Author Archives: Laura Hertzfeld

Tackling tuition

1 Reply

Here in California, education has been making headlines this week, as the University of California board of regents voted to increase tuition more than 30%. And California is hardly alone. Across the country, education is being affected by the recession.

In New Hampshire, some students are facing a subprime loan crisis much like the housing one – except this time it’s loans to help cover rising tuition costs of higher education.

“In many cases private student loans come with variable interest rates that can top twenty percent. In addition, a number of recent graduates contend that the education they paid for included sub-par labs, mediocre instructors, and fell short of the quality education that was advertised.”

NewsHour’s Paul Solman reported that a new bill making its way through the Senate would move the student loan industry under the Department of Education, reducing the subprime risk.

In Michigan, among the areas hardest hit by recession, some recent graduates are staying true to their state.

“Anna Barson graduated from The University in Michigan and immediately moved to Washington D.C, and then New York. She’s discovered there’s a lot of grassroots activism in Detroit she wants to be a part of.
“I do feel some connection, and if I am serious about wanting to do social justice work, Detroit– I mean, it is in my home state, and I think it would be hypocritical of me to completely ignore that,” said Barson.”

Propublica reported on how the US Department of Education is dividing up stimulus funds to schools – and it’s turning into a competitive race to get any of that funding.

“Using an elaborate scoring system just announced, the program will benefit only those states that have already taken steps to shake up their school systems, the [Wall Street] Journal reports. “This is going to be highly competitive, and there are going to be a lot more losers than winners,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan told reporter Neil King Jr. Preliminary plans for the program provoked an outpouring of criticism, The New York Times reports, but the final rules have added flexibility. Some potentially volatile aspects remain – like President Barack Obama’s emphasis on charter schools – but the new rules invite states to describe “innovative public schools other than charter schools.”

There is some good news for veterans looking to go back to school, however. As Emilie Ritter reported for Montana Public Radio back in August, a new GI bill is sending those who’ve served back to college — for free.

The costs of climate change

Leave a reply

In early December, Copenhagen will play host to the UN Conference on Climate Change, where world leaders will gather to work on agreement to reduce emissions and slow the effects of global warming.

What are the Copenhagen talks? Cartoon essayist for Twin Cities Public Television David Gillette will be there, and here he explains why:

It almost goes with out saying that climate change and the global economy are intimately linked. As Marketplace reports in the series The Climate Race, countries like China are already coming up with ways to profit from climate change technology.

“If carbon capture and storage becomes a global market, China could well be the manufacturing hub for much of the equipment. Just as they’re manufacturing everything else that we use in our day to day lives,” Energy Consultant Bill Senior told Marketplace’s Scott Tung.

Nightly Business Report’s Darren Gersh looks at the economic impact of cutting greenhouse gases here in the U.S.

For a selection of stories on climate change, check out this PRX playlist, which includes stories and documentaries covering the science behind global warming and the political impact of climate change ahead of the Copenhagen talks. In the Inside Out documentary Heat of the Moment, Daniel Gross visits Paris, India, Bangladesh, and South Africa to report on the effects of climate change.

Hitting the road

Leave a reply

We’ve written before about WNYC’s Your Uncommon Economic Indicators (YUEI for lack of a better term!) project, which asks listeners to send in videos, stories, and photos showing how the economic downturn is being seen on a street-by-street level. This is just one of several projects mapping the economy, but now the technology behind YUEI is available for individuals and stations. WNYC’s John Keefe explains in this video:

A new photo essay project from Michigan Public Radio takes us through home foreclosures across the state, including interviews with contributors. In one of the pictures, homeowner Eric Lewis talks about what he thinks is broken in the current housing system:
“People are too willing to walk away from the problems they created and give them to someone else… As far as I’m concerned, my house is worth just as much as it was 20 years ago.”

The ongoing Mapping Main Street documentary project, part of the MakersQuest initiative, finds stories about towns Main Streets across America from Queens to Chattanooga to Wisconsin. If you have a story or photograph from your town’s main street, add it here.

But do we have too many maps? New Hampshire Public Radio’s Virginia Prescott, who hosts Word of Mouth, spoke with writer Alex Hutchinson, who talks here about what it means to have a sense of direction.

Online Exclusive: Does My Sense of Direction Suck? from The Walrus Magazine on Vimeo.

One house, one town, one lecture

Leave a reply

A new film about the real estate crash, the story of a farm town in Montana, and a lecture about the cultures of the Great Depression all give very different but very clear pictures of the economy and how we got here — then and now.

The new feature-length documentary from filmmaker Leslie Cockburn was recently discussed on the Economy Project blog at the University of Missouri. But the film doesn’t focus on casinos like the ones in Las Vegas. Instead, this film looks at the entire economy as one American casino – the idea that the finance industry was gambling with peoples’ homes and bank accounts as you might put money in the slots.

One of the places that’s fallen short after all this gambling is Ronan, Montana, a farming town in rural Montana. Patchwork Nation blogger Carly Flando writes about how the town is having to explore other means of survival, now that the farming industry is suffering.

But for all the talk of new businesses and hospitals, David Sagmiller, the owner of Westland Feed, still sees the farms and ranches that surround Ronan as the foundation of the entire Mission Valley’s economy. The valley, which stretches north from Missoula, Mont., toward Flathead Lake and Glacier National Park, is known as one of the best seed potato areas in the state, and eight potato seed farmers live near Ronan.
“The community relies on agriculture,” he says. “The hospital would never get the community to survive. You can’t live off that.”
Rich Janssen, sitting sideways in a booth at the Ronan Café, agrees that agriculture is an important part of the community. However, the dynamics have changed.
“There’s a lot of government and school workers here, too,” he says. “It’s a blue-collar town with a little white collar mixed in.”

For more perspective on how we got here, a new lecture on WGBH’s Forum project from CUNY Professor Morris Dickstein recalls the Great Depression and its effect on culture. Will there be a similar impact 60 years from now?

video platform
video management
video solutions
free video player