An Ambitious 20-Year Study Aims to Explain Human Behaviors and More Must-Reads

 

This Audacious Study Will Track 10,000 New Yorkers’ Every Move for 20 Years, Vox
Doctors, sociologists and psychologists utilize longitudinal studies to analyze how we change over time, but their research presents a segmented view of human behavior. A groundbreaking project at New York University, recording everything that happens in 4,000 households over 20 years, will take a more interdisciplinary approach to its data. By the study’s end, we might see, for example, how sleep affects relationships or how genetics dictates what we buy.

The Janitor Felt Invisible to Georgetown Students — Until One Changed His Life, Washington Post
As students rush to class, it can be easy to forget who maintains a college’s pristine façade: the gardeners who tend the quad or the chefs who prepare the dining-hall fare. At Georgetown, one student’s friendship with a janitor led him to create a Facebook page featuring profiles of university staff, from window-washers to repairmen. The stories they shared were so popular, students raised thousands of dollars to help out a few of them, including funding a janitor’s dream to open his own jerk-chicken restaurant and buying a cashier a round-trip ticket to his native South Sudan to visit the family he hasn’t seen in 45 years.

How Did Walmart Get Cleaner Stores and Higher Sales? The New York Times
For years, Walmart executives looking to bolster the bottom line hacked away at labor costs. The results showed: dirty bathrooms, near-empty shelves and nonexistent customer service depressed sales. How did the retail giant make a turnaround? Last year, they upped wages and invested in training. Sales reversed course and climbed upward, showing that employees are only a monetary drain when they are treated that way.

This Scorecard Could Help Make College More Affordable for Millions of Americans

When it comes to important decisions in a young person’s life, picking the right college (for both educational and financial reasons) ranks right at the top. So it makes sense to do some research beyond the rankings from the folks at U.S. News & World Report.
That’s where President Barack Obama’s College Scorecard comes in, as he says, to help you discover “where you can get the most bang for your educational buck.” The U.S. Department of Education grades universities by alternative criteria like graduation and loan default rates, which are arguably more important than the number of Nobel Prize-winning professors a school employs.
Potential applicants might be interested to know, for example, that Harvard is the best deal for a top-10 school (the average student pays $14,445 annually) or that Columbia University in New York City has the highest loan default rate amongst all the Ivy League schools (2.9 percent, which is still far lower than national average of 14.7 percent).
“We know students and families are often overwhelmed in the college search process, but feel they lack the tools to sort through the information and decide which school is right for them,” Secretary of Education Arne Duncan says. “The College Scorecard provides a snapshot about an institution’s cost and value to help families make smart decisions about where to enroll.”
The site has drawn some criticism as being overly simplistic — it currently shows only four criteria — in grading something as intangible as the value of a liberal-arts education (although you can measure faculty degrees and student ratios). And others have called for data that would be directly relevant to at-risk students, like demographics and outcomes for racial minority, low-income or first-generation students.
Sure, the scores aren’t perfect, but the scorecard has started a conversation about college and affordability. It’s a start, providing plenty of interesting data. Here’s some findings we gleaned from the site, among the top 50 national universities:

  • Georgia Institute of Technology (#35) is offering the best deal on a four-year degree from a national university. The average net price (meaning the cost students pay after scholarships and grants are deducted) is $9,116. Four years at Georgia Tech will get you just one at the country’s most expensive school, New York University (#32), where the average net price is $37,656.
  • Harvard (#2) students, as you may expect, are most likely to don a cap and gown. They have the highest graduation rate — 97 percent — among the top colleges. Case Western Reserve University (#36) in Cleveland, on the other hand, has the lowest. Only 77.8 percent earn a diploma within six years.
  • Alumni from Duke University (#8), in Durham, N.C., generally have the smallest bill to worry about after graduation. Families typically borrow $8,000 in federal loans, which works out to a repayment schedule of about $92 per month over 10 years. High-priced New York University again bottoms out the list. Families take out an average of $32,090 in federal loans, which means they’ll be paying about $369 a month for a decade.
  • Graduates of Stanford University (#4), near Palo Alto, Calif., top the list in their ability to manage student loans. Only 0.7 percent default on their federal student loans within three years of beginning to pay them back. (No surprise, considering that Silicon Valley’s not too far away.) Happy Valley in Pennsylvania, on the other hand, isn’t nearly as lucrative. Eight percent of students from Penn State’s University Park campus (#48) default on their student loans.

