Is it safe to assume that when CNN reports on a presidential economic or educational initiative that’s been around for awhile, there’s some serious White House PR effort under way? A “CNNMoney” column today titled “Recovery at Risk: Community Colleges Step in to Fill ‘Skills Gap’” by Tami Luhby lays out the basics of [...]
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June 23rd, 2011 The idea that 4-year college degrees and liberal arts curricula waste students’ time and money, which I’ve lately been writing about in this blog, is definitely spreading among those who seem most easily to get media exposure. The recent words of Bill Gross, one of the country’s most revered bond investors, have been heard across [...] June 11th, 2011 “I want to have as few people touching our products as possible.” So spoke Dan Mishek, the managing director of an industrial plastic products manufacturer in Minnesota, quoted in Catherine Rampell’s NYTimes article yesterday, “Companies Spend on Equipment, Not Workers.” Why would an employer want to keep people away from its products? Germphobia? Elitism? No, [...] January 25th, 2011 If President Obama was an ordinary orator, I’d be placing bets on the number of times “innovation,” “education” and just plain “technology” will come up in the State of the Union tonight…with side-bets on “future” and “tomorrow.” But as an eloquent stylist, he’ll likely avoid the sort of redundancy that makes for good speech-based gambling fun. (Or, [...] December 17th, 2010 Innovating Then…and Now? (from eriecanal.org) It’s official: “Innovation” is going viral among American politicians. “Yankee ingenuity” is back, with a vengeance. Our famous inventive spirit will beat back all comers in the quickening global race for economic dominance. Brainpower is the new horsepower. I’m now completely convinced that the anxiety/enthusiasm recipe I wrote about [...] December 8th, 2010 Be Afraid: China’s “stellar” performance on recent standardized tests, described in yesterday’s New York Times (“Top Test Scores from Shanghai Stun Educators,” by Sam Dillon), is apparently another sign that America is being “out-educated.” We are at our very own “Sputnik” moment, President Obama tells us, our nation once again threatened by the academic attainments [...] September 28th, 2010 Run, do not walk (or at least link your way quickly), to David Sirota’s recent Salon column on “The Neo-Liberal Bait-and-Switch: Why Corporate-Friendly Democrats Like to Blame our Schools for Not Producing Enough White-Color Specialists.” (Sirota was also a guest on NPR’s “Tell Me More” today). His is one of the first discussions of STEM [...] May 17th, 2010 I could be projecting here, but it seems to me that 2-year colleges are getting a lot more media attention these days. The coverage brings bad news or good news by the day, depending on how you see the role of higher ed in America. On the worrying side of things for me is a growing conservative enthusiasm [...] April 24th, 2010 Renaissance job? (From www.photosfan.com) In a special section aptly titled, “The Business of Green” (April 22, 2010), the New York Times gave itself over this week to a story on the resurgence of nuclear power and the “many thousands” of new jobs shortly to be created as the country’s 104 existing nuclear power plants [...] March 23rd, 2010 Today’s edition of NPR’s Radio Times spent an hour on proprietary colleges: the for-profit world of DeVry, ITT, the University of Phoenix, and other schools familiar to anyone who takes public transportation or watches local TV, where their ads offer training and quick advancement in nursing, computing, office management, and a host of technical occupations. It [...] |
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