Home and Ownership

Today is tax day and across America we will be writing checks, filling in forms for both State and Federal taxes in which to ensure our role in the defining marker of equality and parity in American Democracy. Yeah that is working out great, right?

One of the ideas that is instilled in Americans is the dream of Home Ownership. And that has been peddled along with the idea that a College Degree is the key to success. And that is working out great, right?

Owning a home is perhaps the most daunting project one can take on. It is considered wealth building, provides economic security and builds a concept of community as one lives, builds a family, works and lives in a home for at least the term of the Mortgage (that usually 30 years) and in turn sends their Children to local schools, which are paid for through the taxes on said home. This like Meritocracy is a massive myth.

Home ownership MAY have been that at some point in the economic ladder but like Union jobs, decent wages, pension plans and other financial incentives such as supporting infrastructure that includes schools, public transportation, roads and all that align said roads, from crosswalks to street lighting, I suggest you take a trip to a Southern City and see how that fails in every stretch of the imagination. Even some larger cities that are appreciated for density fail in providing that equally across the board to all citizens as you can see in New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, San Francisco.

One book that deals with some of the failures of policy when it comes to issues regarding housing, especially affordable housing is a book called San Francisko. But there are other books that have covered the economic failures such as Evicted, Nickel and Dimed to name a few. The reality is that housing has always been a NIMBY issue by many regardless of their political and economic leanings. They may be for different reasons but the issue is the same when it comes to costs. And by that we mean Property Tax. This is the least transparent of tax systems and this article about how New York City demonstrates that the poorer homeowner often subsidizes the richer home owner when it comes to the way taxes are assessed.

And this is not just in New York, Colorado is facing a similar situation. And the move to remote work led many to find themselves relocating to cheaper environs in which to work and live and surprise they are not the Nirvana one imagines. As I can attest living in Nashville I experienced first hand the United States equivalent of third world country trying to navigate a city with lackluster public transportation, poor sidewalks, no crosswalks, high traffic fatalities, shitty infrastructure when it comes to weather issues and then the largest issue – the failures of the public school system. This article discusses the way these areas nickel and dime you to death when it comes to subsidizing the city when property and/or income taxes are low.

One of the major beliefs in home ownership which still mystifies me is a “starter home” that one buys and maintains to eventually leave and build up or move up. I had never heard of this until the arrival of HGTV and with that flipping also became a new moniker in which to convey they idea of buying properties that a dilapidated and in turn fixing them and turning them over to make a buck. I recall that may have been a factor in the crash of 2008 but again those were different times, right? True lower than lower mortgage rates, less down, shorter term loans and of course Realtors and Mortgage Brokers willing to find suckers, whoops I mean, clients willing to sign the contract. That worked out well, didn’t it?

I could get into a discussion about Real Estate and their MONOPOLY (the reality not the game on which irony that it is based) on selling and buying homes. The recent Missouri Case regarding the National Association of Realtors and that subject is best explained in this article from some of the actual Homeowners behind the case. It is shocking to realize how exploited and dependent we are on agents who have little to no business background, accounting or legal knowledge yet we hand over thousands of dollars to them to exchange property. A Lawyer could do it for a flat fee and so could any Agent, but that is not how it has been done. Okay then.

I have written often about how Real Estate Agents are one step above a Used Car Salesman and again Television has glorified it with varying reality shows that have them raking in the bucks and living the life. That is not the life of the “average” Real Estate Agent. This is one perspective I found that explains wages and incomes in varying markets. But like many other industries, this is industry that is not exempt from those that define corporate hierarchy, or is that Patriarchy? As the the story behind the such as this reason the NAR (irony that the acronym is so close to the NRA) head stepped down. Or this story about another Real Estate Agency, eXp, and their “issues” regarding harm. But just a review of a search in the NY Times brings article after article about the real estate industry and its many “issues.”

Aside from that industry that has contributed to housing costs, housing shortages and denting one’s savings via commissions and costs (come on do you really need to stage a home?) that ultimately come out of the seller’s pocket, there is little to no reason to believe that the equity you have built in your home for many will entitle them to a million dollar retirement. Again that is the reality of real estate, the rich stay richer, the poor stay well less poor in some cases if they have a hot house in a hot market.

But the real problems with home ownership other than maintenance which includes insurance, upkeep as those two factors with Climate problems of late are placing burdens on many, is the biggest check one will write – Property Taxes.

I have reprinted this editorial from the Times regarding this issue and it is something that we have to ask why? As I live in Jersey City the city mentioned in the article I can see firsthand what happened to this city and the aftermath of what it means for its residents, past.

It’s Time to End the Quiet Cruelty of Property Taxes

April 11, 2024 The New York Times Guest Essay

By Andrew W. Kahrl

Dr. Kahrl is a professor of history and African American studies at the University of Virginia and the author of “The Black Tax: 150 Years of Theft, Exploitation, and Dispossession in America.”

Property taxes, the lifeblood of local governments and school districts, are among the most powerful and stealthy engines of racism and wealth inequality our nation has ever produced. And while the Biden administration has offered many solutions for making the tax code fairer, it has yet to effectively tackle a problem that has resulted not only in the extraordinary overtaxation of Black and Latino homeowners but also in the worsening of disparities between wealthy and poorer communities. Fixing these problems requires nothing short of a fundamental re-examination of how taxes are distributed.

