with friends, you also have an online identity. That means you have an identity that’s related to how you look, what you do, and what you say when you’re using the computer. If you play on Club Penguin and put seven disco balls in your igloo, that says something.

Sites like Club Penguin and Webkinz let you create an avatar _ a character that represents you. It’s fun to dress up that character and maybe give it a sense of style you’d never try at school. Would you like a rainbow mohawk hairstyle? It’s yours at the click of a mouse.
Avatar games, instant messaging, and chat rooms also let you choose your own screen name. If you want to be known as King _ of _ Ketchup, that’s your new name. Maybe your little sister will want to be the Mayor _ of _ Mustard.

So if you start calling yourself the King of Ketchup, does that mean you really like ketchup? Should you tell your new online friends how much you love ketchup and all the foods you like to top with ketchup? That’s up to you, but it brings up a good point: How much should you share about your real self online?

You may feel perfectly fine telling your best friends about your biggest crush, but what if the whole school could see your poem about your crush’s beautiful eyes? What if perfect strangers could see it? Or even worse, what if, as a joke, someone pretended to be your crush and said your eyes are beautiful, too? Oh, dear.

Facebook and MySpace

Maybe you have an instant messaging account or have uploaded a video on YouTube. These are two popular ways to communicate online. As you get older, you might get interested in Facebook and MySpace, two sites that are big with teens and college students. They’re known as social networking sites because they let you create a group of online friends.

These sites give users the freedom to create online identities through personal Web pages. With that page, users can chat, share photos, and tell people as much or as little about themselves as they’d like. Some people even report what they had for lunch!

If you’re thinking about creating a page on one of these sites, talk with your mom or dad first. Neither site allows users younger than 13.

Online bullying

On Halloween it can be fun to pretend to be someone else. Maybe you’re a mild-mannered kid but on Halloween you like to put on the grossest monster mask you can find. That’s OK because it’s just one day and everyone knows it’s for fun.

When you’re using the computer, it can be tempting to use a screen name as a kind of mask. It might seem fun to play a joke on someone _ by teasing the person or pretending to be someone else. Or maybe you’re angry with someone and it’s easier to say something rude if the person doesn’t know it’s you.

But it’s mean and hurtful to do stuff like that online. Even if you’re only kidding, these jokes can make a girl or guy feel very low. It’s a lonely feeling when you don’t know who’s messing with you. Is it someone just being funny or does the person really mean it?

Whether they are strangers or friends, try to be kind online. In other words, be a good citizen in the online world. Here’s a good test: If you wouldn’t say it to someone’s face, don’t say it to the person on the computer. And just like with regular bullying, tell a grownup if you know that someone is being hurt in this way.

Rules to follow

If you’re a kid who likes to have fun and mix with friends online, here’s how you can stay safe, avoid problems, and enjoy your online identity:

- Stick to safer sites.Your parents and teachers can guide you to the best sites for you. Some sites have age restrictions, so you might be tempted to lie about your age. It’s safer to tell the truth and avoid those sites until you’re older. Also remember that plenty of sites let you play games and have fun without asking you to create an account. If you need an account and password, ask a parent first.

- Guard your passwords.If someone can sign in as you, you have no control over what they do or say. And everyone will think it’s you! For that reason, don’t share your passwords with anyone except your parents. To keep people from guessing your password, don’t pick something easy like your pet’s name or your favorite team. For a truly secret password, try picking two very random nouns that have nothing to do with you (lampshadeMilk). To keep it super secret, put a number between the words (lampshade7milk). It’s a good idea to change your password every couple of months.

- Limit what you share.It’s best to think first and type second when you’re telling stuff about yourself online. You probably already know that you shouldn’t tell a stranger where you live or give out your phone number. But you might wonder about other information _ your parent’s email address, your favorite color, the celebrity you’d most like to meet. If you’re not sure if you should share a piece of information, ask a parent.

- Remember that anything you put online or post on a site can stay online forever, even if you try to delete it.It’s easy for anyone to copy, save, and forward information online. For this reason, don’t share your secrets or personal information about friends and people you know. A good guide is if you wouldn’t want your entire class to know something, you shouldn’t share it with anyone online.

- Don’t be mean or embarrass other people online.Just like you, there’s a real person attached to that screen name who has feelings, too.

- Always tell if you see strange or bad online behavior.Tell an adult right away if someone says something to you that makes your uncomfortable. Also tell an adult if you see anyone bullying or saying strange stuff to other kids. Many sites have easy ways to report or flag a user who is breaking the rules. By using them, you protect yourself and other people, too.

- Be choosy about your online friends. Some sites let kids make lots of friends with people they don’t know.Some kids even compete to see who can get the most friends. But online friends are not the same as real in-person friends. Never agree to meet an online friend in person or give out personal information about yourself, such as your home address, where you go to school, or your phone number. It’s dangerous because some people pretend to be kids online but actually are creepy adults.

You’ll stay safer by mixing online with people you already know. To be sure you know who you’re talking to, have your friends write down their screen names. Then, you’ll recognize them in the online world. But will they recognize you with that rainbow mohawk?

Bar-Code Scanning of Licences Might Start in Nebraska

2010-01-14T18:45:00.000-08:00

Bar-Code Scanning of Licences Might Start in Nebraska

LINCOLN, Neb. – Now the only state that doesn’t allow information to be scanned from drivers’ licenses, Nebraska may soon let store clerks do more than just look at them when selling alcohol, tobacco and lottery tickets.

On Monday, state lawmakers gave first-round approval to a bill (LB261) that would allow retailers to electronically scan the bar codes on the backs of state-issued drivers’ licenses to determine buyers’ ages. Supporters say it will make it easier for clerks to ensure they don’t sell to kids. Opponents worry that residents would lose control of personal information that could be used to take advantage of them.

“There’s more and more information out there on us, it’s scary,” said Sen. Dave Pankonin of Louisville, who recalled a major data breach last year that required a bank where he is a board member to issue new debit cards to customers.

Supporters won out, saying that in an age where people regularly dump personal information into minicomputers by using debit cards and the like, it doesn’t make sense that Nebraska is the only state where basic information can’t be taken from licenses.

State Sen. Galen Hadley of Kearney counted nine cards in his wallet that can be swiped or scanned.

“I have no idea what information is on the back of that strip, but we know what information is on the back of the driver’s license,” he said.

Currently, only the courts and police can swipe drivers’ licenses. But the only information that is revealed is already visible on the front of the cards, said the director of the state Department of Motor Vehicles.

Under federal law, the DMV isn’t allowed to release drivers’ license numbers, addresses and the like, director Beverly Neth said. The state legislation would allow retailers to gather only drivers’ ages and license numbers, Neth said. They would be trusted not to take more of the information, such as addresses, and use it in illegal ways, such as marketing products.

Neth said that could be risky.

“You’re only supposed to store two bits of information,” she said. “But sitting in front them is a bunch of information about a person. We’re putting a lot of trust in retailers.”

One benefit to retailers, said the senator who introduced the bill, is that they would not have to calculate customers’ ages because scanning the license bar codes will give them that instead of the dates customers were born.

Sen. Kent Rogert of Tekamah also said the bill would allow licenses to be scanned when checks are used, reducing the likelihood that stolen checks would be accepted.

Why Web Stores Will Be Main Profit Providers for Retailers By Year's End

2010-01-14T18:41:00.000-08:00

Why Web Stores Will Be Main Profit Providers for Retailers By Year's End

CHICAGO _ The battle for the shrinking American budget is moving online this year with a vengeance.

While the recession took its toll on shopping centers and strip malls around the country, the economic downturn has left the Internet poised to enter 2010 as a larger force in retail.

Newly frugal shoppers are turning to the Internet in droves to compare prices, hunt for bargains, download coupons and seek advice from fellow shoppers. Retailers, weary from years of building sprees, are diverting capital away from physical storefronts and to their Web sites, investing in the technology to make online shopping easier, faster and cheaper.

Look no further than Wal-Mart Stores Inc. for a sign that online shopping, historically only 5 percent of U.S. retail sales, is about to get a whole lot bigger. The world’s largest retailer announced late last year that it plans to unleash its economic might on its decade-old but often neglected Web site, walmart.com, intent on toppling Amazon.com Inc. from its perch as the world’s largest online merchant.

“There’s no question the Internet has gone from being a curious sidebar to a main event,” said Mark Cohen, marketing professor at Columbia Business School in New York and former chairman and CEO of Sears Canada Inc. “Customers are becoming completely comfortable with doing business on the Net and receiving things in short order. This year is going to be a very good year for online shopping, tempered only by the negative effect of the economy.”

Online sales, excluding travel, had been growing at a roughly 20 percent to 25 percent annual clip for much of the decade, before slowing to a 6 percent gain in 2008, according to ComScore Inc., a digital market research firm. Growth came to a halt last year.

When ComScore releases its year-end data this week, 2009 online sales are expected to remain about even with 2008 at $130 billion. That would make it the first year online sales have failed to expand. For the year through Dec. 27, sales fell 0.28 percent, said Andrew Lipsman, ComScore’s director of industry analysis.

After tumbling in the second and third quarters of 2009 as consumers went into hiding, online sales rebounded to post a 5 percent gain for the holiday season from Nov. 1 through Christmas Eve, ComScore said. The strong finish bodes well for 2010. Lipsman expects online sales to return to “reasonably healthy growth rates” this year.

Some experts say Internet sales reached a turning point over the holidays. Black Friday, or the day after Thanksgiving, typically has been a day for physical stores to shine with early-bird specials that entice shoppers to stand in line for hours until stores open their doors at dawn.

But last year the big national chains _ including Wal-Mart, J.C. Penney and Best Buy _ grabbed a piece of the doorbuster promotions by offering “screenbuster” sales online for shoppers who wanted to stay home. The cyber activity spurred a record $595 million in online spending that day, an 11 percent gain over Black Friday 2008, ComScore said. Meanwhile, Amazon, Wal-Mart and Best Buy saw their Web site traffic soar more than 20 percent on Black Friday from the year-ago period, the firm said.

