Tag: Government policy

Affirmative action for white people? Legacy college admissions come under renewed scrutiny

[ad_1]

WASHINGTON (AP) — The next big fight over college admissions already has taken hold, and it centers on a different kind of minority group that gets a boost: children of alumni.

In the wake of a Supreme Court decision that strikes down affirmative action in admissions, colleges are coming under renewed pressure to put an end to legacy preferences — the practice of favoring applicants with family ties to alumni. Long seen as a perk for the white and wealthy, opponents say it’s no longer defensible in a world with no counterbalance in affirmative action.

President Joe Biden suggested colleges should rethink the practice after the court’s ruling, saying legacy preferences “expand privilege instead of opportunity.” Several Democrats in Congress demanded an end to the policy in light of the court’s decision to remove race from the admissions process. So did Republicans including Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, who is vying for the GOP presidential nomination.

“Let’s be clear: affirmative action still exists for white people. It’s called legacy admissions,” Rep. Barbara Lee, a California Democrat, said on Twitter.

For critics of legacy admissions, the renewed debate over fairness in admissions has offered a chance to swing public sentiment behind their cause.

As colleges across the U.S. pledge their commitment to diversity following the court’s ruling, activists have a simple response: prove it. If schools want to enroll more Black, Hispanic and Indigenous students, activists say, removing legacy preferences would be an easy first step.

“Now more than ever, there’s no justification for allowing this process to continue,” said Viet Nguyen, a graduate of Brown and Harvard who leads Ed Mobilizer, a nonprofit that has fought legacy preferences since 2018. “No other country in the world does legacy preferences. Now is a chance to catch up with the rest of the world.”

Using the Supreme Court decision as a catalyst, Nguyen’s group is rallying the alumni of top colleges to press their alma maters to end the practice. The goal is to get graduates of the 30 schools to withhold donations until the policy ends. The schools include Harvard and the University of North Carolina, which were at the center of the court case, along with the rest of the Ivy League and the University of Southern California.

It builds on other efforts taking aim at the practice. Colorado banned it at public universities in 2021, and lawmakers in Connecticut, Massachusetts and New York have introduced similar bills. In Congress, Rep. Jamaal Bowman of New York and Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon, both Democrats, are reviving legislation that would forbid it at all universities that accept federal money.

Legacy preferences have become an easy target in the wake of a Supreme Court decision that hinged on questions of merit in the college application process, said Julie Park, who studies college admissions and racial equity at the University of Maryland. Instead of getting in on their own merit, she said, legacy students are just “standing on their parents’ shoulders.”

“It’s just low-hanging fruit,” she said. “People want something to do, and there’s a strong rationale to get rid of it.”

Secretary Miguel Cardona urged colleges to “ask themselves the tough questions,” adding that legacy admissions and other types of special treatment “have long denied well-qualified students of all backgrounds a level playing field.”

“In the wake of this ruling, they could further tip the scales against students who already have the cards stacked against them,” Cardona said in a statement to The Associated Press.

In the hazy world of college admissions, it’s unclear exactly which schools provide a legacy boost and how much it helps. In California, where state law requires schools to disclose the practice, USC reported that 14% of last year’s admitted students had family ties to alumni or donors. Stanford reported a similar rate.

At Harvard, which released years of records as part of the lawsuit that ended up before the Supreme Court, legacy students were eight times more likely to be admitted, and nearly 70% were white, researchers found.

An Associated Press survey of the nation’s most selective colleges last year found that legacy students in the freshman class ranged from 4% to 23%. At four schools — Notre Dame, USC, Cornell and Dartmouth — legacy students outnumbered Black students.

Supporters of the policy say it builds an alumni community and encourages donations. A 2022 study of an undisclosed college in the Northeast found that legacy students were more likely to make donations, but at a cost to diversity — the vast majority were white.

Some prestigious colleges have abandoned the policy in recent years, including Amherst College and Johns Hopkins University. In the first year after dropping it, Amherst saw its share of legacy students in the freshman class fall by about half, while 19% of first-year students were the first in their families to attend college, the most in the school’s history.

Some colleges argue that, as their student bodies become more racially diverse, the benefits of legacy status will extend to more students of color. Opponents argue that white families still have an advantage, with generations of relatives who had access to any college.

Ivory Toldson went to college at Louisiana State University, but it wasn’t an option for his parents in the Jim Crow South.

“My parents couldn’t legally go to LSU. Discrimination is a lot more recent in our history than a lot of people seem to understand,” said Toldson, a Howard University professor and the director of education, innovation and research for the NAACP.

Toldson said there’s growing awareness of the irony that preferences for athletes and legacy students are still allowed, while race must be ignored.

In May, an AP-NORC poll found that few Americans think legacy admissions or donations should play much of a role in college admissions. Just 9% say it should be very important that a family member attended and 18% say it should be somewhat important. Likewise, only 10% say donations to the school should be very important and 17% say that should be somewhat important.

That same poll found that most Americans support affirmative action in higher education but think race should play a small role. Sixty-three percent said the Supreme Court should not block colleges from considering race in admissions, but 68% said it should not be a big factor.

Several colleges declined to say whether they will continue providing a boost for legacy students next year, including Cornell and the University of Notre Dame.

Meanwhile, Nguyen said he’s more optimistic than ever. In the past, colleges have been reluctant to be among the first to make the change, he said. Now he thinks that’s changing.

“In the next few months, I think the hesitancy will actually be who will be the last,” he said. “No university wants to be the last.”

___

The Associated Press education team receives support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

[ad_2]

Source link

July 3, 2023
Driverless cars are driving San Francisco crazy — ‘They are not ready for prime time’

[ad_1]

A street was blocked for road work in my San Francisco neighborhood this month, with a worker holding a large STOP sign to direct traffic.

A white car did as instructed, stopping in the middle of the intersection and blocking traffic at the four way intersection. No one was in the driver’s seat and there were no passengers, nor any training drivers — it was a Cruise driverless car, one of many that have flooded streets in the city in the last two years.

The public works employee holding the sign was flummoxed as how to get the car to move away. After several minutes, the car slowly backed its way out and crossed the street, but ended up on the wrong side. After another 10 minutes, it managed to pull itself together, get in the right lane and drive down the hill.

Most San Francisco residents can tell a similar story. The growing driverless car fleets in San Francisco are both a fascinating glimpse of science fiction come to life and a scary example of how Big Tech and auto companies have run roughshod over a congested city, with technology that really isn’t ready yet and little regulation to keep it at bay.

Now, the problem is coming to a head. San Francisco public officials have had enough, and are speaking out about safety threats ahead of a hearing next month that could let companies expand into larger fleets of fare-generating robotaxis.

“They are not ready for prime time,” San Francisco Fire Chief Jeanine Nicholson told MarketWatch in an interview.