In theory, the property tax would seem to be an eminently fair one: The higher the value of your property, the more you pay. The problem with this system is that the tax is administered by local officials who enjoy a remarkable degree of autonomy and that tax rates are typically based on the collective wealth of a given community. This results in wealthy communities enjoying lower effective tax rates while generating more tax revenues; at the same time, poorer ones are forced to tax property at higher effective rates while generating less in return. As such, property assessments have been manipulated throughout our nation’s history to ensure that valuable property is taxed the least relative to its worth and that the wealthiest places will always have more resources than poorer ones.

Black people have paid the heaviest cost. Since they began acquiring property after emancipation, African Americans have been overtaxed by local governments. By the early 1900s, an acre of Black-owned land was valued, for tax purposes, higher than an acre of white-owned land in most of Virginia’s counties, according to my calculations, despite being worth about half as much. And for all the taxes Black people paid, they got little to nothing in return. Where Black neighborhoods began, paved streets, sidewalks and water and sewer lines often ended. Black taxpayers helped to pay for the better-resourced schools white children attended. Even as white supremacists treated “colored” schools as another of the white man’s burdens, the truth was that throughout the Jim Crow era, Black taxpayers subsidized white education.

Freedom from these kleptocratic regimes drove millions of African Americans to move to Northern and Midwestern states in the Great Migration from 1915 to 1970, but they were unable to escape racist assessments, which encompassed both the undervaluation of their property for sales purposes and the overvaluation of their property for taxation purposes. During those years, the nation’s real estate industry made white-owned property in white neighborhoods worth more because it was white. Since local tax revenue was tied to local real estate markets, newly formed suburbs had a fiscal incentive to exclude Black people, and cities had even more reason to keep Black people confined to urban ghettos.

As the postwar metropolis became a patchwork of local governments, each with its own tax base, the fiscal rationale for segregation intensified. Cities were fiscally incentivized to cater to the interests of white homeowners and provide better services for white neighborhoods, especially as middle-class white people began streaming into the suburbs, taking their tax dollars with them.

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One way to cater to wealthy and white homeowners’ interests is to intentionally conduct property assessments less often. The city of Boston did not conduct a citywide property reassessment between 1946 and 1977. Over that time, the values of properties in Black neighborhoods increased slowly when compared with the values in white neighborhoods or even fell, which led to property owners’ paying relatively more in taxes than their homes were worth. At the same time, owners of properties in white neighborhoods got an increasingly good tax deal as their neighborhoods increased in value.

As was the case in other American cities, Boston’s decision most likely derived from the fear that any updates would hasten the exodus of white homeowners and businesses to the suburbs. By the 1960s, assessments on residential properties in Boston’s poor neighborhoods were up to one and a half times as great as their actual values, while assessments in the city’s more affluent neighborhoods were, on average, 40 percent of market value.

Jersey City, N.J., did not conduct a citywide real estate reassessment between 1988 and 2018 as part of a larger strategy for promoting high-end real estate development. During that time, real estate prices along the city’s waterfront soared but their owners’ tax bills remained relatively steady. By 2015, a home in one of the city’s Black and Latino neighborhoods worth $175,000 received the same tax bill as a home in the city’s downtown worth $530,000.

These are hardly exceptions. Numerous studies conducted during those years found that assessments in predominantly Black neighborhoods of U.S. cities were grossly higher relative to value than those in white areas.

These problems persist. A recent report by the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy found that property assessments were regressive (meaning lower-valued properties were assessed higher relative to value than higher-valued ones) in 97.7 percent of U.S. counties. Black-owned homes and properties in Black neighborhoods continue to be devalued on the open market, making this regressive tax, in effect, a racist tax.

The overtaxation of Black homes and neighborhoods is also a symptom of a much larger problem in America’s federated fiscal structure. By design, this system produces winners and losers: localities with ample resources to provide the goods and services that we as a nation have entrusted to local governments and others that struggle to keep the lights on, the streets paved, the schools open and drinking water safe. Worse yet, it compels any fiscally disadvantaged locality seeking to improve its fortunes to do so by showering businesses and corporations with tax breaks and subsidies while cutting services and shifting tax burdens onto the poor and disadvantaged. A local tax on local real estate places Black people and cities with large Black populations at a permanent disadvantage. More than that, it gives middle-class white people strong incentives to preserve their relative advantages, fueling the zero-sum politics that keep Americans divided, accelerates the upward redistribution of wealth and impoverishes us all.

There are technical solutions. One, which requires local governments to adopt more accurate assessment models and regularly update assessment rolls, can help make property taxes fairer. But none of the proposed reforms being discussed can be applied nationally because local tax policies are the prerogative of the states and, often, local governments themselves. Given the variety and complexity of state and local property tax laws and procedures and how much local governments continue to rely on tax reductions and tax shifting to attract and retain certain people and businesses, we cannot expect them to fix these problems on their own.

The best way to make local property taxes fairer and more equitable is to make them less important. The federal government can do this by reinvesting in our cities, counties and school districts through a federal fiscal equity program, like those found in other advanced federated nations. Canada, Germany and Australia, among others, direct federal funds to lower units of government with lower capacities to raise revenue.