There was a time when big brick-and-mortar retailers looked askance at their online divisions, figuring stores should receive most of the company’s resources and attention because they generate the bulk of the sales. No longer. Traditional chain stores are starting to recognize what Amazon long has known: The benefit of selling products online reaches far beyond dollars.

Web sites are a treasure trove of information about shopping behaviors and purchasing preferences. Retailers can track what each customer buys and use that information to target discounts and suggest products, said Lauren Freedman, president of the E-tailing Group Inc.

“At the end of the day, everyone is afraid of Amazon because they are so aggressive from a technical standpoint,” Freedman said. “They own all this information on the (shoppers), so they have the ability to market based on buying patterns.”

Online data firm Forrester Research said that the Web influenced $937 billion in U.S. store sales in 2009, a figure projected to reach $1.3 trillion by 2013, or about one-third of total retail sales.

“I know this is an overused phrase, but it really is a perfect storm,” said Sucharita Mulpuru, retail analyst at Forrester. "People want to find the cheapest products. Most households have broadband, and there are a lot more devices with access to the Web.

“As retailers see more dollars shift in that direction and consumers spend more time online, it makes sense to invest in the Web channel.”

Facebook CEO: People No Longer Have Same Privacy Expectations

2010-01-13T09:03:00.001-08:00

Facebook CEO: People No Longer Have Same Privacy Expectations

Jason Mick

January 12, 2010

Mark Zuckberg, Chief Executive Officer and founder of Facebook, certainly deserves a lot of credit for creating the world’s largest social network. The network boasts over 350 million users, with approximately 175 million logging in on any given day. Perhaps only second to Google in click power, the site is also growing rapidly.

However, there’s a dark side to that popularity. Facebook hasn’t exactly been angelic in protecting users’ privacy. The network first landed in hot water way back in 2007, when its CEO was forced to publicly apologize for instituting a new system that snooped on users’ online purchases and posted them in the user’s feed – without their permission. That error led to a lawsuit eventually settled for $9.5M USD.

Since that time, Facebook has continued to make a variety of changes – some based on the premise of protecting privacy, others seemingly eroding it. But according to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, privacy isn’t really even something most users want or care about according to guardian.co.uk. Echoing recent comments by Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who insinuated that those who want privacy are probably up to no good, the 25-year-old executive delivered some controversial comments at the Crunchie awards in San Francisco this weekend.

He commented on the norm no longer being an expectation of privacy, stating, “People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time. When I got started in my dorm room at Harvard, the question a lot of people asked was, ‘why would I want to put any information on the internet at all? Why would I want to have a website?’. Then in the last 5 or 6 years, blogging has taken off in a huge way, and just all these different services that have people sharing all this information.”

Mr. Zuckerberg’s remarks come in the wake of recent privacy changes that forced users to elect whether to make all their information publicly viewable (the recommended option) or to opt out and keep their current privacy settings. Critics have said that Facebook is trying to trick people into giving up their privacy. They are calling for a Federal Trade Commission investigation of the company’s practices.

Mr. Zuckerberg discussed this criticism, stating, “A lot of companies would be trapped by the conventions and their legacies of what they’ve built. But we viewed that as a really important thing, to always keep a beginner’s mind and what would we do if we were starting the company now and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it.”

The opposing opinions seem destined to clash. For now Facebook is standing its ground. Facebook employee Barry Schnitt recently commented, “Any suggestion that we’re trying to trick them [Facebook users] into something would work against any goal that we have.”

Even if Mr. Zuckerberg is right and by and large folks no longer care about privacy, perhaps that means that people need to reexamine their behavior. After all, approximately a fifth of divorce cases in the UK are related to Facebook, according to British lawyers.

State's new plan for transportation | ajc.com

2010-01-10T03:21:00.001-08:00

State's new plan for transportation | ajc.com

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The Disposable Worker

2010-01-08T17:42:00.001-08:00

The Disposable Worker

Pay is falling, benefits are vanishing, and no one's job is secure. How companies are making the era of the temp more than temporary

By Peter Coy, Michelle Conlin and Moira Herbst

On a recent Tuesday morning, single mom Tammy DePew Smith woke up in her tidy Florida townhouse in time to shuttle her oldest daughter, a high school freshman, to the 6:11 a.m. bus. At 6:40 she was at the desk in her bedroom, starting her first shift of the day with LiveOps, a Santa Clara (Calif.) provider of call-center workers for everyone from Eastman Kodak (EK) and Pizza Hut (YUM) to infomercial behemoth Tristar Products. She's paid by the minute—25 cents—but only for the time she's actually on the phone with customers.

By 7:40, Smith had grossed $15. But there wasn't much time to reflect on her early morning productivity; the next child had to be roused from bed, fed, and put onto the school bus. Somehow she managed to squeeze three more shifts into her day, pausing only to homeschool her 7-year-old son, make dinner, and do the bedtime routine. "I tell my kids, unless somebody is bleeding or dying, don't mess with me."

As an independent agent, Smith has no health insurance, no retirement benefits, no sick days, no vacation, no severance, and no access to unemployment insurance. But in recession-ravaged Ormond Beach, she's considered lucky. She has had more or less steady work since she signed on with LiveOps in October 2006. "LiveOps was a lifesaver for me," she says.

You know American workers are in bad shape when a low-paying, no-benefits job is considered a sweet deal. Their situation isn't likely to improve soon; some economists predict it will be years, not months, before employees regain any semblance of bargaining power. That's because this recession's unusual ferocity has accelerated trends—including offshoring, automation, the decline of labor unions' influence, new management techniques, and regulatory changes—that already had been eroding workers' economic standing.

The forecast for the next five to 10 years: more of the same, with paltry pay gains, worsening working conditions, and little job security. Right on up to the C-suite, more jobs will be freelance and temporary, and even seemingly permanent positions will be at greater risk. "When I hear people talk about temp vs. permanent jobs, I laugh," says Barry Asin, chief analyst at the Los Altos (Calif.) labor-analysis firm Staffing Industry Analysts. "The idea that any job is permanent has been well proven not to be true." As Kelly Services (KELYA) CEO Carl Camden puts it: "We're all temps now."

Peter Cappelli, director of the Center for Human Resources at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, says the brutal recession has prompted more companies to create just-in-time labor forces that can be turned on and off like a spigot. "Employers are trying to get rid of all fixed costs," Cappelli says. "First they did it with employment benefits. Now they're doing it with the jobs themselves. Everything is variable." That means companies hold all the power, and "all the risks are pushed on to employees."

The era of the disposable worker has big implications both for employees and employers. For workers, research shows that chronic unemployment and underemployment cause lasting damage: Older people who lose jobs are often forced into premature retirement, while the careers of younger people are stunted by their early detachment from the working world. Even 15 years out of school, people who graduated from college in a recession earn 2.5% less than if they had graduated in more prosperous times, research has shown.

Diminishing job security is also widening the gap between the highest- and lowest-paid workers. At the top, people with sought-after skills can earn more by jumping from assignment to assignment than they can by sticking with one company. But for the least educated, who have no special skills to sell, the new deal for labor offers nothing but downside.

Employers prize flexibility, of course. But if they aren't careful they can wind up with an alienated, dispirited workforce. A Conference Board survey released on Jan. 5 found that only 45% of workers surveyed were satisfied with their jobs, the lowest in 22 years of polling. Poor morale can devastate performance. After making deep staff cuts following the subprime implosion, UBS (UBS), Credit Suisse (CS), and American Express (AXP) hired Harvard psychology lecturer Shawn Achor to train their remaining employees in positive thinking. Says Achor: "All the employees had just stopped working."

In a typical downturn, the percentage decline in payrolls is about the same as the percentage decline in gross domestic product. But in the recessions that began in 2001 and 2007, the decline for payrolls was much steeper—1.8 percentage points more during the latest downturn. Worse yet, only about 10% of the layoffs are considered temporary, vs. 20% in the recession of the early 1980s.

PERMA-TEMPS
All that cutting has been good for corporate profits. Earnings rebounded smartly as companies kept payrolls down after the 2001 recession; by 2006 profits had hit a 40-year high as a share of national income, at 10.2%, according to Bureau of Economic Analysis data. The credit bust sent that figure plunging to 5.6% during the final quarter of 2008. But over the past year corporate profits' share has rebounded to 7.4% of national income, equaling the 40-year average.

The trend toward a perma-temp world has been developing for years. Bosses are no longer rewarded based on how many people they supervise, so they have less incentive to hang on to staff. Instead, the increasing use of bonuses tied to short-term profit performance gives managers an incentive to slash labor costs. The Iowa Policy Project, a nonpartisan think tank, estimates that 26% of the U.S. workforce had jobs in 2005 that were in one way or another "nonstandard." That includes independent contractors, temps, part-timers, and freelancers. Of those, 73% had no access to a retirement plan from their employer and 61% had no health insurance from their employer, the Iowa group said.

Temp employment in the U.S. fluctuates wildly, by design. The whole purpose of bringing on workers who are employed by temporary staffing firms such as Manpower (MAN), Adecco (ADO), and Kelly Services is that they're easy to shuck off when unneeded. While the number of temps fell sharply during the recent recession, the ranks of involuntary part-timers soared. The tally of Americans working part-time for economic reasons—that is, because full-time work is unavailable—has doubled since the recession began, to 9.2 million.

Companies that seized on the recession as an opportunity to make drastic organizational changes for greater efficiency and flexibility aren't likely to reverse those changes once the economy begins growing again, says David H. Autor, a labor economist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In other words, most of the jobs shipped to China will stay in China. And companies that turned labor into a just-in-time, flexible factor of production won't return to an old-fashioned job-for-life arrangement. "For the last 10 years, I and others have been saying that these trends aren't just for a fringe workforce but increasingly are for the mainstream," says Sara Horowitz, founder and executive director of the Freelancers Union, a 130,000-member advocacy group for contract workers. "This recession has shown us that the future is here."