“They have run over our hoses, they have blocked our fire engines from going on calls, they have just blocked our vehicles from getting down streets where there is a possible fire. They have just done a multitude of things. We had to break the window of one once because we could not get its attention,” Nicholson said.

While the average citizen can laugh at the stalled cars in city streets, the vehicles represent a major impediment for first responders. The San Francisco fire chief believes they put the city’s firefighters and residents at risk.

“Response time matters — a fire can double in size in a minute,” she said.

Aaron Peskin, president of the city’s Board of Supervisors, said there have been 66 incidents in which driverless cars interfered with first responders this year. But the city has little control over the cars operated by Cruise, a unit of General Motors Co.
GM,
+1.04%,
and Waymo LLC, a subsidiary of Google parent Alphabet Inc.
GOOG,
-0.34%
GOOGL,
+0.17%
Both companies already have Department of Motor Vehicle permits to deploy a driverless passenger taxi service, a process Peskin described as “Kafka-esque.”

“You have this thing where the DMV colluded with the industry to redact information that otherwise was public,” he said, referring to the result of a lawsuit Waymo filed last year against the DMV to keep its crash data private, arguing that it held trade secrets. “The funny thing is it’s not like San Francisco is trying to say ‘let’s put the genie back in the bottle.’ We are trying to ensure that our streets are safe. They have become too congested.”

Both companies are seeking to expand their operations into fare-generating robotaxis in San Francisco, leading to a crucial meeting of California’s Public Utility Commission now slated for July. Waymo is seeking to begin passenger robo-taxi service in the city, while Cruise is seeking to expand its passenger robo-taxi service to the entire city, 24 hours a day, and remove exclusions of steep hills and roundabouts, deploying 100 vehicles. Helpfully for the companies, one PUC commissioner appointed by Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2021 is John Reynolds, who was managing counsel of Cruise until 2019.

Resistance is building locally and nationally. Cathy Chase, president of Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, a nonprofit in Washington seeking more regulation and data transparency on autonomous vehicles as part of its mission for more highway and road safety, said it was “illogical and irresponsible at best, and dangerous and deadly at worst, to go forward with any expansion until the significant problems have been resolved.”

The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Authority (SFMTA) wrote letters of protest to both company’s applications. In May, the SFMTA said that since it wrote its first letter in January, “new hazards from driverless AV operations in San Francisco have been reported, and general public complaints about driverless AV operations have increased significantly.”

In May, a Waymo vehicle hit and killed a small dog that was off leash, while a test driver was at the wheel, in what the company said was an unavoidable accident. In June, a Cruise vehicle with no driver started to enter a mass shooting scene in the Mission District, and a video on Twitter showed a police officer yelling to get the car removed. Cruise said a lane was open for emergency vehicles and that its car did a U-turn and pulled over. In April, five Waymo cars stopped and blocked traffic in the Balboa Terrace area, in dense fog, a big problem for the vision systems.

The letters note that both Waymo and Cruise have “committed numerous violations that would preclude any teenager from getting a California’s Driver’s License.” The SFMTA also calls out the PUC for relying on the DMV for approvals, saying that its draft resolution to approve expansions of both companies is an attempt to “deflect rather than exercise the Commission’s duty to protect public safety.”

Waymo said it has been working with public safety officials and provides them a phone number to reach Waymo directly in the event that one of its cars stop. Cruise said it is proud of its safety record “which is publicly reported and includes millions of miles driven in an extremely complex urban environment.” Both companies have over 30 letters of support for their plans, from a range of groups including many representing the disabled, such as the National Federation of the Blind of California.

“It’s because of the donations,” Peskin said.

But the city’s fire chief Nicholson said there needs to be more from the companies than PR statements and lessons on how to stop their vehicles.

“They really need to sit down with us and figure out a solution,” she said, adding that when the fire department is in the middle of putting out a fire or rescuing victims or dealing with a health emergency, “to have to handle one of their vehicles, it’s just ridiculous.”

As is the case with many new technologies, history does tend to repeat itself.

Chris Gerdes, a professor of mechanical engineering at Stanford University and co-director of the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford (CARS) said that as part of work he has been doing with Ford Motor Co.
F,
+0.73%,
he has been researching ethical and legal issues associated with automated vehicles. These same issues came up when the first automobiles started to arrive on public streets at the turn of the 20th century, clashing with horses and buggies.

“You go back and look at the debates when the car came out,” Gerdes said, and “there were a lot of debates around should these things be allowed on the road, should they be allowed everywhere? These questions that are coming now were asked about cars back in the day. They can block the road, they can scare horses. Is this something we want to have on the roads? Is it even legal for them to be on the roads?”

But there is a need to demonstrate that driverless cars are compatible with existing laws and the uses of the roads, he said. “The question becomes at what point do these isolated incidents add to up to danger, to what extent do these compromise the city’s priorities or mobility and traffic flow.” He said they need to compare the autonomous-vehicle data with that from human drivers.

The SFMTA provided comparison data in its letters of protest. According to the SFMTA, based on data filed with the NHTSA, Cruise’s injury crash rate is estimated to have been 506 injury crashes per 100 million vehicle miles traveled (VMT) between June and November, 2022—approximately 6.3 times the 2021 national average, which is 80 injury crashes per 100 million VMT. Waymo’s injury crash rate is estimated to be 104 injuries per 100 million VMT, approximately 1.3 times the national average, the SFMTA said, when looking at the same period.

“The collision rate from that small fraction of Cruise driverless operations appears to exceed the collision rate for human drivers,” the SFMTA said in its Cruise letter. For Waymo, the agency said it recommends the commission expand on the findings with a more thorough analysis. “Within the complex driving environment of San Francisco city streets, we must conclude that the technology is still under development and has not reached this goal,” the SFMTA said in its Waymo letter.

Some in San Francisco are hopeful the delay of the PUC meeting to July 13 is a good sign that the commission is listening to more input from city officials. In its letters, the SFMTA and the San Francisco City Attorney hint at the next step they could take, noting that the PUC “must conduct an environmental review” of Cruise’s and Waymo’s expansion plans, because its actions could cause environmental impacts. What goes unsaid is that the city could seek to compel such a review with a lawsuit.

Peskin said he has received letters from former employees of the companies saying that autonomous robotaxis are, as the fire chief said, “not ready for prime time.” The workers said they had signed nondisclosure agreements that kept them from saying so publicly. Peskin suggested it could end up like the tobacco industry’s whistleblower case.

“We would rather work with them than waste taxpayers’ money on lawsuits,” Peskin said, adding that the companies could continue to test their cars with test drivers — an option that is not likely to be acceptable by the companies seeking to make money from their big investment.