And what better way to pay for the program than to tap our wealthiest, who have benefited from our unjust taxation scheme for so long? President Biden is calling for a 25 percent tax on the incomes and annual increases in the values of the holdings of people claiming more than $100 million in assets, but we could accomplish far more by enacting a wealth tax on the 1 percent. Even a modest 4 percent wealth tax on people whose total assets exceed $50 million could generate upward of $400 billion in additional annual revenue, which should be more than enough to ensure that the needs of every city, county and public school system in America are met. By ensuring that localities have the resources they need, we can counteract the unequal outcomes and rank injustices that our current system generates.

Time Out

We all need said time outs, either by choice or by assignment. The reality is that we have been living under extraordinary pressure and fear that has only accelerated for some as they live in seclusion, isolation or in a small cohort or pod. The mirror held is one that reflects much of the same dynamics that enables one to thrive and succeed when times are tough. I am one who thrives on my own, I have always known that and now this has only confirmed it in ways that have made me relieved, sad, glad and whatever the day brings I ultimately know that I am on my own and I must do what needs to be done to get through it; whatever it is.

The past year has demonstrated Biblical proportions of all that defines the Apocalypse – as defined by the Book of Revelation. This from James Tabor on a Frontline discussing this issue:

If you open the Book of Revelation and simply begin reading it as an unfolding scenario, it goes something like this. There will be wars and famines and disease epidemics and heavenly signs that will alert the world to some sort of crisis. Then will come an Antichrist as he’s called, or a political ruler, that will establish control over the whole earth. He’ll be backed up with a religious ruler, who’s called the false prophet. They together establish a unified social, economic and religious system that dominates the world. The only thing opposing them are the people of God and these two prophets, they’re called the two witnesses, who appear in Jerusalem, and begin to speak against this power. The rest of the book, really the last half of the book is about the overthrow of this system. The beast, the false prophet, who has the number 666, the Antichrist, is overthrown with judgments and plagues. Most of them are very cosmic. Asteroids hitting the earth. The water turning to blood and that sort of thing, until finally, Jesus Christ returns as a warrior on a white horse and sets up the kingdom of God. ...

And with this comes the Four Horsemen with their signs, which we can see as War/Unrest, Plague, Pestilence, Floods/Tornados, Starvation and of course the Met Gala. Seriously what the fuck was Anna Wintour thinking dressing adults in ostensibly overpriced Halloween Costumes, calling it fashion to descend upon New York City and paying for the privilege of looking like idiots? Talk about out of touch. When a self described Socialist, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is wearing a six figure gown with the message, “Tax the Rich,” folks the irony is not lost there, it is fucking buried. I think someone needs a time out!

Then we have the denial and claims that the current state of affairs with regards to the weather as a 500 year flood. From Alabama, Texas and Tennessee to here in Tri-State area that is some 500 year spread as Sandy was just nine years ago. At least I can do the math. As one clean up begins another continues. This is climate change folks and if you are denying it at this point it may be time for a time out for you!

As for the Covid vaxx deniers. Let’s start with the South, the region of the country going out of its way to deny voting rights to ensure that the majority is ruled by the minority. Again, going with that math thing – when you have 70% of your population not voting by choice or because of convoluted laws to ensure that you have a minority, 30% of the population deciding who will represent you and create said laws that are equally convoluted about a myriad of subjects. Such as the weird ass Abortion law of Texas, written by a religious zealot, male of course. And the equally wierd ass gun law in Missouri which is the Abortion law only about guns. So this is why the South gets the stereotype notion they are hicks and dicks. Well that is partially true but they are the loudest voices in the room and that dick swinging takes up a lot of energy. Yet they are also the biggest liars and hypocrites I have ever met. The Southern Conundrum I call it where they say one thing, do another and blame Jesus. Tennessee has quite restrictive mandates when it comes to vaccinations as does Mississippi. Why? Well the issues are racist and public health in mind, the priority is of course neither it is about the most critical thing – money. The reason being is that these are states with poor public health programs and hospitals and why? Black people. The poor in the South are by far largely faces of color but they are not the majority: however, the largest driver in their economies are jobs without insurance and deceent wages and the reality is that by having everyone inoculated it saves medical care costs if a pandemic arises. Covid is such an example as right now Tennessee has the largest cases of Covid per capita.. As a result profitable and needed surgeries and treatments that keep hospitals going (I was going to say alive but felt it was an inappropriate pun) cannot schedule them, as in this case. So it is time for the Legislatures to wake up and take a time out on this bullshit.

Be that it was MANDATED to be vaccinated at the Met Gala last night, Nikki Minaj, apparently missed out, the story being something to do with the mandate but also with some family members testicle, but she is like many in the Black community – unvaxxed. Hey folks, if Little Nas X, or whatever his name is, can show up, wear three outfits it says that yes it is fine to be vaccinated as I am sure he is not risking his balls. He is our new Gaga. And on that I can make even an exception for him but the others not so much. He gets no time out!