Boeing (BA) typifies the companies that are taking advantage of flexibility. In 2009, it cut 1,500 contingent workers from its commercial division. Says spokesman Jim Proulx: "The first imperative was to reduce all of the contract and contingent labor that we possibly could to shield our regular employees from those layoffs." Boeing says less than 3% of its workforce is contingent. It has also reduced its dependence on costly permanent staff in the U.S. by making new hires abroad. Last March it announced a research and development center in Bangalore that will "coordinate the work of more than 1,500 technologists, including 100 advanced technology researchers, from across India." Bill Dugovich, a spokesman for Boeing's white-collar union in the U.S., the SPEEA, complains that the Indian workers "are basically contract labor."

For years Microsoft (MSFT) has been an avid user of temporary-staffing firms such as Volt Information Sciences (VOL) for a variety of short-term projects, including writing chunks of software, says Microsoft spokesman Lou Gellos. "Our contingent workforce fluctuates wildly depending on the different projects that are going on," Gellos says. "Somebody does just part of a project. They're experts in it. Boom, boom, they're finished." Temps are especially appealing to companies in cyclical industries. "We have been able to get really good talent. Off the charts," says Jeff Barrett, CEO of Eggrock, a manufacturer of pre-built bathrooms based in Littleton, Mass. It has brought on dozens of plumbers, electricians, and administrative workers through Manpower to handle a spike in orders.

With the economy expanding again, and employers loath to add permanent workers, temp employment is one of the few sectors of the labor market that is growing rapidly. Stock prices for the big temp firms have doubled since last March, while analysts surveyed by Bloomberg expect profits to double in 2010 at Robert Half International (RHI) and to jump about 50% at Manpower. LiveOps is among the biggest beneficiaries of the just-in-time labor trend; its revenues grew by a double-digit percentage in 2009 and the company is planning an initial public offering. "We want to do for the world of work what eBay did for commerce," says LiveOps CEO Maynard Webb, a former chief operating officer of eBay (EBAY). "You have access to the talent you need. And when the need is gone, the talent goes away."

"LEADERSHIP ON DEMAND"
The world of temporary work used to be the domain of sneaker-footed admins. No longer. Last year, Kelly Services placed more than 100 people—including lawyers and scientists—in interim stints that paid more than $250,000 a year. At the forefront of the "leadership on demand" movement in the U.S. is the Business Talent Group, whose roster of 1,000 executives has done jobs at companies like mobile-phone content provider Fox Mobile (NWS), health-care company Healthways (HWAY), and private equity firm Carlyle Group. BTG says its client demand rose 50% in 2009.

Sydney Reiner, of Southern California, has had five assignments in five years as an interim chief marketing officer at companies like Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf and Godiva Chocolatier. "I got a call from Godiva on a Wednesday asking if I could be on a plane to Japan on Saturday," says Reiner. "I was." For the past two months, she's been the interim chief marketing officer at beverage maker POM Wonderful. Reiner prefers the challenge of working in short, adrenaline-packed chunks. But like Smith, the University of Chicago MBA has no access to employer-sponsored health insurance and other benefits. Says Reiner: "To some extent I end up working as hard as a permanent employee, without a lot of the benefits."

Reiner relishes the flexibility of the free-agent lifestyle. While there are others like her, many upscale, white-collar workers aren't contingent laborers by choice. Matthew Bradford, who is 38 and married with three young children, could scarcely believe it when he was laid off in early 2009 by a national law firm in Cleveland. He eventually set up as a one-man "legal professional association" in Akron, handling overflow from other lawyers while he slowly builds up his own practice. Meanwhile he's responsible for his own health insurance and a share of office overhead, things he never considered when he was on track to making partner back in Cleveland. "I never would have thought this would have happened," says Bradford. "I thought, 'Hey, I've got a law degree and an MBA. I'm not going to be out of work.' It's just not the case anymore."

During the boom-time 1990s, employers sold the move away from secure full-time jobs as pure upside for workers—a step toward greater flexibility and freedom. To compete with dot-coms, corporations like IBM (IBM) started replacing some fixed pay with variable compensation: stock options, bonuses, and other cash incentives that have to be renegotiated each year. It was attractive for awhile, but the Great Recession is showing workers the downside of that deal. Employers' unspoken message to employees, says Cornell University labor economist Kevin F. Hallock, is this: "You can absorb more risk, or you're going to lose your job. Which would you prefer?"

At the bottom of the ladder, workers are so powerless that simply getting the minimum wage they're entitled to can be a struggle. A study released in September and financed by the Ford, Joyce, Haynes, and Russell Sage Foundations found that low-wage workers are routinely denied proper overtime pay and are often paid less than the minimum wage. It followed a Government Accountability Office report from March 2009 that found that poor oversight by the Labor Dept.'s Wage & Hour Div. leaves low-wage workers "vulnerable to wage theft." Some companies have been fined for misclassifying employees as freelancers and then denying them benefits. Meanwhile, the George W. Bush Administration made it easier for people earning as little as $23,600 a year not to be covered by overtime-pay rules.

Workers hired for temporary or contract work face a higher risk of developing mental health problems like depression, according to research presented in 2009 by Amélie Quesnel-Vallée of McGill University. A lack of job security and health-care benefits, as well as social ties to the rest of the workforce, increase stress levels for temps and contractors. A survey conducted in September by the National Alliance on Mental Illness found that people who experienced a forced change in their employment during the last year were twice as likely to report symptoms consistent with severe mental illness as individuals who hadn't experienced one.

The situation is especially difficult for young people, many of whom haven't been able to get a first foot on the career ladder. The percentage of people 16 to 24 who have jobs has plummeted by 13 percentage points since the beginning of 2000, while the share of workers 55 and over who have jobs has edged up over the period, despite the recession. Some young people are so desperate to get a start, they're working for free as semi-permanent interns. "Companies that used to use only one or two interns are now asking me for five or six at a time," says Lauren Berger, who runs a company that matches interns with entertainment, marketing, and media companies. Berger also reports a rise in the number of "adult interns," who work for free while trying to break into a new career.

Those internships might look like plum spots in years to come, for the gloomy trends in the labor market show no sign of abating. Consider some statistics. In the 2001 recession cycle, the economy lost 2% of its jobs and took four years to get them back. This time it has lost more than 5% of its jobs. Even after the recession is history, employers are likely to continue to offshore and automate jobs out of existence. If they don't, they'll lose out to competitors that do. In a November update of previous research, Princeton University economist Alan S. Blinder estimated that 22% to 29% of all U.S. jobs will be offshorable within two decades. Of course, even working in a job that's not offshorable—say, landscaping—is no guarantee of job security or decent pay. That's because people in those jobs must compete with the millions of former factory workers and such whose jobs have already been offshored, notes Josh Bivens, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington.

IBM may strike many people as the quintessential American company, but 71% of its workforce was outside the U.S. at the end of 2008, a figure even higher than the non-U.S. share of its revenue (65%). In 2009 the company reduced its U.S. employment by about 10,000, or 8%. It also announced a program offering certain employees the opportunity to move their jobs to emerging markets; in turn, the company will foot some of the relocation costs.

PAY CUTS
When employment in the U.S. eventually recovers, it's likely to be because American workers swallow hard and accept lower pay. That has been the pattern for decades now: Shockingly, pay for production and nonsupervisory workers—80% of the private workforce—is 9% lower than it was in 1973, adjusted for inflation. Sure, back in the 1950s pillars of the economy such as General Motors paid generously, because they could. Contracts between GM and the United Auto Workers set a pattern for pay throughout the economy, says Harley Shaiken, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley who specializes in labor issues. But while unions covered 36% of private-sector workers in 1953, the figure plunged to less than 8% by 2008. "Today, working conditions are set either by trends in the global economy or by nonunion firms in the U.S.," says Shaiken. He points out that while GM was the largest U.S. employer in the 1950s, "today that role is played by Wal-Mart (WMT), with very different consequences."

The best solution to relieve the pressure on workers would be rapid economic growth sustained over a long period, possibly enabled by some technological breakthrough. The Internet boom pushed unemployment to less than 4% in 2000. But few economists expect such a renaissance anytime soon. That's why labor unions and politically liberal economists argue for New Dealesque public jobs programs and against free-trade pacts like the North American Free Trade Agreement. In 2007, Ralph E. Gomory, former head of IBM's research department and later a senior vice-president at the company, declared before a U.S. House panel: "In this new era of globalization the interests of companies and countries have diverged. In contrast with the past, what is good for America's global corporations is no longer necessarily good for the American people."

Conservative economists, in contrast, say the real problem is too much government intervention in the economy. Employers who might be adding jobs are frozen in place by uncertainty over the impact of pending legislation on health care, global warming, and other big-ticket items, says economist Steven J. Davis of the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business. "I can't think of another time during my professional lifetime when there was so much riding on policy decisions that could get made in the next year or two."

For a glimpse of where things might be headed in the U.S., look at Europe, which makes a lot more use of temporary and part-time workers than U.S. employers do. That's in large part because of Europe's famously rigid labor laws; rather than hiring permanent workers, employers turn to temps and contractors who can be let go more easily during a downturn. In Spain, 85% of recent job losses in this recession were by temps or contractors. One big difference: Most European countries cover temps and part-timers with government health insurance and require that they receive wages and benefits comparable to those for permanent employees doing similar work.

Look far enough into the future and it's possible to see better times ahead for labor. A decade from now the retirement of the baby boom generation could cause labor shortages and hand some bargaining power back to younger workers, says Robert Mellman, a senior economist at JPMorgan Chase Bank (JPM). If that happens, woe unto employers. A survey in 2009 by the benefits consultant now known as Towers Watson found that top-performing employees will be ready to jump ship as soon as a better offer comes along. Says Wharton's Cappelli: "The idea of loyalty—'I will stick with you and you will reward me'—that is effectively gone."

