labor economics

Potential graduate-student unionization re-re-reversal?

New York University graduate students seems to have prevailed in letting a regional director of National Labor Relations Board hear arguments on a long-standing union drive at the university. NYU graduate students have the magic touch, since they were the first to overturn a 40-year 28-year precedent prohibiting graduate-student unions at private universities in 2000–only […]

Oh the Humanities

The New York Times has an article on the hardships of a humanities Ph.D. Among the highlights: it takes an average of 9 years to finish a humanities Ph.D. (if you do); high amount of debt (over $25,000); and the old age of graduates (35 years-old) which means less time available to recover all of […]

Preview: From Major to Targeted Clusters

The state of Iowa has established three targeted industry clusters: advanced manufacturing; bioscience; and information solutions. How have Iowa’s community colleges been supplying the industry? Above is an ideogram showing the path from program major (left) to targeted cluster (right). Obviously bioscience is being well-stocked, mostly from health science majors. I’m a bit surprised though […]

Preview: Five-year In-state Retention Rate

Ever get a letter from your alma mater asking what you’ve been up to since you graduated? That data is used to see how well the college has been doing. It’s especially important for public colleges to see if most graduates stick around. Ever send one back? No? Well, most don’t. But that’s a pain […]

Visualizing Transitions into the Workforce Presentation

This presentation was given at the MidAIR 2009 conference in Kansas City. An earlier post highlighted a poster associated with this project. This presentation highlights the methodology and reasoning behind the methodology. I’ve posted scripts and other materials to the project’s webpage.

Preview: Visualizing Transitions into the Workforce

Today the Iowa Department of Education and Iowa Workforce Development released “Visualizing Transitions into the Workforce” poster. In short, DE and IWD partnered to follow students from Iowa community colleges into the workforce. The poster shows how specific majors lead to employment in various sectors in Iowa’s economy. The findings are discussed in the full […]

Preview: Visualizing Transitions to the Workforce

The Iowa Department of Education and Iowa Workforce Development have teamed together to track students from community college into the workforce. While we’ve looked at returns to degree and in-state retention rate, we wanted to see where kids were working. In short, we looked at majors and tracked them into the industry. We aggregated majors […]