And the last time out I want to give is to the uneducated. A week ago the Wall Street Journal did an article about how men, across color lines, are dropping out of College and joining a long line of those who are uneducated and in turn working for less and feeling isolated as again women are, across color lines, attending college in 2:1 ratio. That said it has been like this for decades and little has changed with regards to pay equity for women, regardless of color and with women of color making substantially less that their white counterparts in same said jobs. But overall the reality is that women are still picking up the check and paying for it. As pink collar jobs still require licensing and credentials and still pay shit. The equivalent blue collar ones for men do not. Time out on that!

We are a stupid lot of sheep. We are afraid and we take no for an answer quite often and yet when you choose not, including Ms. Minaj, you are mocked, derided and often “canceled.” What we have is a culture of talking AT you not WITH you. Active listening, asking questions is not wrong as that is how you grow. Take a Time Out and try it, you may be surprised.

MBA?

I recall when Business was the “it” major and today it is STEM and there is some truth in that but just good old fashioned Math, Physics and Chemistry or Engineering are all quality majors that enable an individual to have flexibility in career choices.

The idea that computer science is all that and a bag of chips I think will go the way of business 2.0 in the immediate future as you cannot study a field that changes in such frequency and still think you are relevant. Ask those who are in their 40s and are being cut from jobs with that as the “reasoning” behind it. Well actually it is age and in fact salary, the irony is that the largest growth in technology came from those who never had said degrees or even related fields of study but they were good with math, design and this thing called ingenuity. Things that lack in our supposed creative entrepreneurial class. I am always shocked at how kids don’t even understand the symbol for division nor can perform basic math and multiplication. Oh that is right it is the Teachers fault and technology can fix that. Sure.What.Ever.

The fake claim that a degree gives you “x” when you do “y” is well math. Just that whoever came up with that formula put in their own variables to determine x and y. Gee an aged old equation that has no substance in actual data is always relevant right?  Maybe it is time to do a new study as it looks like the M.B.A is going the way of Liberal Arts.

Wonder what Betsy DeVos thinks?  Does she?  And to think that is the same major that our current “President” has.  Well that might explain it. Well no it doesn’t.

Business is the most popular college major, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good choice

By Jeffrey J. Selingo
The Washington Post
January 28 2017

A few weeks ago, a young woman approached me after I gave a talk about my book on finding a job after college. She was in her mid-20s and unemployed despite applying for dozens of jobs and taking on several unpaid internships. “I majored in business marketing,” she told me, “because everyone said it would lead to a job after graduation.”

She’s not alone in that line of thinking. It’s why business is the most-popular major on college campuses these days. The academic fields that make up undergraduate business — finance, accounting, marketing, management, and general business — account for about one out of every five bachelor’s degrees awarded each year.

But not all business majors are created equal in the job market. Research shows that students who major in general business and marketing are more likely to be unemployed or underemployed, meaning they hold jobs that don’t require a college degree. They also earn less than those in more math-focused business majors, such as finance and accounting.

Those gaps exist for all kinds of reasons, but perhaps the most telling is that math-focused business majors tend to work harder while in school than do those pursuing a general business degree. Students majoring in business spend less time studying than anyone else on campus, according to the National Survey of Student Engagement. They also spend less time reading and writing than other majors. One analysis of 10 public four-year universities in Texas found that of the 40 courses needed for a business degree, only one required a writing assignment of 20 or more pages, and only three required assignments of at least 10 pages.

What’s more, the results of national standardized tests, such as the Collegiate Learning Assessment Plus, given to freshmen and seniors, found that students who major in business made significantly fewer gains in college in critical thinking, writing and communication, and analytical reasoning than those who studied mathematics, science, and engineering, as well as the traditional liberal arts (philosophy, history, and literature).

Everywhere I go, parents and students ask me for advice about choosing a major. Here’s what I tell them: Find a major that will challenge you to work hard and spend time on specific tasks, such as writing, reading or math programs, and one that will present you with opportunities to learn from the best professors and be surrounded by peers who will constantly challenge you.

Students today are commonly told they should follow their passions and find a mission in life, but very few 18-year-olds or even 22-year-olds have enough experience in the world to know what truly excites them. Pick a major that interests you, but allow it and external experiences to help shape, not dictate, your mission in life.

While you should consider different majors, and you should keep your options open for a while, don’t think you can do anything you want or have all the time in the world to make a decision. Talent and drive matters to success in most majors. You can’t major in physics if you’re terrible at math.

If money is your goal, Tony Carnevale, the director of Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce, will tell you that a certain group of majors provide a bigger return on investment over a lifetime. The Georgetown center has found in its research that of the 25 highest-paying majors, all but two (economics and business economics) are in STEM fields.

Even so, Carnevale warns students who pick their majors solely on the basis of the expected paycheck not to count their money too quickly. Salaries for specific majors can differ greatly, too. The top quarter earners who majored in humanities or the liberal arts make more than the bottom quarter of engineering majors. Just 22 percent of graduates with degrees in science and math actually get jobs in those fields and utilize their training.

Another study by the Brookings Institution analyzed the market value of the 25 most commonly cited skills listed by alumni of each college in their LinkedIn profiles. It demonstrated that skill development, not your undergraduate major or the college you choose, is most critical to your earnings potential.