“San Francisco is the perfect place to test them,” he said. “But they still haven’t worked these kinks out.”

The city of San Francisco is beaten down at the moment, thanks in part to its past close relationship with tech. As the downtown core suffers from the departure of the tech workers that defined it for the past decade, city officials are doing what they can to ensure that the technology some of them created does not become the next hated addition to the city.

[ad_2]

Source link

July 3, 2023
Putin will speak with leaders of China and India in his first summit since the Wagner insurrection

[ad_1]

NEW DELHI — President Vladimir Putin will participate this week in his first multilateral summit since an armed rebellion rattled Russia, as part of a rare international grouping in which his country still enjoys support.

Leaders will convene virtually on Tuesday for a summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a security grouping founded by Russia and China to counter Western alliances from East Asia to the Indian Ocean.

This year’s event is hosted by India, which became a member in 2017. It’s the latest avenue for Prime Minister Narendra Modi to showcase the country’s growing global clout.

The group so far has focused on deepening security and economic cooperation, fighting terrorism and drug trafficking, tackling climate change and the situation in Afghanistan after the Taliban took over in 2021. When the foreign ministers met in India last month, Russia’s war on Ukraine barely featured in their public remarks but the fallout for developing countries on food and fuel security remains a concern for the group, analysts say.

The forum is more important than ever for Moscow, which is eager to show that the West has failed to isolate it. The group includes the four Central Asian nations of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, in a region where Russian influence runs deep. Others include Pakistan, which became a member in 2017, and Iran, which is set to join on Tuesday. Belarus is also in line for membership.

“This SCO meeting is really one of the few opportunities globally that Putin will have to project strength and credibility,” said Michael Kugelman, director of the Wilson Center’s South Asia Institute.

None of the member countries has condemned Russia in U.N. resolutions, choosing instead to abstain. China has sent an envoy to mediate between Russia and Ukraine, and India has repeatedly called for a peaceful resolution of the conflict.

For Putin personally, the summit presents an opportunity to show he is in control after a short-lived insurrection by Wagner mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin.

“Putin will want to reassure his partners that he is very much still in charge, and leave no doubt that the challenges to his government have been crushed,” said Tanvi Madan, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

India announced in May that the summit would be held online instead of in-person like last year in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, where Putin posed for photographs and dined with other leaders.

For New Delhi at least, the optics of hosting Putin and China’s leader Xi Jinping just two weeks after Modi was honored with a pomp-filled state visit by U.S. President Joe Biden would be less than ideal.

After all the fanfare Modi received from American leaders on his recent visit, “it would have been too soon (for India) to be welcoming Chinese and Russian leaders,” Kugelman said.

India’s relationship with Moscow has stayed strong throughout the war; it has scooped up record amounts of Russian crude and relies on Moscow for 60% of its defense hardware. At the same time, the U.S. and its allies have aggressively courted India, which they see as a counterweight to China’s growing ambitions.

A key priority for India in the forum is to balance its ties with the West and the East, with the country also hosting the Group of 20 leading economies’ summit in September. It’s also a platform for New Delhi to engage more deeply with Central Asia.

“India glorifies in this type of foreign policy where it’s wheeling and dealing with everybody at the same time,” said Derek Grossman, an Indo-Pacific analyst at the RAND Corporation.

New Delhi, observers say, will be looking to secure its own interests at the summit. It will likely emphasize the need to combat what it calls “cross-border terrorism” — a dig at Pakistan, whom India accuses of arming and training rebels fighting for independence of Indian-controlled Kashmir or its integration into Pakistan, a charge Islamabad denies.

It may also stress the need to respect territorial integrity and sovereignty — a charge often directed towards its other rival, China. India and China have been locked in an intense three-year standoff involving thousands of soldiers stationed along their disputed border in the eastern Ladakh region.

Analysts say China, seeking to posture itself as a global force, is becoming a dominant player in forums like the SCO, where interest for full membership from countries like Myanmar, Turkey and Afghanistan has grown in recent years.

“The limitation with the SCO is that China and Russia are trying to turn it into an anti-Western grouping, and that does not fit with India’s independent foreign policy,” said Madan.

The SCO could also prove challenging for Washington and its allies in the long run.

“For countries uncomfortable with the West and their foreign policies, the SCO is a welcome alternative, mainly because of the roles Russia and China play. … I think that highlights just how relevant and concerning this group could be for a number of Western capitals, especially if it keeps expanding,” said Kugelman.

[ad_2]

Source link

July 3, 2023
In 370 days, Supreme Court conservatives dash decades of abortion and affirmative action precedents

[ad_1]

WASHINGTON (AP) — Overturning Roe v. Wade and eliminating affirmative action in higher education had been leading goals of the conservative legal movement for decades.

In a span of 370 days, a Supreme Court reshaped by three justices nominated by President Donald Trump made both a reality.

Last June, the court ended nationwide protections for abortion rights. This past week, the court’s conservative majority decided that race-conscious admissions programs at the oldest private and public colleges in the country, Harvard and the University of North Carolina, were unlawful.

Asian shares are mostly higher after a rally on Wall Street driven by reports that showed inflation abating, alleviating fears over the threat of a recession.

A much-feared backup of U.S. passport applications has snarled summer plans for would-be travelers around the world.

The United Nations body that regulates the world’s ocean floor is preparing to resume negotiations that could open the international seabed for mining, including for materials vital for the green energy transition.

Nearly six months after the Democratic Party approved Biden’s plan to overhaul which states lead off its presidential primary, implementing the revamped order has proven anything but simple.

Precedents that had stood since the 1970s were overturned, explicitly in the case of abortion and effectively in the affirmative action context.

“That is what is notable about this court. It’s making huge changes in highly salient areas in a very short period of time,” said Tara Leigh Grove, a law professor at the University of Texas.

As ethical questions swirled around the court and public trust in the institution had already dipped to a 50-year low, there were other consequential decisions in which the six conservatives prevailed.

They rejected the Biden administration’s $400 billion student loan forgiveness program and held that a Christian graphic artist can refuse on free speech grounds to design websites for same-sex couples, despite a Colorado law that bars discrimination based on sexual orientation and other characteristics.

The court, by a 5-4 vote, also sharply limited the federal government’s authority to police water pollution into certain wetlands, although all nine justices rejected the administration’s position.

Affirmative action was arguably the biggest constitutional decision of the year, and it showcased fiercely opposing opinions from the court’s two Black justices, Clarence Thomas and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

They offered sharply contrasting takes on affirmative action. Thomas was in the majority to end it. Jackson, in her first year on the court, was in dissent.

The past year also had a number of notable surprises.

Differing coalitions of conservative and liberal justices ruled in favor of Black voters in an Alabama redistricting case and refused to embrace broad arguments in a North Carolina redistricting case that could have left state legislatures unchecked and dramatically altered elections for Congress and president.

