AmeriCorps, as noted before here, is the largest national service organization in the United States outside the military. More than 80,000 people every year do service work in this program across the country for a pittance. Its support has historically been broad-based and bipartisan, with one consistent complaint. Despite the fact that today nearly three […]
Ryan Cooper
Follow Ryan on Twitter @ryanlcooper. Ryan Cooper is a national correspondent at The Week. His work has appeared in The Washington Post, The New Republic, and The Nation.
Posted inPolitics
Is There National Service in the Air?
George Clooney’s new movie, The Ides of March, about the shady backroom dealing of a presidential campaign, has been getting mixed reviews for its strong acting but weak plot, bad script, and “basic misunderstanding of politics.” But one scene is worth extracting, where Ryan Gosling, playing the candidate’s campaign manager, lays out a case for […]
Posted inPolitics
Obama, AmeriCorps, and Jobs
Back in the halcyon days of 2008, Barack Obama talked a lot about national service. He famously proposed a plan to double the Peace Corps and triple AmeriCorps. Though the Peace Corps didn’t get quite that size a boost, AmeriCorps did: back in 2009 President Obama signed a bill to triple its size, though the […]
Posted inPolitics
Herman Cain’s New Ad
On first thought, one might expect that a kind of Darwinian mechanism operating between the press and presidential candidates these days would weed out all but two classes of political advertisements: the bland, anodyne type, and the dishonest, viciously negative type. A candidate would want to avoid even the faintest whiff of strangeness. After all, […]
Posted inPolitics
Herman Cain and Health Care for Small Business
In a surprising swing in the Republican presidential field, Herman Cain has rocketed to second place, just behind Mitt Romney. Like all the other candidates, he has promised to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and even claimed (falsely) that he would have died from his liver cancer under Obamacare. Cain actually got his start in […]
Posted inPolitics
Occupy DC On Its Feet, But Yet to Get Oriented
Last Thursday several hundred people stood around Freedom Plaza as a part of the Occupy DC movement, one of the offshoots of the larger Occupy Wall Street movement that have sprung up nationwide. The organizers, many of whom were apparently from labor unions and the anti-Walker protests in Wisconsin, had a strong logistical backbone, with […]
Posted inEducation, Higher Education
Does Federal Financial Aid Make Colleges Raise Prices?
In American colleges and universities, financial aid packages are often need-based (see this example from Yale), meaning the school calculates the student’s ability to pay and then makes up the difference with loans and/or grants. It’s an admirable sentiment, but one upshot of this at many schools is that any outside scholarships students receive will […]
Posted inPolitics
The “Price” of Food
Mark Bittman, food columnist and blogger for the New York Times, has an article arguing that, contrary to a spate of recent studies, junk food is really more expensive than groceries and that cultural reform is needed to get people cooking and eating healthy again. His premise, while flawed, isn’t completely preposterous, but his solutions […]
Posted inEducation, Higher Education
Why It Can Be Cheaper to Go to an Expensive College
I graduated from Reed College in 2008 with $11,000 or so in student loans outstanding, a piddling amount by today’s standards. I was lucky. I was within a hair’s breadth of going to the University of Colorado at Boulder, where I would have likely ended up with a great deal more debt even with in-state […]
Posted inEducation, Higher Education
How Employers Talk About Unemployment
David Altstadt has a new report out for Jobs for the Future analyzing online job posting aggregation tools and how community colleges might use them to fine-tune their programs to reflect local job opportunities. According to the report, Georgetown economists have estimated that two-thirds of all jobs will require at least some postsecondary education, as […]