But those are issues for another day. Right now the face of American labor is more like that of Jamila Godfrey, 35, of Seattle. A licensed naturopathic physician, she ran an alternative medicine practice but decided to scoop up another degree, this time in nursing, for greater job security. Though she graduated in June, and health care is the strongest sector in the economy, she hasn't been able to find a job because hospitals can't spare the money for three months of on-the-job training. To support herself and her 12-year-old daughter, the single mother has been working as a temp for the past several months, but that project ends in several weeks. "I'll be jobless again," says Godfrey. "I thought the [RN] qualification would make it easy to find a job, but it's not working out that way."

With Carol Matlack in Paris

Atlanta works on its sales pitch | ajc.com

2010-01-07T02:48:00.001-08:00

Atlanta works on its sales pitch | ajc.com

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Reed against Atlanta tunnel

2010-01-06T08:38:00.000-08:00

Reed against Atlanta tunnel

By Ariel Hart
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

11:13 p.m. Tuesday, January 5, 2010
Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed told a meeting of Intown Atlanta neighborhood leaders Tuesday night that his opposition to a road tunnel under east Atlanta was "steadfast and absolute" from the moment he heard of it.

Another Atlanta-area official, Atlanta Regional Commission Chairman Tad Leithead, said the ARC had no opinion on the project yet, and would have to do extensive studying if it were to advance in the planning process. However, he said, very preliminary data showed a funding gap, a possible $8 toll, and not enough lanes, added up to a project that "doesn't make any sense." The ARC is metro Atlanta's official planning agency.

The state Department of Transportation is considering the new toll road to connect Ga. 400 north of Atlanta to I-675 southeast of the city. It could be a tunnel for most of the way, then surface for a few miles at its southern end.

Other toll projects are far ahead of it in the planning stages, like I-75 and I-575 in Cobb and Cherokee counties. Those projects and the tunnel were among the possibilities that DOT suggested to private investors at a recent conference. DOT is planning a forum to discuss the tunnel idea with tunnel company representatives in the spring.

The forum is only intended for the most basic information-gathering on the project's possibilities and pitfalls, the director of DOT's toll program, Earl Mahfuz, said last month.

DOT leaders stressed to the irate audience Tuesday night that the tunnel was only a concept, that it had not yet been formally approved or found feasible, and that other toll projects were well ahead of it in the pipeline. DOT Planning Director Todd Long said even with toll money and private investors there would likely be a significant funding gap that "concerns us." It was under consideration, however, because of the significant possible benefits to relieving congestion on the Downtown Connector, which would parallel the tunnel.

"I don't know if we'll ever even see a tunnel," said DOT Commissioner Vance Smith. He said he was merely in favor of putting all ideas on the table for discussion.

Rep. Pat Gardner (D-Atlanta) held the meeting at the Rock Springs Presbyterian Church. Initially intended for a small number of neighborhood leaders to meet with transportation officials, Gardner said, "it grew." Attending were with a standing room only crowd; the top board and staff leaders of the state DOT and the Atlanta Regional Commission; the mayor of Atlanta, and several members of the city council and the General Assembly.

She opened the meeting by asking to hear "what they can tell us about this wretched tunnel."

Asked after the meeting if there were any circumstances under which he could accept the tunnel, Reed said, "they do not exist."

Budget Cuts Take Toll on Education

2010-01-05T08:55:00.000-08:00

Budget Cuts Take Toll on Education

Budget cuts have hit public colleges hard, even as the demand for a well-educated workforce soars.

By Kim Clark

San Francisco—Every chair was taken. Yet more students jammed into the classroom for the first summer session class of City College of San Francisco's Microcomputer Applications for Business 101. By the time the class started, at least 12 extra people were standing in the aisles and clustered in the doorway. Instructor Hugo Aparicio shouted to the growing crowd that there were only enough computers to accommodate 28 students. Normally, with so many eager learners, CCSF would hire an instructor to teach another section of the class. But the state's $26 billion-plus deficit means there's no money for extra teachers. So Aparicio announced that only the first 28 students who registered for the course could stay. One young woman began to weep, explaining that this course was the last one she needed to graduate. Sophomore Inga Jargal also pleaded. She was having trouble finding any class to fill up her schedule: If she couldn't enroll in another one, she might lose her financial aid and campus job in the registrar's office. It was no use. There simply wasn't room. So, in a scene that is being repeated increasingly in California and other recession-socked states, several otherwise qualified students were sent out into the dark, blustery evening.

"I am worried," says Jargal. "I need an education for my future and my son's future," says the 26-year-old single mom.

The recession, state budget cuts, and hidebound bureaucracies are endangering some of the most important foundations of the American dream—the low-cost, high-quality public colleges created to provide anyone with smarts and diligence the training needed to succeed.

True, a few public higher ed leaders are using the financial downturn as a catalyst to permanently lower costs and increase the graduation rate above today's unimpressive 55 percent. They are reducing waste, streamlining, and modernizing courses.

But some influential analysts say too many colleges are reacting in shortsighted ways that will undermine the institutions themselves, as well as the opportunities for socioeconomic mobility that are at the core of American society. Just when public colleges are being swamped by applicants eager for low-cost classes and the nation needs new ideas to pull the economy out of recession, many schools are shutting classroom doors, raising tuition, crowding courses, canceling extracurriculars, and hobbling research.

"This is an opportunity," says William Bowen, a former Princeton University president who has written several books examining inequities and quality problems in higher education. "Some sensible pruning is occurring. Some good could come out of this." But, he worries, colleges are not using the recession as a spur for the kinds of fundamental changes needed to give more Americans better training.

The financial troubles of community colleges and state universities are far more important than the layoffs at elite schools such as Harvard and Yale that have grabbed headlines. Such storied privates educate perhaps 2 percent of America's 18.3 million college students. Public colleges teach 74 percent.

The Last Straw. The immediate crisis was sparked by an estimated 5 percent—about $4 billion—drop in the amount of money state governments apportioned to higher education for the fiscal year that started July 1. Federal stimulus money can close only part of that gap this year.

A drop of a few billion dollars out of the $79 billion or so that states had spent on higher education in 2008 might not sound severe, but for many colleges, this was a last straw. Even during the boom years, most states weren't increasing college budgets to match rising enrollments. The average public research university got almost $8,350 per student from taxpayers in 2002. By 2006, that had dropped below $7,100, according to the Delta Project on Postsecondary Education Costs, Productivity, and Accountability.

Now, public colleges are receiving even less per student. In hard-hit states such as California, Nevada, and Oregon, where colleges have had to slash their budgets by double-digit percentages in the past few months, educational and political leaders say they don't have the time or money to do anything but turn away more students. In California, where tax revenues for higher education are expected to plunge by about $2 billion, the flagship University of California system reduced its incoming freshman class this year by 2,300 and will probably have to reduce it by thousands more in 2010. The schools that are supposed to take the UC overflow, the California State University system, cut enrollment by about 4,000 students this year and are likely to cut 10 times as many next year. The CSU overflow students, along with thousands of unemployed workers hoping for retraining, have been mobbing community colleges. California community college leaders say they simply can't accommodate the influx with a state budget reduction of more than $340 million. They fear they could end up turning away as many as 250,000 students in the coming months.

That's effectively trapping thousands of Californians, like 20-year-old Sarah Hendrickson, into unemployment or low-paying, dead-end jobs. Hendrickson, who is wrapping up her associate's degree at a community college in San Luis Obispo, says she broke down in tears when her adviser told her she couldn't transfer into the overcrowded local state university for at least another year. "I am kind of stuck in all aspects of my life," she says.

California is the most extreme case, but many other states are closing classroom doors by raising tuition or cutting aid. In Florida, where the higher education budget this year is $153 million, or 4 percent, lower than last year's, many public universities will hike tuition by 15 percent. A year at Stony Brook University in New York, where state legislators have required public colleges to send some of their tuition money to the state's general fund to reduce the deficit, will cost students at least $1,000 more this year. The state of Washington, which has reduced its higher education budget by $168 million, or 10.6 percent, will raise tuition at public universities by about 14 percent this year. Washington's governor, Christine Gregoire, says that raising tuition was the least bad of all the options to make up a $9 billion shortfall over the next two years.

Although the federal government has increased the number and size of the need-based Pell grants and made it easier to take out and repay federally backed loans, many states, such as Florida and West Virginia, are reining in their financial aid programs. The net result is that the true cost of college for many students is rising at a time when they have less money.

Jon Shure, a tax expert at the Washington-based Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, says state officials and taxpayers used to "subsidize students because that was in the best interests of society. Now the balance is shifting to where students pay more and taxpayers less." That will mean some low-income students who could benefit from college will either be priced out or will hobble themselves with education debt, he says.

The recession is making classrooms harder to get into, more expensive—and, possibly, less instructive. Many colleges are saving money by packing more students into fewer courses. Arizona public universities, for example, have laid off thousands of employees and canceled scores of classes and programs in the past year. "You definitely learn less," University of Arizona junior Kevin Ferguson says of his bigger classes. "You can't interact with the professor when you are contending with 200 to 300 other students." Instructors say increased class sizes mean they work many more unpaid hours and have much less time to do, for example, thoughtful grading of papers, let alone research. Instructors' time shortages are being worsened by many colleges' requirements that staffers take unpaid furlough days.

Even seemingly small cuts might threaten the quality of education. The Kentucky community college system has decided not to offer tenure to new hires, prompting outcries that the system will lose the best candidates, who prefer colleges that offer more job security. Florida State University pulled the phones out of English and history professors' offices, saving more than $12,000 a year but sparking complaints that it will be harder for students to reach professors.

No band aid.

The cuts also mean fewer choices and opportunities for students. Many colleges are deciding that they can no longer fund less popular courses. Idaho State University, like many other schools, has eliminated some low-enrollment courses such as French, German, Russian, Arabic, and Chinese. Many other schools have eliminated expensive science classes. The University of Nevada-Las Vegas—fictional hometown of television's CSI—has decided to phase out its forensic science program. Others are targeting the arts: Washington State University is disbanding its theater program. The University of West Georgia has canceled some music courses. "I don't believe I've ever seen a more troubling situation" for college music students across the country, says Mark Camphouse, interim chair of George Mason University's music department.