The court also ruled for the Biden administration in a fight over deportation priorities and left in place the Indian Child Welfare Act, the federal law aimed at keeping Native American children with Native families.

Those cases reflected the control that Chief Justice John Roberts asserted, or perhaps reasserted, over the court following a year in which the other five conservatives moved more quickly than he wanted in some areas, including abortion.

Roberts wrote a disproportionate share of the term’s biggest cases: conservative outcomes on affirmative action and the student loan plan, and liberal victories in Alabama and North Carolina.

The Alabama case may have been the most surprising because Roberts had consistently sought to narrow the landmark Voting Rights Act since his days as a young lawyer in the Reagan administration. As chief justice, he wrote the decision 10 years ago that gutted a key provision of the law.

But in the Alabama case and elsewhere, Roberts was part of majorities that rejected the most aggressive legal arguments put forth by Republican elected officials and conservative legal advocates.

The mixed bag of decisions almost seemed designed to counter arguments about the court’s legitimacy, raised by Democratic and liberal critics — and some justices — in response to last year’s abortion ruling, among others. The narrative was amplified by published reports of undisclosed, paid jet travel and fancy trips for Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito from billionaire Republican donors.

“I don’t think the court consciously takes opinion into account,” Grove said. “But I think if there’s anyone who might consciously think about these issues, it’s the institutionalist, the chief justice. He’s been extremely concerned about the attacks on the Supreme Court.”

On the term’s final day, Roberts urged the public to not mistake disagreement among the justices for disparagement of the court. “Any such misperception would be harmful to this institution and our country,” he wrote in the student loans case in response to a stinging dissent by Justice Elena Kagan.

Roberts has resisted instituting a code of ethics for the court and has questioned whether Congress has the authority to impose one. Still, he has said, without providing specifics, that the justices would do more to show they adhere to high ethical standards.

Some conservative law professors rejected the idea that the court bowed to outside pressures, consciously or otherwise.

“There were a lot of external atmospherics that really could have affected court business, but didn’t,” said Jennifer Mascott, a George Mason University law professor.

Curt Levey, president of the Committee for Justice, pointed to roughly equal numbers of major decisions that could be characterized as politically liberal or conservative.

Levey said conservatives “were not disappointed by this term.” Democrats and their allies “warned the nation about an ideologically extreme Supreme Court but wound up cheering as many major decisions as they decried,” Levey wrote in an email.

But some liberal critics were not mollified.

Brian Fallon, director of the court reform group Demand Justice, called the past year “another disastrous Supreme Court term” and mocked experts who “squint to find so-called silver linings in the Court’s decisions to suggest all is not lost, or they will emphasize one or two so-called moderate decisions from the term to suggest the Court is not as extreme as we think and can still be persuaded from time to time.”

Biden himself said on MSNBC on Thursday that the current court has “done more to unravel basic rights and basic decisions than any court in recent history.” He cited as examples the overturning of abortion protections and other decisions that had been precedent for decades.

Still, Biden said, he thought some on the high court “are beginning to realize their legitimacy is being questioned in ways it hasn’t been questioned in the past.”

The justices are now embarking on a long summer break. They return to the bench on the first Monday in October for a term that so far appears to lack the blockbuster cases that made the past two terms so momentous.

The court will examine the legal fallout from last year’s major expansion of gun rights, in a case over a domestic violence gun ban that was struck down by a lower court.

A new legal battle over abortion also could make its way to the court in coming months. In April, the court preserved access to mifepristone, a drug used in the most common method of abortion, while a lawsuit over it makes its way through federal court.

The conservative majority also will have opportunities to further constrain federal regulatory agencies, including a case that asks them to overturn the so-called Chevron decision that defers to regulators when they seek to give effect to big-picture, sometimes vague, laws written by Congress. The 1984 decision has been cited by judges more than 15,000 times.

Just seven years ago, months before Trump’s surprising presidential victory, then-Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg reflected on the term that had just ended and made two predictions. One was way off base and the other was strikingly accurate.

In July 2016, the court had just ended a term in which the justices upheld a University of Texas affirmative action plan and struck down state restrictions on abortion clinics.

Her first prediction was that those issues would not soon return to the high court. Her second was that if Trump became president, “everything is up for grabs.”

Ginsburg’s death in 2020 allowed Trump to put Justice Amy Coney Barrett on the court and cement conservative control.

Commenting on the student loan decision, liberal legal scholar Melissa Murray wrote on Twitter that Biden’s plan “was absolutely undone by the Court that his predecessor built.”

___

Follow the AP’s coverage of the Supreme Court at https://apnews.com/hub/us-supreme-court

[ad_2]

Source link

July 2, 2023
Affirmative action for white people? Legacy college admissions come under renewed scrutiny

[ad_1]

WASHINGTON — The next big fight over college admissions already has taken hold, and it centers on a different kind of minority group that gets a boost: children of alumni.

In the wake of a Supreme Court decision that strikes down affirmative action in admissions, colleges are coming under renewed pressure to put an end to legacy preferences — the practice of favoring applicants with family ties to alumni. Long seen as a perk for the white and wealthy, opponents say it’s no longer defensible in a world with no counterbalance in affirmative action.

President Joe Biden suggested colleges should rethink the practice after the court’s ruling, saying legacy preferences “expand privilege instead of opportunity.” Several Democrats in Congress demanded an end to the policy in light of the court’s decision to remove race from the admissions process. So did Republicans including Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, who is vying for the GOP presidential nomination.

“Let’s be clear: affirmative action still exists for white people. It’s called legacy admissions,” Rep. Barbara Lee, a California Democrat, said on Twitter.

For critics of legacy admissions, the renewed debate over fairness in admissions has offered a chance to swing public sentiment behind their cause.

As colleges across the U.S. pledge their commitment to diversity following the court’s ruling, activists have a simple response: prove it. If schools want to enroll more Black, Hispanic and Indigenous students, activists say, removing legacy preferences would be an easy first step.

“Now more than ever, there’s no justification for allowing this process to continue,” said Viet Nguyen, a graduate of Brown and Harvard who leads Ed Mobilizer, a nonprofit that has fought legacy preferences since 2018. “No other country in the world does legacy preferences. Now is a chance to catch up with the rest of the world.”

Using the Supreme Court decision as a catalyst, Nguyen’s group is rallying the alumni of top colleges to press their alma maters to end the practice. The goal is to get graduates of the 30 schools to withhold donations until the policy ends. The schools include Harvard and the University of North Carolina, which were at the center of the court case, along with the rest of the Ivy League and the University of Southern California.

