A Rough Year for Moms, and the Crisis in Higher Ed

By Rhiannon Meyers Collette, Communications Manager
 

It's a shocking statistic — of all the students in the U.S. who start a full-time, four-year undergraduate program, nearly two out of every five will drop out. That painful reality is even more acute for low-income students and communities of color. It's also a stark reminder that the $200 billion-plus the U.S. spends every year on loans and grants for students is falling short of helping provide social mobility to those who are most vulnerable.
 

What’s Happening: The short answer: We don't know. Why? Because we don't have the data needed to answer basic questions about a school's performance and how its students are faring. Despite a decades-long bipartisan push to unleash the data and increase transparency into institutions of higher education, the system remains opaque. An odd mix of bedfellows — predatory for-profit schools, expensive private schools, even some nonprofits — have pushed back against requiring release of this information.
 

Dive Deeper: In the latest episode of our podcast Deep Dive with Laura Arnold, our co-founder and co-chair sits down with two distinguished experts in higher education — the former U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings and Amy Laitinen, director of education at New America — to talk about the efforts to drive transparency around student outcomes and the window of opportunity for long-lasting reforms.

Year Up, a unique workforce training program that is helping low-income young adults find good jobs. Now it’s up to Year Up and other innovators to convince the government and a sometimes skeptical public to fund them.

How It Works: Young adults like Yunior Valdez, who was a teenage father and DACA immigrant with dim prospects after high school, access the full-time, year-long program in 25 U.S. cities at no cost. Advisors teach technical and professional skills like how to write an email and interact with customers and colleagues. Valdez was snapped up by an employer immediately upon his graduation from Year Up.

Why It Matters: Year Up and other programs like it really do make a difference. New research from Abt Associates makes the case: The results of a randomized controlled trial show Year Up graduates enjoy earnings gains of 30 to 40 percent annually over their peers, and those results were sustained over five years. For every dollar spent on Year Up, society gets back $1.66 in tax revenue and savings on other social programs. “And that’s not counting hard-to-monetize benefits like improvement in family well-being, better outcomes for the children of participants, less use of mental health services, less incarceration,” says study author David Fein.

What’s Next: Currently, Year Up is paid for privately by corporate partners and nonprofit dollars. To really ramp it up, public dollars would have to arrive. AV, which is funding follow-up studies of two randomized controlled trials to evaluate the impact of Year Up's Professional Training Corps and a similar program named Per Scholas, is advocating a new approach: the Funding Match for Evidence initiative. The goal: Drive more public money toward programs that really work. 

By Rhiannon Meyers Collette, Communications Manager
 

If you want to know why health care in the United States has become so unaffordable, consider the prices we're being charged for care. “We’re now at a point where the average household is sending more of their household income to the hospital industry than they are to the Treasury Department,” says Avik Roy, president of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity and AV grantee. “That is how bad the problem has become, in terms of the affordability of hospital care. And that’s before you even get to drugs, doctors, and everything else.”
 

What’s Next: As out-of-control prices attract growing scrutiny, policymakers seeking to rein them in have a number of solutions to consider. Transparency mandates, for example, have shed light on opaque provider prices, but transparency alone can't fix the underlying consolidation of the health care sector that has led to higher prices. To do that, stronger federal regulation is needed.

Bottom Line: “There are good policy options in this space that address the drivers of health care cost growth, and there’s evidence to suggest that these policies would make health care more affordable," says Hunter Kellett, AV’s director of payment reform.
 

José Garza, who is bringing a new vision to the Travis County, Texas, District Attorney’s Office. The former public defender and immigration activist spent his career on the other side of the legal aisle — he’s never prosecuted a case. But this unique background gave him a first-hand look at how broken the American criminal justice system is. In his first 100 days since taking office, Garza has ended the use of cash bail for people charged with low-level, nonviolent crimes; increased eligibility for diversion programs; and is focusing on prosecuting people charged with violent crimes rather than those with low-level drug offenses. He talks to the National Partnership for Pretrial Justice about his goals as district attorney, fighting for underrepresented communities, and building trust back into the criminal justice system. 

Thousands of nonviolent incarcerated people were sent to home confinement from federal prisons amid the COVID-19 outbreak, thanks to the CARES Act. But as NBC News and The Marshall Project’s Lawrence Bartley report, they are living amid uncertainty in the face of last-minute guidance from the Trump administration to send them back to prison when the pandemic is over. Sens. Dick Durbin and Cory Booker are pushing the Biden administration to rescind the order. Bartley talks to those impacted about their transition home, what their second chance has meant, and what lies ahead.

Related: Read more from those facing a return to prison in this USA Today piece: “You let us out for a reason, because we weren't a threat to society. You let us join back with our families. I mean, it's harder for the family than it is for us.”

Also Watching:

“What Breonna Taylor’s name and image is teaching America about Black lives,” a report from PBS NewsHour on a new exhibition in Taylor’s hometown that explores her life and death — and the larger questions they raise about policing in America. It comes a year and a half after Taylor’s death and was made with contributions from her mother, Tamika Palmer.

U.S. Rep. Katie Porter on Twitter calling out organ procurement organizations as “havens for waste and abuse, in part because they can manipulate data to escape accountability, while vacationing on private jets — literally.” Every day, more than 33 Americans die waiting for a transplant organ; the House Oversight Subcommittee confronted OPO leaders this week on needed reforms in the industry. Learn more about AV’s work on this issue.

This candid conversation between Missouri Gov. Mike Parson and George Lanier of Bolivar, Missouri, who is part of the Improving Community Treatment Success program from the Missouri Department of Corrections. It provides community-based services for people on probation and parole who have behavioral health needs. Lanier shares how he came to be involved in the criminal justice system and where ICTS stepped in. He’s now employed full time and is focused on taking care of his children, including a new baby. The video is part of CSG Justice Center’s Face to Face Initiative, which challenges policymakers to engage in meaningful, personal interactions with people impacted by the criminal justice system.

Here & Now's Robin Young speaking with Dr. Utsha Khatri, an emergency medicine physician and fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, where she researches substance use, about the rising number of opioid-related deaths amid the pandemic — and the disproportionate impact on Black communities. She highlights how the criminal justice system and access to evidence-based treatment have played a role in such disparities.

• Netflix's new animated series “City of Ghosts” is getting a lot of love for how its creator Elizabeth Ito weaves together diverse stories of Los Angeles history. It’s striking a chord with both children and adults. (My son is hooked.)
   
• Here’s a wholesome story for you: Teenager Madison Kohout accidentally moved into a senior living complex, and TikTok is loving it. “It’s like having extra sets of grandparents,” Kohout tells The New York Times. 
   
• We are about to experience “one of nature’s weirdest events, featuring sex, a race against death, evolution and what can sound like a bad science fiction movie soundtrack.” The cicadas are coming.
   
• For Mother’s Day: This woman has fostered 81 infants over three decades: “What I do comes from my heart for every fragile infant who needs a good start in life. I remember them all.”