Activities, too, are disappearing. Florida International University and Minnesota State University-Mankato eliminated bands. FIU also zeroed out the budget for its cheerleading squad. Many schools are canceling expensive and untelevised sports teams such as baseball, skiing, wrestling, and swimming. At least 10 schools, including Indiana State and Missouri Southern, have canceled their tennis teams so far this year.

Such classroom and activity cuts are drawing increasing criticism from students and faculty who point to what they consider to be continued wasteful extravagance. Florida Atlantic University laid off five computer science and engineering professors, but it is proceeding with construction on a new movie theater. (FAU officials say the construction is funded with donated and earmarked funds that couldn't be used for operations.)

North Carolina's legislature has ordered public universities to cut their budgets by about 10 percent but is still having taxpayers pick up almost $14 million worth of tuition for out-of-state students, including athletes. Amy Perko, executive director of the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, says many other recession-strapped colleges are spending millions on coaches and stadiums in the hopes of recouping big bucks from television contracts or alumni donations. But NCAA research shows that's a loser's bet, Perko says. "In 2006, only 19 of the 119 programs in the most competitive division finished the year with positive net revenue," she noted. The average shortfalls of nearly $9 million were subsidized by students and taxpayers, she says.

Lead by example.

The news isn't all dire. A few oil-rich states—such as Texas, Alaska, and North Dakota—are increasing their spending on higher education. And several hard-hit states, such as Michigan and Ohio, have managed so far to avoid drastic cuts at universities.

Many colleges are turning the cutbacks into an opportunity to shed luxuries that had become common during fat years. Just by reducing the number of support staff who travel with sports teams, ending the indiscriminate handing out of "participation awards" to student athletes, and canceling some social activities, the universities belonging to the Pac-10 sports conference figure they'll collectively save about $1 million. The University of Texas athletic department estimates it will save at least $300,000 by replacing its glossy media guide booklets with DVDs. Athletes around the country are now taking buses to many games, instead of chartered planes. During the winter, the State University of New York-Canton saved approximately $250,000 by turning thermostats down to 68 Monday through Thursday and a frosty 58 on Fridays, when there were no classes. East Carolina University saved $30,000 by switching from paper to electronic tuition bills. The University of Vermont cut its custodial budget by $400,000 in part by making professors empty their own trash bins.

Many university executives are attempting to reduce the impact on students and lead by example by absorbing some of the financial pain themselves. The leadership of the University of Tennessee voluntarily took a 5 percent pay cut and turned in the keys to university cars to save the campus $400,000. Arizona State University President Michael Crow donated his $60,000 bonus for 2008 to the university's financial aid office and took the same 15 unpaid furlough days as the rest of the executive staff in the first half of 2009.

A few educational visionaries are experimenting with radical course redesigns to save money and give more students a better shot at graduating. Robert Olin, dean of arts and sciences at the University of Alabama, has overseen the creation of a math lab that has revolutionized entry-level classes. No longer do students spend three or four hours a week listening to lectures, only to then do homework on their own. In the new classes, students get only 40 minutes of lecture a week but then do at least three hours of practice on specially programmed computers in the math lab, where there are lots of tutors to answer questions.

The new math courses cost the university about $82 per student—about two thirds of the cost of a traditional lecture class. But the pupils score higher on standardized end-of-course tests because they've had so much practice and individual attention, Olin says.

About 150 other schools, including the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Arizona State, and the State University of New York system, are experimenting with similar redesigns of courses for everything from chemistry to Spanish, often with similar results. Cheaper, better classes are the only long-term solution to the growing demand for education and shrinking funding, says Carol Twigg, founder of the National Center for Academic Transformation.

The economy will some day rebound, of course. But those colleges that are just cutting courses or having instructors lecture in front of ever bigger classes will simply offer lower quality. They won't have solved the structural problems that have led to high costs and low graduation rates. "Thinking differently," Twigg says, "is the only solution."

Emily Brandon contributed to this report.

GE moving division to Atlanta

2010-01-05T07:35:00.000-08:00

GE moving division to Atlanta

By Associated Press

For the AJC

6:26 a.m. Tuesday, January 5, 2010

LOUISVILLE, Ky.-- General Electric Co. will realign its Louisville-based Consumer & Industrial Division in a move that will shift the industrial segment of the business to Atlanta.

GE spokeswoman Kim Freeman said in a statement Monday that the Louisville operation will be renamed GE Appliances and Lighting.

Freeman says the realignment won't have any effect on employment at Louisville-based Appliance Park, where the work force is about 4,000. The company says Jim Campbell, the longtime head of the Consumer & Industrial Division, will continue to lead the Louisville operation.

GE says the industrial side of the business will be shifted to GE Energy, based in Atlanta, where a new unit called Industrial Solutions will be formed.

Online Banking Has Killed Personal Checks for Good

2010-01-03T16:50:00.000-08:00

NEW YORK – It’s been nine months since I’ve written a check.

That’s not to say I’m on some 12-step program to resist shopping. My credit card bills would suggest otherwise. Rather, when I opened a new bank account in March, I challenged myself to see to how much I could use my bank’s online bill-payment service to stretch the 10 starter checks I got for free.

Ordering a box of checks can cost $20 to $30, and in these tough times, every penny counts. I also save 44 cents in postage for most checks that go unwritten.

To my surprise, I haven’t needed to use any of the 10 free checks all year.

I knew I wouldn’t have trouble paying electricity, cable TV, phone or credit card bills. And for merchants, friends and others without prior electronic arrangements with my bank, Citibank, its bill-payment service simply prints out a check and mails it directly. I’ve done that with rent for my apartment, and so far I haven’t been evicted.

Trouble could lie with bills that have payment slips to return.

Because Citibank’s service – like those offered by other banks – sends checks or makes electronic transfers to merchants directly, there’s no way to attach that slip.

I thought I’d encountered such a roadblock just a month into my experiment, as I needed to submit a form with some state tax payments. I prepared to pull out one of those precious starter checks. But then I noticed that New York state has a Web site for making electronic payments directly, without forms. Problem solved.

The solutions aren’t always elegant, though.

Instead of handing my building’s super a holiday tip, I had Citibank mail a check with “Merry Xmas” and my apartment number printed on the memo line. There wasn’t enough space to use the nonreligious “Happy Holidays,” and the bill-pay approach seems so impersonal. We’ll see how quickly I get repairs done in the coming year.

Perhaps the most nonsensical check-free experience involved my registration for a marathon in Charlotte, N.C. I could have mailed in a form with my check for 44 cents postage. Instead, to conserve my 10 starter checks, I paid a $7 processing fee to submit it online.

I know, it might sound silly. But I’ve gotten so used to a check-free lifestyle over these past nine months that I couldn’t bear the thought of writing one and mailing it in – and getting closer to having to pay for a box of checks.

I do miss getting canceled checks back, but banks have generally moved away from that anyhow, with or without electronic payments. Instead, many banks now let you view electronic images of canceled checks online.

For electronic payments and transfers, Citibank lets you view records online for about four months. After that, you’d have to rely on the brief listings in the monthly statements or contact customer service for more detailed records. But I was glad to learn that option would remain available even after I closed my account.

My one disappointment with online bill payment is over what’s known as the float.

Normally, I would get to keep my money for several days while a check got mailed and cashed. If a friend procrastinated, the money could remain mine for weeks or months.

With Citibank’s service, the money is taken out of my account as soon as the bank sends the payment. Citibank uses the interest earned during that period to cover costs of running the service.

Not all banks do this, though – some will deduct the funds from your account when the recipient gets the payment. And we’re really just talking about a few pennies here, not enough to offset the convenience of online bill payment.

It’s become such a lifestyle change that I have now gone paperless with many other accounts as well. Credit card and cable TV statements are now delivered electronically, after years of my resisting nagging by those companies.

It got me wondering: What’s the point of checks in this era of credit cards, PayPal and electronic transfers? Many merchants don’t even accept personal checks anymore.

The biggest test of my check-free devotion came when I called Citibank to find out just how much a box of checks would cost – only to learn they come for free at my account level.

As much as I love free, my reply was still: No, thanks.

Report: U.S. Virtual Economy is Booming

2010-01-03T16:46:00.000-08:00

Report: U.S. Virtual Economy is Booming

When a lot of people think of gamers, they automatically think of mostly male teens who sit around a game console or computer screen all day playing alone. The reality is that the average gamers today are in their 30’s and have a significant disposable income to support the expensive hobby. More and more women are also becoming gamers.

A new study recently found that women tend to be more hardcore gamers than men are, but they also tend to lie about how much time they spend playing games. More and more people are also playing games that are closely tied to social networks like MySpace and Facebook.

These gamers often report that they play the games not so much for the game itself, but to interact with friends and family. The virtual economy that was created to cater to the goods that many of these social games sell is booming. BBC News reports that the virtual economy in the U.S. is set to make billions selling goods that don’t really exist. The sale of virtual goods is one of the hottest trends in technology and is showing no signs of letting up.

Venture Capitalist Jeremy Liew said, “This [virtual goods] is just an exploding part of the gaming business right now. It is the most exciting area in gaming.”

Liew’s company Lightspeed Venture Partners has invested about $10 million in virtual goods so far. He said, “We have seen companies go from nothing in the last 18-24 months to tens and hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.”

Virtual goods like fertilizer and seeds in farming games are big sellers and there are a myriad of other games that sell virtual goods to players seeking to get ahead. Social gaming firm Playfish says that virtual goods are key to its success.

Playfish’s Tom Sarris told BBC News, “Virtual items within the Playfish games are the centre point of the way in which Playfish derives its revenue.” He continued saying, “We have two different revenue models. The primary is the sale of virtual goods and the second is in-game advertising, but that is a very minor aspect at this stage.”

Liew says that making the lion’s share of revenue from digital goods is very common for social gaming companies. He says that virtual goods often make up 90-95% of the revenue for the game developers. Virtual goods and the games that sell them are attracting women in increasing numbers and the players don’t consider themselves to be average gamers.