It builds on other efforts taking aim at the practice. Colorado banned it at public universities in 2021, and lawmakers in Connecticut, Massachusetts and New York have introduced similar bills. In Congress, Rep. Jamaal Bowman of New York and Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon, both Democrats, are reviving legislation that would forbid it at all universities that accept federal money.

Legacy preferences have become an easy target in the wake of a Supreme Court decision that hinged on questions of merit in the college application process, said Julie Park, who studies college admissions and racial equity at the University of Maryland. Instead of getting in on their own merit, she said, legacy students are just “standing on their parents’ shoulders.”

“It’s just low-hanging fruit,” she said. “People want something to do, and there’s a strong rationale to get rid of it.”

Secretary Miguel Cardona urged colleges to “ask themselves the tough questions,” adding that legacy admissions and other types of special treatment “have long denied well-qualified students of all backgrounds a level playing field.”

“In the wake of this ruling, they could further tip the scales against students who already have the cards stacked against them,” Cardona said in a statement to The Associated Press.

In the hazy world of college admissions, it’s unclear exactly which schools provide a legacy boost and how much it helps. In California, where state law requires schools to disclose the practice, USC reported that 14% of last year’s admitted students had family ties to alumni or donors. Stanford reported a similar rate.

At Harvard, which released years of records as part of the lawsuit that ended up before the Supreme Court, legacy students were eight times more likely to be admitted, and nearly 70% were white, researchers found.

An Associated Press survey of the nation’s most selective colleges last year found that legacy students in the freshman class ranged from 4% to 23%. At four schools — Notre Dame, USC, Cornell and Dartmouth — legacy students outnumbered Black students.

Supporters of the policy say it builds an alumni community and encourages donations. A 2022 study of an undisclosed college in the Northeast found that legacy students were more likely to make donations, but at a cost to diversity — the vast majority were white.

Some prestigious colleges have abandoned the policy in recent years, including Amherst College and Johns Hopkins University. In the first year after dropping it, Amherst saw its share of legacy students in the freshman class fall by about half, while 19% of first-year students were the first in their families to attend college, the most in the school’s history.

Some colleges argue that, as their student bodies become more racially diverse, the benefits of legacy status will extend to more students of color. Opponents argue that white families still have an advantage, with generations of relatives who had access to any college.

Ivory Toldson went to college at Louisiana State University, but it wasn’t an option for his parents in the Jim Crow South.

“My parents couldn’t legally go to LSU. Discrimination is a lot more recent in our history than a lot of people seem to understand,” said Toldson, a Howard University professor and the director of education, innovation and research for the NAACP.

Toldson said there’s growing awareness of the irony that preferences for athletes and legacy students are still allowed, while race must be ignored.

In May, an AP-NORC poll found that few Americans think legacy admissions or donations should play much of a role in college admissions. Just 9% say it should be very important that a family member attended and 18% say it should be somewhat important. Likewise, only 10% say donations to the school should be very important and 17% say that should be somewhat important.

That same poll found that most Americans support affirmative action in higher education but think race should play a small role. Sixty-three percent said the Supreme Court should not block colleges from considering race in admissions, but 68% said it should not be a big factor.

Several colleges declined to say whether they will continue providing a boost for legacy students next year, including Cornell and the University of Notre Dame.

Meanwhile, Nguyen said he’s more optimistic than ever. In the past, colleges have been reluctant to be among the first to make the change, he said. Now he thinks that’s changing.

“In the next few months, I think the hesitancy will actually be who will be the last,” he said. “No university wants to be the last.”

___

The Associated Press education team receives support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

[ad_2]

Source link

July 2, 2023
In 370 days, Supreme Court conservatives dash decades of abortion and affirmative action precedents

[ad_1]

WASHINGTON — Overturning Roe v. Wade and eliminating affirmative action in higher education had been leading goals of the conservative legal movement for decades.

In a span of 370 days, a Supreme Court reshaped by three justices nominated by President Donald Trump made both a reality.

Last June, the court ended nationwide protections for abortion rights. This past week, the court’s conservative majority decided that race-conscious admissions programs at the oldest private and public colleges in the country, Harvard and the University of North Carolina, were unlawful.

Precedents that had stood since the 1970s were overturned, explicitly in the case of abortion and effectively in the affirmative action context.

“That is what is notable about this court. It’s making huge changes in highly salient areas in a very short period of time,” said Tara Leigh Grove, a law professor at the University of Texas.

As ethical questions swirled around the court and public trust in the institution had already dipped to a 50-year low, there were other consequential decisions in which the six conservatives prevailed.

They rejected the Biden administration’s $400 billion student loan forgiveness program and held that a Christian graphic artist can refuse on free speech grounds to design websites for same-sex couples, despite a Colorado law that bars discrimination based on sexual orientation and other characteristics.

The court, by a 5-4 vote, also sharply limited the federal government’s authority to police water pollution into certain wetlands, although all nine justices rejected the administration’s position.

Affirmative action was arguably the biggest constitutional decision of the year, and it showcased fiercely opposing opinions from the court’s two Black justices, Clarence Thomas and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

They offered sharply contrasting takes on affirmative action. Thomas was in the majority to end it. Jackson, in her first year on the court, was in dissent.

The past year also had a number of notable surprises.

Differing coalitions of conservative and liberal justices ruled in favor of Black voters in an Alabama redistricting case and refused to embrace broad arguments in a North Carolina redistricting case that could have left state legislatures unchecked and dramatically altered elections for Congress and president.

The court also ruled for the Biden administration in a fight over deportation priorities and left in place the Indian Child Welfare Act, the federal law aimed at keeping Native American children with Native families.

Those cases reflected the control that Chief Justice John Roberts asserted, or perhaps reasserted, over the court following a year in which the other five conservatives moved more quickly than he wanted in some areas, including abortion.

Roberts wrote a disproportionate share of the term’s biggest cases: conservative outcomes on affirmative action and the student loan plan, and liberal victories in Alabama and North Carolina.

The Alabama case may have been the most surprising because Roberts had consistently sought to narrow the landmark Voting Rights Act since his days as a young lawyer in the Reagan administration. As chief justice, he wrote the decision 10 years ago that gutted a key provision of the law.

But in the Alabama case and elsewhere, Roberts was part of majorities that rejected the most aggressive legal arguments put forth by Republican elected officials and conservative legal advocates.

The mixed bag of decisions almost seemed designed to counter arguments about the court’s legitimacy, raised by Democratic and liberal critics — and some justices — in response to last year’s abortion ruling, among others. The narrative was amplified by published reports of undisclosed, paid jet travel and fancy trips for Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito from billionaire Republican donors.

“I don’t think the court consciously takes opinion into account,” Grove said. “But I think if there’s anyone who might consciously think about these issues, it’s the institutionalist, the chief justice. He’s been extremely concerned about the attacks on the Supreme Court.”