Picking a major is not like buying a new car. You can’t easily test-drive a major, unless you plan to stay in college for many more than four years. A major reflects your interests at one moment in your life. Where you end up in a career is the result of a meandering pathway that most college graduates are destined to take after graduation. Some graduates apply their majors to their careers more than others, and some not at all.

Ask anyone working today if they knew exactly what they wanted to do with their lives at age 18, and they will probably say they had no idea (if they’re being honest). The longer they have been in the workforce, the less likely it is that they are in a career directly related to their college major.

And if you’re majoring in business and think the undergraduate degree doesn’t matter anyway because you’re going to business school, remember this: business students score lowest of all majors on the GMAT, the entrance exam for most MBA programs.

The Barter System

Today it was announced that the bonuses for the white shoe law firms are back. David Boies one of the Attorney’s who seems to be linked to liberal causes although frankly he has demonstrated that cause is not effect and he will represent anyone who pays him as that is what a Lawyer is all about, his firm leads the bonus awards. Shocking? Not really.

And then there is the new approach to law school, arguing about tuition before admission. Getting a head start frankly on a career in arbitration no doubt.

Well better than entering the field of education as it too is a career where it is under fire yet most Teachers barely make ends meet. But keep talking about those Teacher’s union! In the Seattle area a Teacher working in an adjacent district makes 10K less. Substitute teaching for many average between $11 to $15/hour. And there is much ad o about supposed sub shortages across the country. Shocking but flipping burgers is less hassle and better pay.

But don’t rush as for many college is not on the 4 year plan, it is more like 6 and in turn costs more without any guarantee that this paper will get you the job you need or want. Accountability only applies to you and the student loan that follows you for life. As for income that is a dish best left cold as more and more Americans are finding it tough to make ends meet.

So the best gig is finding Wall Street jobs. The revolving door is paved with gold.

Nothing says hope more than asking an 18 year old to make a career and educational decision that can affect their lives forever. No wonder we have eliminated meritocracy as that is just too hard! Income inequity serves the status quo just fine.

Most College Students Don’t Earn a Degree in 4 Years, Study Finds

By TAMAR LEWIN
DEC. 1, 2014

The vast majority of students at American public colleges do not graduate on time, according to a new report from Complete College America, a nonprofit group based in Indianapolis.

“Students and parents know that time is money,” said the report, called “Four-Year Myth.” “The reality is that our system of higher education costs too much, takes too long and graduates too few.”

At most public universities, only 19 percent of full-time students earn a bachelor’s degree in four years, the report found. Even at state flagship universities — selective, research-intensive institutions — only 36 percent of full-time students complete their bachelor’s degree on time.

Nationwide, only 50 of more than 580 public four-year institutions graduate a majority of their full-time students on time. Some of the causes of slow student progress, the report said, are inability to register for required courses, credits lost in transfer and remediation sequences that do not work. The report also said some students take too few credits per semester to finish on time. The problem is even worse at community colleges, where 5 percent of full-time students earned an associate degree within two years, and 15.9 percent earned a one- to two-year certificate on time.

The lengthy time to graduate has become so much the status quo that education policy experts now routinely use benchmarks of six years to earn a bachelor’s degree and three years for an associate degree.

“Using these metrics may improve the numbers, but it is costing students and their parents billions of extra dollars — $15,933 more in cost of attendance for every extra year of a public two-year college and $22,826 for every extra year at a public four-year college,” the report said. “Hands down, our best strategy to make college more affordable and a sure way to boost graduation rates over all is to ensure that many more students graduate on time.”

Each year, the report said, 1.7 million students begin college in remediation, including a majority of community college students — but only one in 10 remedial students ever graduate.

Also, 60 percent of bachelor’s degree recipients change colleges, with almost half of them losing some of their credits when they transfer.

Too much choice in college catalogs contributes to the problem, the report said, often overwhelming 18-year-olds “with an enormous cafeteria of possibilities in the college curriculum” and too few counselors to help them chart their course.

Tuition borrowers who do not graduate on time take on far more debt in their extra years, the report found. According to data from Temple University in Philadelphia and from the University of Texas, Austin, two extra years on campus increases debt by nearly 70 percent.

While there is widespread agreement that graduation rates are too low, some education experts said they wished Complete College America had considered faculty issues and how much students actually learn.

“They’re too focused on efficiency and not enough on quality,” said Debra Humphreys, a spokeswoman for the Association of American Colleges and Universities. “Yes, we have a huge completion problem, but we also have a problem that a lot of students graduated without learning what they need.”

The report did not include statistics from private colleges and universities.

Ladders to Climb

I have no way of actually saying with certainty that apples are good for your health the same way college is good for your life.

I have met many College degreed people serving me lattes. I have met many college degreed people who need to serve me lattes. In all honesty I have no way of saying that either apples or college is good for you.

I recall dropping out of the Masters/Doctorate program years ago as I made more money remodeling houses.  True I gave up the “dream” of being called Doctor and that dream was up there with winning the lotto. Okay I have never played the lotto.  But I have also met many “Doctors” of the M.D., J.D. and Ph.D kind and frankly many of them need to learn I like a rich foam.