Social gamer Emma Cox told BBC News she only plays to keep in contact with friends and family. She said, “I am not a traditional gamer. I don’t buy console games or go out and spend $40 on a game for my PlayStation.” She continued saying, “I am playing online games for a different reason and it’s instant gratification, playing with friends, showing off to others and have them see all the virtual goods you have bought for yourself and even for them.”

Cox and other players like her buy things like digital birthday cards, bottles of digital champagne, seeds and fertilizer, and other items for virtual games. Gamers and the game firms behind the popular titles liken the buying of digital goods to renting movies. Cox said, “The way we look at it is it’s no different from paying money to go and see a movie or rent a DVD. What you are paying for is the experience and that notion of entertainment.”

Budget cuts ‘will not be pretty’ | ajc.com

2010-01-02T12:17:00.001-08:00

Budget cuts ‘will not be pretty’ | ajc.com

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Loss of jobs resets values | ajc.com

2009-12-28T12:06:00.001-08:00

Loss of jobs resets values | ajc.com

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Driving really fast to cost more starting Friday | ajc.com

2009-12-28T12:02:00.001-08:00

Driving really fast to cost more starting Friday | ajc.com

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Recession? Teenagers Get It, and Are Cutting Back

2009-12-26T02:02:00.000-08:00

December 26, 2009

Recession? Teenagers Get It, and Are Cutting Back

By STEPHANIE ROSENBLOOM

After a year of observing their parents pinch pennies and fret about the economy, the nation’s teenagers may be coming to grips with reality.

Sales are down sharply in recent months at nearly every major retail chain catering to teenagers, and interviews with teenagers suggest that the reasons go beyond their own difficulty finding part-time jobs.

“I think my sister and I, throughout this year we’ve kind of lost an interest in getting gifts and things like that,” said Morgan Porpora, 16, who in the past had a list of things she wanted for Christmas. “I guess we’ve noticed the economy and we just kind of even feel bad I guess asking for a lot.”

Last month, stores that specialize in clothing and accessories for teenagers were the worst-performing sector in all of retailing, posting a 7.8 percent year-over-year sales decline, according to Thomson Reuters.

Sales at stores open at least a year, a measure of retail health known as same-store sales, tumbled by double digits in November at Abercrombie & Fitch, Hot Topic and American Apparel. Same-store sales also declined at Zumiez, Wet Seal and American Eagle Outfitters.

Teenagers’ growing mindfulness about money is influenced, of course, by the way their parents are cutting back, and by a record-high teenage unemployment rate. But the biggest factor, according to the teenagers themselves, is that they have come to understand the social moment.

“As me and my brothers get older and we realize the implications of the recession,” said Sarah Berger, 16, “we just kind of value presents and gifts less.”

Ms. Berger was among more than a dozen teenagers talking about shopping and spending last week at a roundtable in Armonk, N.Y. Similar gatherings have taken place across the country, all of them organized and moderated by John D. Morris, an analyst with BMO Capital Markets who uses the sessions to glean insights about the health of the teenage retailing market. A reporter asked to attend the New York meeting, which took place one night around a dining room table in the home of David Taitz, 16.

While a couple of students said they felt slightly more optimistic this year, mainly because their parents still had jobs, most said thrift was the reigning household theme. Teenagers who celebrate Hanukkah, for instance, said they received one gift instead of presents on each of the holiday’s eight nights. Additionally, many parents had spoken with their children ahead of Christmas to lower expectations.

“I know my mom was saying that we’re going to spend a little bit less this year,” said Katharine LaMantia, 16. “We’re each getting either one big gift or a couple of smaller gifts. And I’m not going to buy as many gifts for my friends because we’re trying to spend less than we did last year.”

Mr. Morris, who has led several retailing discussions with teenagers, said that unlike last holiday season, when the economic crisis was still new, teenagers now understood that nearly everyone was making sacrifices. “What we’re hearing more and more is that these teens are empathizing with their parents,” he said. “They’re more concerned.”

No major retailing chain has felt the effects of that concern as much as Abercrombie & Fitch, the pricey, preppy clothing purveyor that has turned in 19 consecutive months of same-store sales declines. Last month, its sales sank 17 percent.

Rachel Kaplan, 16, said the chain was once a top trendy destination. “Now I walk in there, it’s empty,” she said. “I think it’s because they charge $80 for a polo shirt.”

While Abercrombie is suffering, Aéropostale, the value-priced clothing chain for teenagers, has fared well in this economy, posting record monthly sales figures. Last month, same-store sales rose 7 percent.

“I don’t mind it because it’s kind of the same thing as Abercrombie and Hollister but a little cheaper,” said Bryan Dunn, 17, “so you’re not spending like $40 for a T-shirt.”

The students want low prices, but at the same time, they seem to be discovering the relationship between price and quality. “If a shirt costs $10 but then rips every month or so, that’s a lot of T-shirts,” Ms. Kaplan said. “It adds up. Whereas if you buy a shirt that costs like $30 but it doesn’t rip, you can have it for as long as you want to wear it.”

That sentiment may explain why some teenagers are gravitating to the Gap, which is trying to pull off a turnaround. November same-store sales at Gap were unchanged from the same month last year, when they fell 10 percent. That is a better performance than most of Gap’s competitors.

“That’s your confirmation that teens are much more practical-minded,” said Mr. Morris, the BMO analyst. “You know you can just go in and get basic things and that the price is right. That to me is the confirmation that for them it’s not all about status labels and chasing trends. It’s more about enduring quality.”

The teenagers said they were also shopping more at TJ Maxx, which sells designer brands at affordable prices. As it turns out, TJX Companies, which owns TJ Maxx and Marshalls, just had its best quarter ever. The chain reported an 8 percent same-store sales increase in November, and retailing analysts said it was taking market share from teenage clothing stores.

Plenty of teenagers shop with money from their parents, yet many at the roundtable also had jobs baby-sitting, tutoring, delivering food from local restaurants and refereeing local sports games. Most were able to find some kind of part-time work, though Michelle Cioffoletti, 16, said it was more difficult these days.

“I think it’s kind of competitive because more people are losing their jobs,” she said, “so even the job that used to be easy to get for a teenager now is being filled by someone who got laid off.”

The teenage unemployment rate is at a record high, more than 26 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, compared to an overall unemployment rate of 10 percent. One reason is that retailers hired fewer seasonal employees, which analysts at Standard & Poor’s Equity Research said had hurt chains that sell to teenagers.

Those statistics and other uninspiring economic reports are inescapable even for teenagers whose parents do not tend to discuss finances around the dinner table. The teenagers said they could see the impact that news reports about the economy had on their parents.

“It’s nothing you can run away from,” Ms. Cioffoletti said.

If You Don't Buy a House Now, You're Stupid or Broke

2009-12-11T18:03:00.000-08:00

If You Don't Buy a House Now, You're Stupid or Broke

Interest rates are at historic lows but cyclical trends suggest they will soon rise. Home buyers may never see such a chance again, writes Marc Roth

By Marc Roth

Well, you may not be stupid or broke. Maybe you already have a house and you don't want to move. Or maybe you're a Trappist monk and have forsworn all earthly possessions. Or whatever. But if you want to buy a house, now is the time, and if you don't act soon, you will regret it. Here's why: historically low interest rates.

As of today, the average 30-year fixed-rate loan with no points or fees is around 5%. That, as the graph above—which you can find on Mortgage-X.com—shows, is the lowest the rate has been in nearly 40 years.

In fact, rates are so well below historic averages that it should make all current and prospective homeowners take notice of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

And it is exactly that, based on what the graph shows us. Let's look at the point on the far left.

In 1970 the rate was approximately 7.25%. After hovering there for a couple of years, it began a trend upward, landing near 10% in late 1973. It settled at 8.5% to 9% from 1974 to the end of 1976. After the rise to 10%, that probably seemed O.K. to most home buyers.

But they weren't happy soon thereafter. From 1977 to 1981, a period of only 60 months, the 30-year fixed rate climbed to 18%. As I mentioned in one of my previous articles, my dad was one of those unluckily stuck needing a loan at that time.

INTEREST RATE LESSONS

And when rates started to decline after that, they took a long time to recede to previous levels. They hit 9% for a brief time in 1986 and bounced around 10% to 11% until 1990. For the next 11 years through 2001, the rates slowly ebbed and flowed downward, ranging from 7% to 9%. We've since spent the last nine years, until very recently, at 6% to 7%. So you can see why 5% is so remarkable.

So, what can we learn from the historical trends and numbers?

First, rates have far further to move upward than downward; for more than 30 years, 7% was the low and 18% the high. The norm was 9% in the 1970s, 10% in the mid-1980s through the early 1990s, 7% to 8% for much of the 1990s, and 6% only over the last handful of years.

Second, the last time the long-term trends reversed from low to high, it took more than 20 years (1970 to 1992) for the rate to get back to where it was, and 30 years to actually start trending below the 1970 low.

Finally, the most important lesson is to understand the actual financial impact the rate has on the cost of purchasing and paying off a home.

Every quarter-point change in interest rates is equivalent to approximately $6,000 for every $100,000 borrowed over the course of a 30-year fixed. While different in each region, for the sake of simplicity, let's assume that the average person is putting $40,000 down and borrowing $200,000 to pay the price of a typical home nationwide. Thus, over the course of the life of the loan, each quarter-point move up in interest rates will cost that buyer $12,000.

LOAN COSTS

Stay with me now. We are at 5%. As you can see by the graph above, as the economy stabilizes, it is reasonable for us to see 30-year fixed rates climb to 6% within the foreseeable future and probably to a range of 7% to 8% when the economy is humming again. If every quarter of a point is worth $12,000 per $200,000 borrowed, then each point is worth almost $50,000.