Half a million unique visitors checked out the scorecard last year, but the government thinks it can reach an even wider audience: not just high schoolers and their families, but also nontraditional students older than the age of 25 (a demographic that accounts for half of all college students). Before next fall’s application season begins, the department plans to release long-promised data on employment rates and starting salaries, and there’s talk of eventually tying some of the federal government’s $150 billion in financial aid and state government’s $70 billion for public colleges to school performance.
Now more than ever, as unpaid student loans total an unbelievable $1.16 trillion, it’s a valuable tool to find a degree that’s worth more than just ink on paper.
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Meet the Man Who Believes Creativity Knows No Economic Boundaries

It’s the height of summer, and soon, back-to-school commercials will dominate our television screens.
Students won’t be the only ones hitting the books this coming semester, however, as New York University (NYU) just announced a new course load entitled  “Initiative for Creativity and Innovation in Cities.” Created by Richard Florida, it aims to help city leaders make the creative field accessible for all economic classes.
That’s because in New York City, a city prized for its creative industry, 3 million residents don’t have home internet access. And in the Big Apple’s public schools, there is only one computer science teacher for every 11,000 students.
The goal?  To teach city officials, nonprofit leaders and economic development professionals the tools to expand the wealth of the creative class to a greater and more diverse population. Included in this course is a class called “Tools and Techniques for Understanding Urban Economies,” which teaches how to correctly assess community assets.
Students will also have the opportunity to take “Principles of Economic Development,” which is anything but your normal economics class, as it focuses on how “technology, talent, tolerance and territorial assets” are the “strategy for competitiveness in the creative age.”
According to Florida’s interview with Next City, “I thought we could build an educational model that wasn’t so cloistered and was very much broader based” with a goal “to ‘preach the gospel of urbanism’ to a really broad group of people… This initiative is another mechanism for doing this.”
The boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn already experienced their boom, and Florida hopes this course will carry that growth to the people living in the area — from Staten Island to the Bronx. For many people in these communities and in the rest of the city, Florida cites low wages, not high rent as the main cause of economic immobility in NYC.
While the lucrative creative class remains an exclusive group, sending these city leaders back to school may break down those cliquey borders and promote inclusion in this broad city — or at the very least, set the wheels in motion.
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A National Effort to Boost Local Resources

As smaller cities across the country grapple with poverty, unemployment, failing schools and other indicators economic distress, little time is devoted to ensuring they’re receiving the best tools and resources for better solutions.
While cities like New York and San Francisco benefit from the bright minds of Silicon Valley and other social startups, smaller communities are in need of similar solutions and ideas to restore economic recovery and growth. That’s why President Barack Obama launched the National Resource Network, a pilot program developed to be a consulting agency for policy, technical, and financial support for local governments.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) injected $10 million into the program, forming a network of experts with the New York University and the International City/County Management Association as well as Enterprise Community Partners, Public Financial Management Inc. and HR&A Advisors.
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The goal is to spend a three-year period listening to local governments for the type of guidance and assistance they need. From there, teams will be formed to create customized strategies. Local officials will also have access to a library of resources on government reform and community development, as well as a “311 for Cities.”
What’s that, you’re probably asking? The help line will serve as an online resource for government officials to log in for help with anything from public budgeting to crime prevention. After sending an inquiry, the network will review the problem and within three days, send a response with referrals and resources. The online site is available for about 50 communities and aims to expand to hundreds more over the course of the next three years.
While larger cities continue to innovate new policies and strategies to spur more community development, economic growth, and public and private partnerships, it’s important to keep in mind the thousands of smaller cities without the same resources — but that need of the same solutions. With a one-stop shop like the National Resource Network, help is on the horizon.