Minnesota has been ahead of most other states in recognizing the importance of early childhood education, and investing up front in this priceless human capital. Currently, thanks to bi-partisan support and strong consensus among business leaders and childhood experts, Minnesota is putting hundreds of millions of dollars more into quality child-care than we were just a decade ago, through a variety of systems. Yet for all this... Read More
President Obama's proposal to make community college free was another blow to for-profit higher education providers, according to a recent Forbes article that analyzed the for-profit sector's deep troubles, and a further decline in stock prices after the announcement. In Minnesota, the state Senate's DFL majority leadership also recently proposed free tuition for community college. There is no other way to say it; reconciling return... Read More
DALLAS -- Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings is a plain-spoken former CEO who is rather brash about his city's emergence as the fourth largest metropolitan area and one of the strongest economic growth powerhouses in the nation. And yet he's rather humble about how big-thinking "Big D's" long-term health is directly threatened by the opportunity gap for students of color and from low-income families, who make up about 80 percent of... Read More
The people who are dumping on MnSure and threatening to de-fund the Affordable Care Act really need to listen to us struggling Millennials. As a new intern for Growth & Justice, I am also a member of that “Millennial Generation” entering the workforce at a particularly trying time. For the first time ever nationally, student loan debt has hit the $1 trillion mark, meaning more students hold more student loan debt than ever befo... Read More
In previous blogs, I wrote about the University of Minnesota and its history of an expectation of transparency and a framework of accountability. In Minnesota, the University follows the same public access to information laws as other government entities, namely the Data Practices Act and the Open Meeting Law, and has had an expectation of accountability to the State Legislature ever since its founding in 1851. That’s 162 years to practice ... Read More