On the term’s final day, Roberts urged the public to not mistake disagreement among the justices for disparagement of the court. “Any such misperception would be harmful to this institution and our country,” he wrote in the student loans case in response to a stinging dissent by Justice Elena Kagan.

Roberts has resisted instituting a code of ethics for the court and has questioned whether Congress has the authority to impose one. Still, he has said, without providing specifics, that the justices would do more to show they adhere to high ethical standards.

Some conservative law professors rejected the idea that the court bowed to outside pressures, consciously or otherwise.

“There were a lot of external atmospherics that really could have affected court business, but didn’t,” said Jennifer Mascott, a George Mason University law professor.

Curt Levey, president of the Committee for Justice, pointed to roughly equal numbers of major decisions that could be characterized as politically liberal or conservative.

Levey said conservatives “were not disappointed by this term.” Democrats and their allies “warned the nation about an ideologically extreme Supreme Court but wound up cheering as many major decisions as they decried,” Levey wrote in an email.

But some liberal critics were not mollified.

Brian Fallon, director of the court reform group Demand Justice, called the past year “another disastrous Supreme Court term” and mocked experts who “squint to find so-called silver linings in the Court’s decisions to suggest all is not lost, or they will emphasize one or two so-called moderate decisions from the term to suggest the Court is not as extreme as we think and can still be persuaded from time to time.”

Biden himself said on MSNBC on Thursday that the current court has “done more to unravel basic rights and basic decisions than any court in recent history.” He cited as examples the overturning of abortion protections and other decisions that had been precedent for decades.

Still, Biden said, he thought some on the high court “are beginning to realize their legitimacy is being questioned in ways it hasn’t been questioned in the past.”

The justices are now embarking on a long summer break. They return to the bench on the first Monday in October for a term that so far appears to lack the blockbuster cases that made the past two terms so momentous.

The court will examine the legal fallout from last year’s major expansion of gun rights, in a case over a domestic violence gun ban that was struck down by a lower court.

A new legal battle over abortion also could make its way to the court in coming months. In April, the court preserved access to mifepristone, a drug used in the most common method of abortion, while a lawsuit over it makes its way through federal court.

The conservative majority also will have opportunities to further constrain federal regulatory agencies, including a case that asks them to overturn the so-called Chevron decision that defers to regulators when they seek to give effect to big-picture, sometimes vague, laws written by Congress. The 1984 decision has been cited by judges more than 15,000 times.

Just seven years ago, months before Trump’s surprising presidential victory, then-Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg reflected on the term that had just ended and made two predictions. One was way off base and the other was strikingly accurate.

In July 2016, the court had just ended a term in which the justices upheld a University of Texas affirmative action plan and struck down state restrictions on abortion clinics.

Her first prediction was that those issues would not soon return to the high court. Her second was that if Trump became president, “everything is up for grabs.”

Ginsburg’s death in 2020 allowed Trump to put Justice Amy Coney Barrett on the court and cement conservative control.

Commenting on the student loan decision, liberal legal scholar Melissa Murray wrote on Twitter that Biden’s plan “was absolutely undone by the Court that his predecessor built.”

___

Follow the AP’s coverage of the Supreme Court at https://apnews.com/hub/us-supreme-court

[ad_2]

Source link

July 1, 2023
Activision’s Microsoft Saga Is Almost Over. It May Be Time to Sell the Stock.

[ad_1]

The fate of

Microsoft

$69 billion purchase of

Activision

Blizzard will finally be known in the coming weeks—and investors may want to consider taking profits on the videogame maker’s stock before then.

[ad_2]

Source link

June 30, 2023
The Supreme Court blocked student-loan cancellation. Here’s what happens next for your loans.

[ad_1]

Student-loan payments are poised to resume this fall without smaller balances now that the U.S. Supreme Court has blocked President Joe Biden’s loan cancellation plan.

The Biden administration’s loan forgiveness initiative would have canceled up to $10,000 of debt for eligible borrowers, and in some cases up to $20,000.

But the Supreme Court’s conservative majority ruled on Friday that the executive branch overstepped its authority by trying to wipe out billions in student loan debt on its own.

“Six States sued, arguing that the HEROES Act does not authorize the loan cancellation plan. We agree,” Chief Judge John Roberts said, writing for the 6-3 majority.

Now it’s time for more than 40 million borrowers with federal student loans to figure out their next move. They are staring at more than $1.6 trillion in student loan debt. Add on private student loans, and the number climbs to $1.7 trillion.

Federal student loan payments have been on hold since March 2020.

On Friday, the Department of Education filed notice saying it would embark on a regulatory process that would seek an alternative pathway to student-debt relief. Activists have focused on a provision in the Higher Education Act, allowing the Department of Education to “compromise, waive, or release,” any right to collect on student loans.

Approximately 26 million people had either applied for loan forgiveness or were already eligible for the relief as of late last year, the White House said.

Here’s what to know.

When do student-loan payments restart?

In October, according to the Department of Education. Expect more specifics soon on those payments. “We will notify borrowers well before payments restart,” the department said.

While payments start coming in October, interest starts accumulating on the loans in September. Loan balances have not been accumulating interest since the payment pause started in March 2020, during the pandemic’s early days.

“We will also be in direct touch with borrowers and ramping up our communications with servicers well before repayment resumes to ensure borrowers and their families are receiving accurate and timely information about the return to repayment,” an Education Department spokesperson said.

There’s a range of estimates on how much student-loan borrowers typically pay each month on their loans.

According to Bank of America data, $180 was the median monthly student-loan payment as of January 2020. Federal Reserve research before the pause said the average monthly payment was $393, while the median payment was $222.

Can I lower my payments?

Possibly yes, with a range of income-driven repayment plans through the Education Department. These plans are supposed to make repaying loans more affordable by letting borrowers modify their monthly payments based on their income.

While these plans already exist, the department is reworking them. As a result, more monthly income will be shielded from the calculations on what a person could repay for student loans each month, meaning payments will become more affordable. While the revised plans are not in effect yet, the existing plans are up and running.

Many people will likely struggle to fit a student-loan bill back into their budget — the question is how far that financial hardship will go. Student-loan payments would be hitting at a time when car loan and credit-card delinquencies are already rising from their pandemic lows, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Part of the Biden administration’s Supreme Court arguments pointed to the possible economic consequences of resuming student-loan payments without canceling some of the debt.

Without cancellation, there will be a “surge” of loan defaults and delinquencies once payments resume, Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar told the justices during oral arguments earlier this year.

Analysts at Bank of America agree more delinquencies are coming once student loan payments resume.

What if I miss my first payment?

When deciding which debts have to get paid first, a student-loan bill might fall behind other monthly debts like a mortgage or a credit-card bill.