The numbers of letters following ones name may be actually added by “K’s” as in the denomination of them.  When you leave an ivy hall with a piece of paper that you just spent 6 figures for I would hope that is akin to owning a house – deed or degree – you need to be able to vest it as an investment that rises in value over time. Well that clearly is an analogy that I need to work on as it hasn’t quite worked out that way.

Eduardo Porter below discusses the diminishing but still clear value in what education offers for those who do pursue an advanced degree. But what he fails to mention that degrees are like cars, what is in fad today may not have the longevity and in turn value of the future.   He states that it adds over 365K in a lifetime.  OK in what professions? And from where were the degrees issued? The gender and income of the family and color as well should also figure into this historical “average”  Just a blanket statement seems vague and misleading.  Or as they say in law “heresay”   Ah don’t you miss the Mustang?

Rethinking the Rise of Inequality

By EDUARDO PORTER
Published: November 12, 2013

Many Americans have come to doubt the proposition that college delivers a path to prosperity.

In a poll conducted last month by the College Board and National Journal, 46 percent of respondents — including more than half of 18- to 29-year-olds — said a college degree was not needed to be successful. Only 40 percent of Americans think college is a good investment, according to a 2011 poll by the Pew Research Center.

On a pure dollars-and-cents basis, the doubters are wrong. Despite a weak job market for recent graduates, workers with a bachelor’s degree still earn almost twice as much as high school graduates. College might be more expensive than ever, but a degree is worth about $365,000 over a lifetime, after defraying all the direct and indirect costs of going to school. This is a higher payoff than in any other advanced nation, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Still, the growing skepticism about the value of a degree has fed into a deeper unease among some economists about the ironclad trust that policy makers, alongside many academics, have vested in higher education as the weapon of choice to battle widening income disparities and improve the prospects of the middle class in the United States.

It has given new vigor to a critique, mostly by thinkers on the left of the political spectrum, that challenges the idea that educational disparities are a main driver of economic inequality.

“It is absolutely clear that educational wage differentials have not driven wage inequality over the last 15 years,” said Lawrence Mishel, who heads the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal-leaning center for economic policy analysis. “Wage inequality has grown a lot over the last 15 years and the educational wage premium has changed little.”

The standard analysis of the interplay between technology and education, developed by economists like Lawrence Katz and Claudia Goldin of Harvard, and David Autor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is based on a simple proposition: Technological progress increased the demand for highly educated workers who could deploy it profitably, increasing their incomes. Like trade, it rendered many less-skilled occupations obsolete, eliminating what used to be solid, middle-class jobs.

This rendition of history suggests that improvements in technology — coupled with a college graduation rate that slowed sharply in the 1980s — have been principal drivers of the nation’s widening income gap, leaving workers with less education behind.

But critics like Mr. Mishel point out that this theory has important blind spots.

For instance, why have wages for college graduates stagnated over the last decade, even as innovation continues at a breathtaking pace? Between 2000 and 2008 the typical earnings of men with at least a bachelor’s degree fell by more than $2,000, after inflation, to $70,332 a year. Between 2008 and last year they fell a further $3,500. Though somewhat less pronounced, the pattern is similar for women.

Both sides agree that the overall weakness of the job market since the turn of the millennium is a prime culprit. As Professor Katz noted: “The only moments we’ve had of broadly shared prosperity have been in tight labor markets.”

Still, the sluggish job growth of the last decade — following the rapid expansion during the second half of the 1990s — demands an explanation, which the interplay between technology and skill does not provide.

“We have no handle on what happened in the 2000s,” Professor Autor told me. “That is a mystery that nobody I know understands, and I can’t point to a single policy lever or a single external force that would explain it.” ‘

Most notably, the skills-and-tech story leaves aside one of the most perplexing and important dynamics of the last 30 years: the rise of the 1 percent, a tiny sliver of the population that last year took in almost a dollar out of every $4 generated by the American economy.

“I don’t think the college to noncollege wage premium gives you any insight into why such a large share of the economic gains has accrued to such a tiny share of the population,” said David Card, a noted labor economist at the University of California, Berkeley.

Mr. Mishel’s preferred explanation of inequality’s rise is institutional: a shrinking minimum wage cut into the earnings of the nation’s least-skilled workers while falling trade barriers, deregulation and the decline of labor unions eroded the income of the middle class. The rise of the top 1 percent, he believes, is mostly about executive pay and the growing footprint of finance.

In coming weeks, Mr. Mishel and two co-authors, Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute and John Schmitt of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, expect to publish a study called “Don’t Blame the Robots: Assessing the Job Polarization Explanation of Growing Wage Inequality.”

In a conversation, Mr. Mishel argued that while education would improve workers’ economic mobility, if the ever-deepening concentration of income has little to do with the education gap, more education is unlikely to close it.

“Kids should still go to college, and when a whole lot more do we’ll have more opportunity,” he said. “But college wages will fall,” he added, as the supply of graduates increases. “This won’t really bring us broad-based wage growth, which is the central challenge to getting improved social mobility and expanding/rebuilding the middle class.”

When it comes to policy, however, the debate about the specific role that education and other factors play in deepening income inequality may contribute less light than heat.

Professors Katz and Autor agree that an array of policies is needed to address the labor market’s lopsided distribution of economic rewards. They range from a higher minimum wage to help lift the income of service workers at the bottom of the market to a larger earned-income tax credit.