Let's put that into perspective. You have a good stable job (yes, unemployment is at 10%, but another way of looking at that figure is that most of us have good stable jobs). You would like to own a $240,000 home. However, even though home prices have steadied, you may be thinking you can get another $5,000 or $10,000 discount if you wait (never mind the $8,500 or $6,500 tax credit due to run out next spring). Or you may be waiting for the news to tell you the economy is "more stable" and it's safe to get back in the pool. In exchange for what you may think is prudence, you will risk paying $50,000 more per point in interest rate changes between now and the time you decide you are ready to buy. And you are ignoring the fact that according to the Case-Shiller index, home prices in most regions have been trending back up for the last several months.

If you are someone who is looking to buy or upgrade in the $350,000-to-$800,000 home price range, and many people out there are, then you're borrowing $300,000 to $600,000. At 7%, the $300,000 loan will cost just under $150,000 more over the lifetime, and the $600,000 loan an additional $300,000, if rates move up just 2% before you pull the trigger.

What I'm trying to impress upon everyone is that if you are planning on being a homeowner now and/or in the foreseeable future, or if you are looking to move your family into a bigger home, then pay more attention to the interest rates than the price of the home. If you have a steady job, good credit, and the down payment, then you really are being offered the gift of a lifetime.

Marc Roth is the founder and president of Home Warranty of America, which touches just about every part of the real estate industry since it sells through builders, real estate agents, title companies, mortgage companies, and directly to consumers.

Why many college dropouts say they left: the need to work

2009-12-10T09:48:00.000-08:00

Why many college dropouts say they left: the need to work

College dropouts said that they needed to go to work and school at the same time, according to a new report from Public Agenda and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

By Amanda Paulson | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
More students than ever are going to college, but very few of them finish.

Among community-college students, just 1 in 5 earn an associate's degree within three years. At four-year institutions, the completion rate hovers around 40 percent.

Much of the policy discussion today focuses on student-loan and tuition reform, but among students who drop out, more than a third say that even if tuition and books were completely covered, they would be unlikely to go back to school. The main reason: work and family needs.

This is one finding from a new report from Public Agenda, a nonpartisan research group, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The undertaking surveyed young people – both those who earned a degree and those who started college but didn't finish – to try to determine what factors contribute to the low college graduation rate.

It comes at a time when policymakers are increasingly focused on the importance to the economy of having college graduates. President Obama has set a goal to once again make America first in the world in the percentage of adults with college degrees.

"Getting a credential beyond high school has become the new requirement for entrance to the middle class in America," says Hilary Pennington, director of postsecondary success for the Gates Foundation. "But most Americans believe a couple of things about college that aren't true: that if you start college, you're likely to finish it, and that access to college is the great equalizer."

In fact, she notes, children of higher-income parents are both two times more likely to go to college and five times more likely to finish than those from low-income families.

Part of the problem, says Jean Johnson, executive vice president of Public Agenda and one of the authors of the report, is that people's idea of who college students are is at odds with the reality. While many Americans conjure up an image of 18- or 19-year-olds attending classes full time and living in a dorm, that is true for only about a quarter of college students. About 45 percent of students at four-year schools work more than 20 hours a week, and the number rises to 60 percent at community colleges. Also, 23 percent of college students have dependent children.

The No. 1 reason that students in the survey cited for dropping out was that they needed to go to work and school at the same time. Fifty-four percent cited the need to work as the major reason they left school. The second most common reason, chosen by 30 percent, was the inability to afford the tuition and fees.

Most of those who left say that the need to work or family commitments are primarily why they haven't returned.

That's the case for Frankie Barria, a young New Yorker who participated in a Public Agenda call with reporters. He described the work pressures that led to him dropping out of the City University of New York after three years, and then out of two other schools when he tried – and failed – to return to earn a degree.

"It was just too much to pay for school and to pay rent and pay bills," Mr. Barria said. "I was forced at 19 to become an adult."

When students were asked which solutions would most have helped them stay in school, the vast majority of those who dropped out favored making financial aid available to part-time students and offering more evening, weekend, and summer courses. They also wanted day care available – as well as more student loans. Another solution they cited was cutting college costs by 25 percent.

One of the most untapped areas for help may be looking to higher-education institutions themselves to adapt to the needs of their students, says Ms. Johnson.

"They need to start thinking about the fact that they have students in different circumstances, and how they need to change and accommodate what the reality is for a lot of students," says Johnson.

She cites one college that instituted an early-alert system in which signs that a student was struggling were flagged. College officials reached out to such a student to try to help him or her manage outside pressures.

Majority of college dropouts cite financial struggles as main cause

2009-12-10T09:46:00.000-08:00

Majority of college dropouts cite financial struggles as main cause

By Jenna Johnson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 9, 2009 2:46 PM

The No. 1 reason many young adults drop out of college is an inability to juggle school and work, according to a report released Wednesday morning.

When choosing between a degree and going to work, paying rent, buying groceries or supporting family members, many students are forced to drop out, said Jean Johnson of Public Agenda, a nonpartisan public policy research firm that conducted a telephone survey of more than 600 people ages 22 to 30 for the report.

The research reflects a "very, very different reality" than the common image most people have of college as "a place where a young person goes and they become an adult," Johnson said. "So many of them are already assuming adult responsibilities."

Although strides have been made in increasing access to higher education for low-income and minority students, many of them are leaving school without a degree or certificate, Johnson said. Each fall, 2.8 million students enroll in some form of higher education, but fewer than half of students who start school graduate within six years, according to the U.S. Education Department. At public community colleges, only 20 percent of students graduate within three years.

The report is the first of three funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to examine access to college and college success.

Researchers found that students who drop out do not usually fit the stereotype of "Joe College": a student who debated which school to attend, lives on campus, attends class full time and has help paying bills. For students who leave school, "the balancing act is not between going to class and attending football games and frat parties; it's more likely between going to class and punching a clock in order to pay rent," they wrote.

For these students, picking a school to attend is often a haphazard and uninformed process, the researchers wrote, and the top reasons the former students cited in choosing a college were location, class times and tuition rates. Fewer than a third based their decision on the academic reputation of the school.

Of students surveyed, 58 percent said they did not receive any financial help from their parents or relatives to pay tuition or fees, and 69 percent had no scholarships or financial aid.

When these students decided to drop out, 70 percent said they did so because they needed to work to support themselves; other reasons included not being able to afford tuition and fees, needing a break, classes that were not useful and needing more time to spend with family.

Many of these young adults told researchers they would consider going back to school, but full-time work and family responsibilities again keep many of them away. A third of students surveyed said even if their tuition and books were fully covered, they could not go back to school because they could not afford to support themselves.

The report suggests ways to make it easier for working students to complete school, including allowing part-time students to receive financial aid, scheduling more classes at night and on weekends, reducing tuition and providing child care.

Study Sheds Light on Students Leaving College Early

2009-12-10T09:21:00.000-08:00

December 9, 2009, 2:48 pm

Study Sheds Light on Students Leaving College Early

By TAMAR LEWIN
In the popular image of college, there’s dorm life, full-time classes, football games, parties, maybe a part-time job — and then, four years later, a degree.

But for most students, it doesn’t work out that way. About 2.8 million students enroll in some form of higher education each year. But finishing what they start is a different matter: Only one in five of the students who enroll in two-year institutions graduate within three years. And even at four-year colleges, only two in five complete their degrees within six years.

On Wednesday, Public Agenda released an interesting study, “With Their Whole Lives Ahead of Them,” on the college dropout problem. (The study was underwritten by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.)

Public Agenda surveyed more than 600 young adults, 22 to 30, who had done at least some college coursework, and compared those who left before getting a degree with the experiences of those who completed a two- or four-year degree.

The differences are vast. Among those who dropped out, nearly six in 10 were getting no help from their parents in paying tuition. Among those who got degrees, more than six in 10 have help from their family in paying tuition.

About seven in 10 of the dropouts said they had no scholarship or loan aid; among those who got degrees, only about four in 10 went without such aid.

The top reason the dropouts gave for leaving college was that it was just too hard to support themselves and go to school at the same time. Balancing work and school was a bigger barrier than finding money for tuition, they said. In fact, more than a third of the dropouts said that even if they got a grant that covered their books and tuition, it would be hard to go back to school, given their work and family commitments.

Among those who completed a degree, 72 percent had household incomes above $35,000. Among the dropouts, more than half had household incomes below $35,000. And while 7 in 10 of the college graduates had parents who had completed at least some college work, 4 in 10 of the dropouts had parents who had not gone beyond a high school diploma.

The study also asked the young people what changes would be most useful in helping students to complete a college degree, offering 12 choices.

The students liked every idea suggested, but for the non-finishers the most popular solutions were allowing part-time students to qualify for financial aid, offering more courses on weekends and evenings, cutting costs and providing child care. The least popular — although still considered helpful — were putting more classes online, making the college application process easier.

The Public Agenda report is likely to provide fodder for both sides in the continuing debate over whether the best solution to the college dropout problem is money (whether cheaper tuition or more financial aid), high school reform (students with better high school grades and stronger academic preparation are less likely to drop out) or changes in the structure of college (more flexible class schedules, cheap on-site child care).

An image-rehab plan for Tiger Woods

2009-12-10T08:52:00.000-08:00

An image-rehab plan for Tiger Woods

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By Rick Reilly
ESPN The Magazine

Hopefully, Tiger's people have Oprah's people on the phone already.

Tiger Woods is the first person in history to run his car into a hydrant and set himself on fire.

His reputation is shredded. His once-perfect name has been dragged through more mud than a Nantucket clam digger's boots. A once-spotless life is now an episode of "Cops."

So what now?

First, Oprah Winfrey.

"It has to be Oprah," says the king of Las Vegas publicity men, Dave Kirvin. "If you did a poll on who's most disgusted by this whole mess, it would be women. To win over those women, you need to win over Oprah. You win over Oprah, you win over America."

Once he's on Oprah's couch, he says this:

"To my wife, to my kids, to my family, to my friends, to my fans, I am so sorry. You believed in me. You looked up to me. You thought I was different, and I let you down. I'm ashamed of myself. My mom is ashamed of me. I'm sure my dad would be ashamed of me. I'm an idiot." Then he has to go full Tebow: "From this day forward, you will never see somebody work harder, 24 hours a day, to win back your trust."