Anywhere from roughly one-third to three-quarters of borrowers could miss their first student-loan bill when payments resume, according to projections from the credit score company VantageScore.

A missed first payment — in theory — could eventually lead to an average 49- to 82-point reduction in a credit score ranging from 350 to 850, VantageScore researchers said.

However, President Biden on Friday announced a temporary “ramp-up” — a 12-month grace period for borrowers who miss student-loan payments. If borrowers miss payments during this time, they won’t be reported to any of three main credit bureaus — Equifax
EFX,
+0.37%,
TransUnion
TRU,
+1.06%
and Experian
EXPGF,
+0.80%
— and they won’t go into default.

The ramp-up will run from Oct. 1, 2023 through Sept. 30, 2024.

“This is not the same as the student-loan pause, but during this period — if you miss payments — this ‘on ramp’ will temporarily remove the threat of default or having your credit harmed,” Biden wrote in a tweet Friday.

Prior to the payment pause and Biden’s ramp-up announcement, loan servicers waited for a borrower to miss three straight payments before they reported it to the credit reporting bureaus, according to Scott Buchanan, executive director of the Student Loan Servicing Alliance.

In the meantime, brace for potentially long call hold times, curtailed hours and loan servicer glitches, borrower advocates say. It stems back to Congressional cuts on the funding for vendor contracts that handle the day-to-day details of student-loan repayments.

[ad_2]

Source link

June 30, 2023
Supreme Court knocks down Biden’s student-debt forgiveness plan

[ad_1]

The Supreme Court knocked down the Biden administration’s plan to cancel up to $20,000 in student debt for a wide swath of borrowers, the court announced Friday.

The decision means that the White House won’t move forward with the plan for now, though it’s possible officials could try to launch a new version of the debt-forgiveness initiative using a different legal authority. Roughly 26 million borrowers applied for or were automatically eligible for debt relief under the Biden administration’s plan, which canceled up to $10,000 in student debt for borrowers earning less than $125,000 and up to $20,000 in federal loans for borrowers who met that criteria and also used a Pell grant in college.

Americans owe $1.7 trillion of student loans and the White House had estimated that more than 40 million borrowers would benefit from the initiative. But almost as soon as the Biden administration announced the debt-forgiveness plan last year, opponents looked for ways to challenge it legally. Ultimately, two cases made it to the high court.

In one case, two student-loan borrowers sued over the debt-relief plan in part because the Department of Education didn’t submit it for public comment. That, they said, resulted in an initiative that arbitrarily left out or limited the amount of relief available to some student loan borrowers, like themselves. The suit filed by the borrowers was backed by the Job Creators Network, a conservative advocacy organization co-founded by Bernard Marcus, the co-founder of Home Depot, who also supported former President Donald Trump.

Six Republican-led states brought the other case on the basis that canceling debt could harm their state coffers.

The court considered two issues in these cases. The first is whether the plaintiffs had standing, or the ability to bring a lawsuit because they’ve been directly harmed by the policy. The second is whether the Biden administration overstepped in its executive authority when issuing the policy. In order for the justices to reach the second issue, or the merits of the case, they had to find that the plaintiffs had standing to sue.

Legal experts, including some who believed the Biden administration didn’t have the authority to authorize the debt-relief plan, were skeptical of the notion that the parties bringing the cases had standing to sue. During oral arguments in February, the court’s three liberal justices also questioned whether the parties who challenged debt forgiveness were actually injured by the policy.

In addition, one of the members of the court’s conservative wing, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, asked pointed questions about the six states’ argument that they had standing to sue in part because the debt-relief plan would injure the state of Missouri. That claim surrounded the Missouri Higher Education Loan Authority, or MOHELA, a state-affiliated organization that services federal student loans. The states had argued if MOHELA lost accounts due to the debt-relief plan, its revenue would decline and that loss would hurt Missouri because of MOHELA’s ties to the state.

Despite these questions, Barrett agreed with the court’s five other conservative judges and found that the states have standing to sue. The three liberal justices dissented.

“MOHELA is, by law and function, an instrumentality of Missouri,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority opinion. “It was created by the State, is supervised by the State, and serves a public function. The harm to MOHELA in the performance of its public function is necessarily a direct injury to Missouri itself.”

The court’s decision in the states’ suit allowed the justices to get to the merits of the case. The parties challenging the debt-relief plan argued that the Department of Education went beyond the authority Congress delegated it in discharging student debt. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar argued to the justices that in canceling student debt, the Secretary of Education acted “within the heartland” of the authority Congress provided to him under the HEROES Act, a 2003 law that aims to ensure student-loan borrowers aren’t left worse off by a national emergency.

The court’s conservative majority sided with the states, with a 6-3 decision, striking down the debt-relief plan in its current form.

“The HEROES Act allows the Secretary to ‘waive or modify’ existing statutory or regulatory provisions applicable to financial assistance programs under the Education Act, but does not allow the Secretary to rewrite that statute to the extent of canceling $430 billion of student loan principal,” Roberts wrote.

In the months leading up to the court’s decision, White House officials said there was no backup plan for if the Supreme Court knocked down the debt-forgiveness initiative. Advocates and activists have said that student-loan repayments shouldn’t resume until the Biden administration fulfills its promise to cancel some student debt.

The bill President Joe Biden signed in June to raise the nation’s debt limit requires that the Department of Education end the pause on federal student loan, interest payments and collections 60 days after June 30, 2023. Interest on federal student loans will resume starting September 1 and payments will start to come due in October, according to the Department’s website.

Advocates and activists have said for years that the Higher Education Act provides the Secretary of Education with the authority to discharge student loans. In ruling that the HEROES Act didn’t authorize the Biden administration’s debt-relief plan, the court left the option open for the Biden administration to create a loan-forgiveness program authorized under the HEA.

The court’s decision marks the latest development in a more-than-decade-long push to get the government to cancel student debt en masse. The idea, which has its origins in the Occupy Wall Street movement, made it to the presidential campaign stage during the 2020 cycle and was adopted by the White House last year.

Proponents of student debt cancellation and the Biden administration, have expressed concern that without some kind of relief a large swath of borrowers could slip into delinquency and default with the return of student loan payments later this year.

[ad_2]

Source link

June 30, 2023
Biden talks Supreme Court and Russia but also media and McCain in rare network interview

[ad_1]

WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden rarely gives network interviews, and when he sat down in the MSNBC studio on Thursday, it came at an especially busy time, with the Supreme Court having just overturned the use of affirmative action in college admissions and in the aftermath of a revolt in Russia.

The nearly 20-minute conversation addressed those matters. But it also veered heavily into topics like criticism of the media and light-hearted discussion of the late Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain, who was a friend of Biden’s.

