Browsing PBH By Articles

Time To Stop Blaming Women For The Gender Gap

The Article: Study: Women Ask For Raises And Promotions As Often As Men, But Get Less In Return by Marie Diamond in Think Progress.

The Text: It’s a common trope that women in the workplace don’t advance as quickly or make as much as their male counterparts because they simply don’t ask for raises and promotions. But according to new research published today in the Washington Post, this is a myth — women do ask, they just don’t get as much in return:

The research focused on career paths of high-potential men and women, drawing on thousands of MBA graduates from top schools around the world. Catalyst found that, among those who had moved on from their first post-MBA job, there was no significant difference in the proportion of women and men who asked for increased compensation or a higher position.

Yet the rewards were different.

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5,000 Janitors In America Have PhDs

The Article: There Are 5000 Janitors in the US with PhD’s by Kyle Vanhemert in Gizmodo.

The Text: There are 18,000 parking lot attendants in the U.S. with college degrees. There are 5,000 janitors in the U.S. with PhDs. In all, some 17 million college-educated Americans have jobs that don’t require their level of education. Why?

The data comes from a the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and can be seen here in handy, depressing chart form:

At the Chronicle, where the above chart was posted, Richard Vedder argues that maybe we place too much importance on higher education, citing a new study by the National Bureau of Economic Research:

This week an extraordinarily interesting new study was posted on the Web site of America’s most prestigious economic-research organization, the National Bureau of Economic Research. Three highly regarded economists (one of whom has won the Nobel Prize in Economic Science) have produced “Estimating Marginal Returns in Education,” Working Paper 16474 of the NBER. After very sophisticated and elaborate analysis, the authors conclude “In general, marginal and average returns to college are not the same.” (p. 28)

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Keith Olbermann: The Story Is Starting To Sag

The Article: The Keith Olbermann Saga’s Starting to Get Kind of Sad by Adam Estes in The Atlantic.

The Text: Keith Olbermann looks like he’s made nice with his bosses at Current for now, but his war with The New York Times is scrappy as ever. The Countdown host took to Twitter in familiar fashion on Sunday night first to announce that he’ll be “running the election coverage on Current, after New Hampshire” and immediately lit into Times writer David Carr who, Olbermann said several times, “got his facts wrong” in his latest column. After Olbermann’s tussle with Carr’s coworker and Page One co-star Brian Stelter last week, it would appear that he’s particularly obsessed wit the New York Times media desk.

The news itself is pretty mundane. After crossing his arms and refusing to cover the Iowa caucuses for Current — the startup network’s technical troubles were the cause of the protest — Olbermann will lead the election coverage from here on out, at least after Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary. While the cable news star took Stelter to task over the adjective “disgruntled”, it’s the distinction between the verb “participating” and “running” that’s upset Olbermann’s this time.

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College For Your Kids? Hand Over (Almost) Half A Million

The Article: FUTURE SHOCK: College for today’s newborns could cost as much as $422K by Ashley Kindergan in The Daily.

The Text: New moms and dads with visions of Ivy League degrees dancing in their heads should be prepared to face a bill of $422,320 in today’s dollars if Junior heads off to one the country’s priciest colleges as a member of the class of 2034.

If college costs keep rising as they have for the last three decades, the inflation-adjusted price of four years of tuition alone will more than double at private colleges and nearly triple at public universities by the time a baby born this year is ready to enroll, an analysis by The Daily shows.

Even after adjusting for inflation, college tuition has increased by an average of 3.5 percent a year at private schools and 4.5 percent a year at public schools, the analysis showed. When room and board are factored in, the total cost of college has gone up by an average of 3.08 percent a year at private schools and 2.96 percent at public schools.

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Equal Opportunity In America?

The Article: America’s Unlevel Field by Paul Krugman in The New York Times.

The Text: Last month President Obama gave a speech invoking the spirit of Teddy Roosevelt on behalf of progressive ideals — and Republicans were not happy. Mitt Romney, in particular, insisted that where Roosevelt believed that “government should level the playing field to create equal opportunities,” Mr. Obama believes that “government should create equal outcomes,” that we should have a society where “everyone receives the same or similar rewards, regardless of education, effort and willingness to take risk.”

As many people were quick to point out, this portrait of the president as radical redistributionist was pure fiction. What hasn’t been as widely noted, however, is that Mr. Romney’s picture of himself as a believer in a level playing field is just as fictional. Where is the evidence that he or his party cares at all about equality of opportunity?

Let’s talk for a minute about the actual state of the playing field.

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