Posts Tagged: Paul E. Harrington

Evidence-Based Research: The Impact of the College Crusade GEAR UP Program in RI

The federal GEAR UP program in Rhode Island led to large advantages for students who participated in the program in terms of persistence through the middle and high school years, high school graduation and college enrollment. The Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Program, more commonly known as GEAR UP, is a product of federal legislation designed to increase high school c...

Comings and Goings: They’d Rather Be in Philadelphia?

Northeastern University Center for Labor Market Studies associate director Paul E. Harrington moved to Philadelphia-based Drexel University. Harrington has been a frequent contributor to NEJHE and to NEBHE events****Joseph M. O’Keefe, S.J., will also leave leave Boston for Philly, departing as dean of Boston College's Lynch School of Education to become the 27th president of Saint Joseph'...

College Labor Shortages in 2018? Part Deux

“About every two years someone comes up with this story. There is absolutely nothing to it—it's simply not true,” Peter Capelli, Professor, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, commenting on the Georgetown's college labor supply shortage forecast. —“Prediction of Worker Shortage Has Critics,” The Press-Enterprise (Riverside, Calif.), April 10, 2010. The recent response by Anth...

The Real Education Crisis: Are 35% of all College Degrees in New England Unnecessary?

The notion of the "college labor market" as a fixed set of occupations is remarkably static. In contrast, we assume that job and skill requirements are dynamic. (This lively debate over future demand of college-educated workers will continue in our Forum.) Northeastern University economists Paul E. Harrington and Andrew M. Sum argue that in our recent report Help Wanted, we “radically over...

College Labor Shortages in 2018?

The Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce has engaged in a highly publicized campaign claiming that the nation will face a very substantial deficit of college graduates by 2018 if the American postsecondary system fails to rapidly expand the number of college degrees it awards each year. Indeed, the employment projections developed by Anthony Carnevale and his colleagues at Georgetown U...

More than 2 Million Job Vacancies Forecast for NE by 2018 … But Do Our Workers Have What it Takes to Fill Them?

The New England states, like the rest of the nation, are finally starting to show signs of a recovery from the Great Recession of 2008, albeit at different paces. Three of the states, however, still have unemployment rates that are about four percentage points above where they were before the recession began in 2007 (Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Connecticut). The smaller increases in unemploym...

Jobs Report: STIM II, no STIM or Tax Cuts?

The monthly jobs report released today provided little comfort to those hoping for a strong turnaround in the job market over the next few months. Private-sector payroll employment levels in the nation increased by just 67,000 jobs between July and August. However, most of the gains in private sector employment came from health services (+28,000) and social assistance agencies (+12,000), both heav...

Does a 4.5% Unemployment Rate Among College Grads Constitute “Full Employment”?

Last week, a banker asked us a thoughtful question about the relatively low unemployment rate among adult bachelor’s degree holders (25 years and older) we had written about in The New England Journal of Higher Education. Noting that the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) release this month shows those age 25 or older with a bachelor’s degree have an unemployment rate of 4.5%. he as...

Today’s Grim Jobs Report

June 2009 is seen by many as the end of the Great Recession. Strong growth in GDP following massive monetary and fiscal responses to the collapse in housing and financial markets meant that the economy was on the mend. Yet a year later, 1.1 million fewer people are working, and the unemployment rate is stuck at 9.5%. Worse still, more than one million individuals have left the job market since Apr...

Soft Factors Influence College Enrollment

Evidence about the role that “soft factors” like student engagement and school environment play in influencing whether high school students go on to enroll in college is hard to come by. Over the past two years, the Center for Labor Market Studies (CLMS) of Northeastern University, with support from the Nellie Mae Education Foundation and the Rhode Island Board of Governors of Hig...