It has to be next week and no later, because every day the British tabloids have him sleeping with everybody but the Page 3 girl. "The sooner he makes his public act of contrition, the sooner he takes the oxygen out of the story," Kirvin says.

Second, he needs to shut down his public life.

He needs to skip San Diego, skip the Masters, maybe even skip the U.S. Open. When your house is rubble, you don't go play the Buick Open. Tiger needs to prove to his wife, Elin, sponsors and fans that morality is more important than majors.

Third, he needs to clean house. If he wants to keep his wife, he has to get a new agent, a new caddie and some new friends. It's hard to believe all this went on without their help or knowledge. How can she see them as anything but enablers?

Fourth, he needs to freeze his corporate sponsors before they freeze him. He needs to tell them, "I'm not doing any ads or taking any payment until I can again prove myself worthy of your products. I'm sorry I've let you down. It won't happen again."

Fifth, he needs to write his Tiger Woods Learning Center a check for $5 million with a note that says, "Keep studying hard. I'll be back to help you fundraise in 2011."

He needs sincerity and commitment and honor now because he might have just ruined a lot of lives, maybe even his own.

He needs transparency. Let us into your life a little. Do the "A week on the road with Tiger" story. Give a home interview once in a while. Let people check in the closets and under the bed. Prove to the world you've changed. Because "no comment" and three security guards are only going to make people suspicious.

Sixth, a few manners wouldn't kill him. No more terrible-twos temper. No more swearing. No more throwing clubs. And instead of pulling his signature blow-by move on the hundreds of autograph seekers waiting for him after every round, stop and sign for 15 minutes. Hasn't hurt Phil Mickelson any.

This fall is straight out of the Book of Wallenda. Not so much because his bottom was so low, but because his top was so high. His image, his likability, his hero factor were in the clouds. He was the kid with the 10,000-watt smile from the public golf course -- he brought golf to people of color all over the world. He was the great black hope of the game who made good.

A golfer? With two young kids at home? Alleged to have had affairs with numerous women? The best swinger becoming the biggest swinger? Overnight? Unthinkable!

Seventh, he has to return to the Tour and take the ridicule he has coming. He'll feel as though he's being paraded down Main Street, naked, in a glass box. Women will be wearing TIGER, YOU FORGOT ME T-shirts. Guys will be holding ELIN OVERCLUBBED signs. Babes will be hollering, "Hey, Tiger! I took my name off my voice mail like you said!"

He can shoot 42 over par; he just has to get through it. Then he has to play in a major, maybe the British at St. Andrews, where he won last time. And then he has to start winning again.

"There's four steps to getting past this in the public eye," Kirvin says. "First tournament. First major. First tournament victory. First major victory. Only then will the media let us get over this. The public will forgive him. They won't ever forget, but they'll forgive."

He'll come out of this as an even better player, if that's possible. The golf course will be the one place where he can go to forget, and he will want to forget constantly. Where he once spent six hours on the range, he will spend eight. Where he once had the will of 10 men, he will have the will of 100. He will win again -- win huge -- and people will call it a comeback.

But it won't be a comeback. He never lost his game. He only lost his mind.

Teens Show Little Interest in Manufacturing

2009-12-09T08:51:00.000-08:00

Teens Show Little Interest in Manufacturing
Most would prefer white-collar careers, according to survey

Thursday, November 19, 2009
By

A new poll showing the majority of teenagers don't view manufacturing as a realistic career option could make finding skilled labor even more difficult for manufacturers in the years ahead.

A survey sponsored by the Fabricators & Manufacturers Association International shows 52% of 500 teens responding have little or no interest in a manufacturing career, and another 21% are ambivalent.

When asked why, 61% said they seek a professional career, far surpassing other issues such as pay (17%), career growth (15%) and physical work (14%).

"Unfortunately, manufacturing often is not positioned as a viable career by groups such as educators and counselors, and at times factory work even is maligned in pop culture and the media," said Gerald Shankel, president of Nuts, Bolts & Thingamajigs (NBT), The Foundation of the Fabricators & Manufacturers Association International. "Based on this environment, these findings are not surprising."

The poll also shows:

61% of teens have never visited or toured a factory or other manufacturing facility.
Only 28% have taken an industrial arts or shop class, yet 58% have completed a home economics course.

27% spend no time during the week working with their hands on projects such as woodworking or models, 30% less than one hour and just 26% one to two hours.

A separate national poll of 1,000 adults sponsored by NBT reveals parents actually would support having a young factory worker in their family. More than half -- 56% -- would recommend their child pursue a career in manufacturing or another kind of industrial trade.

"Knowing so many parents will back their children in this career path is truly welcome news," said actor and producer John Ratzenberger, an NBT founder who leads the organization's communications outreach.

Shankel also notes that more than 70% of Americans view manufacturing as the most important industry for a strong national economy and national security.

"Such sentiment really motivates us to work hard to inspire the next generation of manufacturers, welders, builders, electricians and other trades people," Shankel said

NBT offers grants to not-for-profit organizations and educational institutions that introduce young people to careers in the trades through manufacturing summer camps for youth. It also issues scholarships to students at colleges and trade schools pursuing studies that lead to careers in manufacturing.

User Data Easier Than Ever to Phish on Facebook, New Study Shows

2009-12-08T02:37:00.000-08:00

User Data Easier Than Ever to Phish on Facebook, New Study Shows

Reilly Shocked By Public Admission - ESPN Video

2009-12-03T23:42:00.001-08:00

The Business of Education

Only 55 percent of young Americans have jobs, lowest since WWII

Seeking a better pay equation | ajc.com

Pattie Maes and Pranav Mistry demo SixthSense | Video on TED.com

Conrad Wolfram: Teaching kids real math with computers | Video on TED.com

David Brooks: The social animal | Video on TED.com

UGA leads, Georgia Tech trails in diplomas among state lawmakers

U.S. workers need more training - GE chief

Google Chrome OS Pilot Program Provides Free Laptops to High School Students

Is Your City Extreme?

Study: Too Much Emphasis Placed On Bachelor's Degree As Route To Success

Retirement: Live Long and Don't Prosper

Facebook to let advertisers republish user posts | ajc.com

Americans Are Still Overwhelmed by Excess

U.S. Schools Are Still Ahead—Way Ahead

Chinese Companies Expand to U.S. Soil and Markets

Google Pushes Education Software Through App Store

Medicare: Is there a doctor in the house? | ajc.com

Google opens e-book store in challenge to Amazon | ajc.com

Cherokee fight over graduations at churches could spread across metro Atlanta | ajc.com

Middle class feels shaky | ajc.com

Businesses attracted to Georgia, but other states lure more | ajc.com

Future hiring will generate mainly high-skilled or low-paying jobs in service industries

God, the Gospel, and Glenn Beck

Monitoring Media: How Can Students Ride the Wave of the Future Without Drowning in a Sea of Distractions?

Blackboard To Chalk Up Elluminate, Wimba

Blackboard To Chalk Up Elluminate, Wimba

07/07/10

Failing U.S. Education Will Dumb Down Economic Growth

The Next Generation of Digitally Enhanced Learning

The Next Generation of Digitally Enhanced Learning

China watchdog OKs giant Agricultural Bank IPO

Shoppers Check Out of Stores Via Cell Phone

Education IT To Grow $2.5 Billion This Year

5-Year-Old YouTube Tops Networks’ Primetime With 2 Billion Views

College for All? Experts Say Not Necessarily

Software Aiming to Curb Texting While Driving - InsideTech.com

Survey: For First Time, More People Would Do Without Television Than the Internet

What a week for new jobs in Georgia | ajc.com

Blogger Buzz: Blogger integrates with Amazon Associates

Colleges, students use new tactics to find jobs for graduates | ajc.com

Study: More Women Embracing Web Communities - InsideTech.com

AT&T to Offer Dog Collars and Pill Containers for Wireless Hotspots

Study: Third of Americans Use Library Computers

Stitching together paychecks a struggle for many | ajc.com

5 Top New Sites to Swap Items Online - InsideTech.com

Young Learners Need Librarians, Not Just Google

Atlanta moves to 9th largest US Metro area | ajc.com

Teacher pay plan stalls, could be headed for more study | ajc.com

The Perils of Market Research

Developer eyeing Bartow County, Georgia as site of huge ski dome development

FCC unveiling sweeping national broadband plan

Financial reform efforts pit US against Europe

NEC Develops "Minority Report" Advertising System - InsideTech.com

When should kids get cell phones?

How Colleges Are Buying Respect

AT&T Says Metered Internet is Coming - InsideTech.com

Obama seeks money, interventions to stem dropouts

Could we see a 77 percent tuition hike at public colleges?

Feds: 100Mbps broadband for everyone!

Public Perceptions Of Higher Education Declining, Study Finds

AP: Southern Co. to get federal loan guarantees for nuclear reactors | ajc.com

GE plans a brighter presence in Atlanta | ajc.com

Mega-regionalism: A Southeastern economic engine? | ajc.com

Poverty moves fast to suburbs | ajc.com

In Digital Combat, U.S. Finds No Easy Deterrent

Lottery Tax: Jackpot for States?

Free Checking Could Go the Way of Free Toasters

Medical industry is Atlanta's next growth driver

Rules for Kids to Follow When Creating Their Online Identities

Bar-Code Scanning of Licences Might Start in Nebraska

Why Web Stores Will Be Main Profit Providers for Retailers By Year's End

Facebook CEO: People No Longer Have Same Privacy Expectations

State's new plan for transportation | ajc.com

The Disposable Worker

Atlanta works on its sales pitch | ajc.com

Reed against Atlanta tunnel

Budget Cuts Take Toll on Education

GE moving division to Atlanta

Online Banking Has Killed Personal Checks for Good

Poverty moves fast  to suburbs | ajc.com