More technical training could help upgrade the skills of high school graduates. Steeper income taxes on the very rich could curb the accumulation of income at the top. Perhaps most important, the design of macroeconomic policies might give more weight to maintaining low unemployment.

“Education is certainly part of the answer, but it is certainly not a complete answer,” Professor Katz said.

There is good reason to resist the proposition that education and technology are solely responsible for growing inequality. It provides political leaders an excuse to cast the problem as beyond the reach of policy.

“It can suck all the air out of the conversation,” Professor Autor acknowledged. “All economists should be pushing back against this simplistic view.”

Still, education plays a crucial role. A study a few years ago by Thomas Lemieux at the University of British Columbia concluded that increases in the returns on a college education accounted for almost 60 percent of the change in wage inequality between 1973 and 2005.

While Professor Lemieux’s data excluded the top few percent of earners, there is a lot of room for improvement left over.

Professor Katz illustrates this with a nifty calculation. Between 1979 and 2012 the share of national income captured by the richest 1 percent of taxpayers increased from 10 percent to 22.5 percent. Had their share instead remained at 10 percent and the rest been distributed equitably among taxpayers in the bottom 99 percent, each would have $7,105 more to spend.

By contrast, between 1979 and 2012 the gap between the annual wages of a typical family of two full-time workers with college degrees and one made up of two high school graduates grew by $30,000, after inflation.

“Nothing we do with the education supply will have a big impact among the top 1 percent,” Professor Katz said. But “could it improve the upward mobility and the prospects of a better job for Americans born in the bottom half of the income distribution? Yes.”

Degree Me This

Much is made about the need for a degree to get a job and then the mate to that check means insurmountable debt and a job that may or not compensate you adequately to both pay down debt and of course acquire more in order to boost the economy. It’s the American Way/Dream/Delusion.

We have of course the valley of milk and honey proclaiming that there are not enough skilled employees for the said jobs that require said skills of which they are neither specific nor truthful about but enough about the home where Jobs is just the name of a dead icon.

Today there is an article (below)  about how Colleges need to make themselves more voc than tech apparently.  And ironic that last week there was an editorial about the decline of Humanities in Universities and another one today about that same issue.  Of course women are the fault of that but soon we will be back getting our English majors, teaching until we get married and have babies in our new return to Little House of Mad Men on the Prairie fantasy America.

And yesterday I found this profile of a tech CEO called Jed Yeueh of Delphix, who ironically carries not one but two degrees in Humanities from of course Harvard.  And yet here is admitting that he taught himself programming via Excel.  So much for that needed skill set to get those unfilled jobs we keep hearing about! Maybe it was the Harvard thing that enabled the whole bypassing of STEM education that is apparently so vital for these thousands and thousands of vacant positions.  Don’t say Jobs.. he’s dead you know.

Why companies complain that they have few skilled workers they also apparently have a problem with the ones that do arrive degrees in hand with their what – lack of Humanity vested skills!  What is this – a conundrum, quandary or is it a double negative?  Who knows.. I have a degree in what – the Humanities! And yet I teach for a living.  Oddly teaching Language Arts.. the humanities and what do teach – Grammar, Phonetics and Linguistics. Not stuff the Common Core or the Readers/Writers workshops endorse. Well it was the Ivy League that devised those new standards. Irony on top of irony.

To break rules you need to know them. What you can’t do teach.  Learning is lifelong. There are dozens more proverbial expressions that I could bore one with but in reality we have a disconnect and miscommunication that comes from the inability to actually work collaboratively and constructively on what our wants and needs are.   We have the silly obsession that the Asian education system is somehow superior and want to emulate it.  Talk to someone living and working in those countries and ask them about what the standards of education are and the types of students they are producing. (I have and it is revelatory how negative their impressions are)  It is not imaginative, innovative, creative individuals – they are worker bees. And that is what the land of milk and honey want – worker bees, they have plenty of Queen bees and they want to keep that honey and hive to themselves.

Many corporations back in the day invested in their workers not Wall Street, providing them outstanding supplementary training and education. They encouraged their employees to stay in their jobs and compensated them. Internships were steps into paid positions, now they are simply free labor.   I have said it before and it bears repeating – the Technology Sector famous for their versions 2.0 discovered that they can do with people what the do with their products – dispose and find a better cheaper version.   Saving the world one gigabyte at a time.

What It Takes to Make New College Graduates Employable

By ALINA TUGEND
Published: June 28, 2013

MY older son graduated from high school last week and has started a pleasant job as a summer lifeguard. In four years we expect to attend his college graduation, and we hope the time there leaves him with great experiences, a love of learning and some idea how to get and keep a job.

It’s that last part of the equation that I’m going to focus on. My heart sinks every time I read a news story or opinion piece quoting employers who charge that four-year colleges and universities are failing to provide graduates with the skills they need to become and remain employable. <

Of course, in many ways, this isn’t a new story.

“A four-year liberal arts education doesn’t prepare kids for work and it never has,” said Alec R. Levenson a senior research scientist for the Center for Effective Organizations at the University of Southern California.

Mara Swan, the executive vice president of global strategy and talent at Manpower Group, agreed.

“There’s always been a gap between what colleges produce and what employers want,” she said. “But now it’s widening.” That’s because workplaces are more complex and globalized, profit margins are slimmer, companies are leaner and managers expect their workers to get up to speed much faster than in the past.

“Employers are under pressure to do more with less,” Ms. Swan said.

Unemployment rates for those with bachelor’s degrees or higher are still much better — at 3.8 percent in May — than those with only a high school diploma, which was 7.4 percent in May, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Nonetheless, a special report by The Chronicle of Higher Education and American Public Media’s Marketplace published in March found that about half of 704 employers who participated in the study said they had trouble finding recent college graduates qualified to fill positions at their company.

But, surprisingly, it wasn’t necessarily specific technical skills that were lacking.

“When it comes to the skills most needed by employers, job candidates are lacking most in written and oral communication skills, adaptability and managing multiple priorities, and making decisions and problem solving,” the report said.

Jaime S. Fall, a vice president at the HR Policy Association, an organization of chief human resources managers from large employers, said these findings backed up what his organization was hearing over and over from employers.

Young employees “are very good at finding information, but not as good at putting that information into context,” Mr. Fall said. “They’re really good at technology, but not at how to take those skills and resolve specific business problems.”

This isn’t a dilemma just in this country, but around the world, Ms. Swan said. A global study conducted last year of interviews with 25,000 employers found that nine out of 10 employees believed that colleges were not fully preparing students for the workplace.

“There were the same problems,” she said. “Problems with collaboration, interpersonal skills, the ability to deal with ambiguity, flexibility and professionalism.”

But it’s easy for the issue to degenerate into finger-pointing.

“If you sat down with a committee of professors, and told them students are not coming out with the skills they need, they would say, ‘you’re smoking something,’ ” Mr. Levenson said. “The trouble is, those skills are applied in a college context, not a workplace context.”

But, he added, “you can’t create a school-based curriculum that can help someone transition to being highly productive on the job in 10 days.”

In other words, the onus shouldn’t just be on universities; employers also need to step up to the plate.

The in-depth training programs and apprenticeships of the past are unlikely to come back, so companies must become more innovative in helping young employees come up to speed, according to a report released in May by Accenture, a management consulting and outsourcing company.

“Rather than simply bemoaning the inability to find employees with the skills required for available jobs, organizations must step up with new and more comprehensive enterprise learning strategies,” Accenture stated in a summary of The Accenture 2013 College Graduate Employment Survey, which queried 1,010 students graduating from college in 2013 and 1,005 who graduated in 2011 and 2012.

The problem, it said, is that most recent college graduates expect employers to provide on-the-ground training, but most of them don’t actually receive it.

“Based on these findings, as well as our own work with hundreds of companies around the world, it is hard to deny the conclusion that many employers have overblown expectations for the skills of new hires — believing falsely that recent college graduates should be able to hit the ground running,” the summary added.

Katherine LaVelle, who leads Accenture’s Talent and Organization group for North America, said the employers they talked to seemed more concerned about the lack of specific technical skills than broad ones like communication. But the overall issue of preparedness remains the same.

“Universities are not in the job of vocational training but they are in the job of evolving,” Ms. LaVelle said. “The magic lies in finding a model that’s appropriate for students to build skills, but palatable and effective for employers as well.”

It would seem that the job internships that college students, and increasingly post-college students, participate in would help prepare students for the working world, but experts say most are too short and not substantial enough. Longer, more in-depth ones at prominent companies are highly competitive.

“They’re incredibly helpful, but they’re not a cure-all,” Mr. Fall said.

There is clearly no one answer, but the most important issue is communication between all sides, said Karin Fischer, a staff writer for The Chronicle of Higher Education, who helped write up the survey results.

“To what extent are employers and colleges having a conversation about what they really need?” she asked. “We see this more in the community college arena. Maybe we need more back and forth.”

It’s not that colleges and companies haven’t been trying to figure this out — and with varying success. In 2008, the Boeing Company ranked colleges based on how well their graduates performed within the corporation. The results weren’t made public, but Boeing did share them with colleges.

Richard Stephens, a former senior vice present of human resources and management at Boeing, told The Chronicle that some colleges took the findings seriously and worked with the company to refine their curriculums, while others dismissed them.

Boeing used that information to determine where the aerospace company focused its internship programs and hiring.

But a spokesman for Boeing said there were no plans for another such evaluation, saying it was “difficult to measure individuals in such a big company and difficult to implement over the long term.”

One way the industry is reaching out directly to new entrants in the work force is through a Web site, Jobipedia.org, started by the HR Policy Association. An employee posts a question and recruiters for the companies that participate answer it. One question may elicit several answers from different perspectives.

About 20 major companies — such as Gap, Merck and American Express — participated. And some 50 colleges, including Cornell, Duke University and Georgia Institute of Technology, have made the Web site available to students at their college career centers.

The questions range from career planning to interview issues to on the job concerns. For example, “Is it O.K. to have a drink at a business lunch?” elicited four responses. The consensus: Best to avoid it.

As Mr. Fall said, “colleges can’t be either/or anymore — a trade school or a liberal arts college. We need skilled people with well-rounded backgrounds and the ability to think constructively.”

You hear that, son?