When Donald Trump was president, he was criticized for giving interviews to sympathetic media outlets where the questions were often soft and even fawning. Biden, meanwhile, has done far fewer formal interviews than his immediate predecessors. His last network interview was in early May and also on MSNBC.

This time, interviewer Nicolle Wallace, who was White House communications director under President George W. Bush and worked on McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, kicked things off by noting how unusual it was for a sitting president to appear in a network studio.

“The president of the United States is here. Really. At the table,” Wallace began, before telling Biden, “This is very exciting for us.” Biden responded, “It’s exciting for me.”

The president said the Supreme Court had “done more to unravel basic rights and basic decisions than any court in recent history,” pointing to its decision Thursday on affirmative action and its overturning of the constitutional right to abortion last summer.

“I just find it so out of sorts with the basic value system of the American people,” Biden said.

He said he did not support the idea of expanding the number of Supreme Court justices, as a number of progressives have urged him to do.

He also spoke about his reelection campaign, acknowledging, “I know the polling numbers are not good.” He noted that many polls once suggested he wouldn’t win the 2020 Democratic presidential primary or defeat Trump in that year’s general election, and they didn’t indicate that Democrats would have a stronger-than-expected showing in last year’s midterms.

The president then spoke at length about the media, saying, “This is not a criticism of the press. It’s an observation. There’s a lot to be worried about around the world, and talking to a lot of reporters, they tell me — I’m going to be careful what I say here — a number of reporters have indicated that there’s no editors anymore, on what they do.”

“Huh,” responded Wallace, as Biden continued that he’d been told by some reporters that they are under pressure to build their personal brands, finally concluding, “I just think there’s a lot changing.”

Wallace asked about the Russian revolt and what the U.S. knew. Biden responded, “We knew things ahead of time,” but said he couldn’t say what. Wallace followed up, “Did you worry that Trump might have tipped him off, had he still been president?” She was apparently asking whether Trump would have warned Russian President Vladimir Putin of the mercenary leader’s plans for the rebellion against Russia’s military leaders.

“Oh, God,” Biden said. “I don’t know. I don’t think about that very often.”

The president spoke a bit more about Russia’s war in Ukraine. Wallace eventually referenced McCain and asked, “What do you think he would think of his Republican Party?”

“I don’t think he’d think much of it,” Biden said, but quickly added, “I don’t know that.”

Wallace concluded by again noting the rarity of Biden’s in-studio appearance, adding, “Consider it your chair. Consider it an open invitation. There are going to be a lot of things on people’s minds, and I hope you’ll look at this as a place where you can come and talk about anything that’s on your mind.”

“Well, I will,” Biden said.

MSNBC declined to comment on the interview afterward.

Later Thursday, Biden attended New York fundraisers to collect donations for his reelection campaign. But the visit to New York, where MSNBC’s studio is located, was an official one — meaning taxpayers funded at least parts of it.

“It’s a mixed — mixed travel trip with official and political — political portions,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters aboard Air Force One on the way to New York.

Asked what the official part of the trip was, Jean-Pierre responded, “You all are always criticizing the president for not doing enough interviews — right?”

“He’s going to New York, and we took the opportunity to go in studio,” Jean-Pierre said. “It’s his first in-studio interview.”

[ad_2]

Source link

June 29, 2023
WSJ News Exclusive | Women Interviewing for Bill Gates’s Private Office Were Asked Sexually Explicit Questions

[ad_1]

Some people who sought jobs at billionaire Bill Gates’s private office described going through an extensive screening process that included being questioned by a security firm about their sexual histories, past drug use and other parts of their private lives that might indicate they were vulnerable to blackmail.

Copyright ©2023 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

[ad_2]

Source link

June 29, 2023
The unexpected group the Supreme Court’s student-loan decision will impact

[ad_1]

Student loan borrowers aren’t just the freshly graduated and mid-30s working generations — millions of Americans in their retirement years have student debt to pay back, too.

There are six times as many borrowers ages 60 and older now than there were in 2004, but their debt has increased “19-fold,” according to a report from New America, a public policy think tank. About 3.5 million Americans in this age bracket carry $125 billion in student debt, the report found.

Overall, Americans hold $1.75 trillion in student debt, the World Economic Forum found. The president’s student loan forgiveness plan, which was announced last August and is now in the midst of legal battles in the Supreme Court, would alleviate $10,000 for qualifying borrowers, or $20,000 for those with Pell Grants. At the time of the announcement, the White House said 20 million borrowers would see their debt washed away, and a total of 40 million would find benefit from cancellation.

See: What you need to know about the student-loan cases before the Supreme Court as the decision looms

Student debt has been especially problematic because of “stagnant wages and soaring tuition prices,” AARP said in another report highlighting older borrowers. Around 3% of families headed by someone who was 50 or older had student debt in 1989, with an average balance of $10,000, but by 2016, that figure rose to 9.6%, with an average of $33,000, AARP said.

Whether student debt forgiveness will happen or not is still to be determined. Borrowers have been anxiously awaiting an answer from the Supreme Court over two cases linked to the plan — one that argues whether or not the president had the legal authority to forgive loans, and another case about whether the program has standing. The Supreme Court is expected to release its decision on Friday, the last day of the court’s term before summer break.

Older borrowers have various reasons to carry debt. Some are paying off their own education, while others have taken on student debt for their loved ones. Federal PLUS loans, for example, allow parents to take loans out for their children’s education. Older Americans may have also taken on debt to refine their skills for a promotion, AARP noted in its report.

Also see: Elizabeth Warren: ‘President Biden has the legal authority to cancel student-loan debt’

Student loans can have a rippling impact on retirement savings — not just in allocating a portion of retirement income toward this debt, but also in accruing enough wealth for old age. Graduates with student loans had 50% less in retirement wealth by age 30 than the graduates without this debt, a Boston College Center for Retirement Research study found.

[ad_2]

Source link

June 29, 2023
Ozempic and other weight-loss drugs boost pharmacy sales at Rite Aid

[ad_1]

Rite Aid Corp. said Thursday that its fiscal first-quarter pharmacy sales got a boost from a new class of drug.

Pharmacy sales, which rose 3.4% from a year ago, were boosted by higher sales of Ozempic and other GLP-1 receptor agonists, which are used to treat Type 2 diabetes and obesity.

The higher sales did not translate into profit, however.

“As the cost of these drugs is also high, the impact of the increase in volume of these drugs on our gross profit dollars is minimal,” Rite Aid Chief Financial Officer Matthew Schroeder told analysts on the company’s earnings call, according to a FactSet transcript.

Still, the company
RAD,
+2.96%
cheered investors by raising its full-year revenue guidance due to the sales bump from Ozempic and other high-dollar GLP-1 drugs. It now expects revenue of $22.6 billion to $23 billion, ahead of the FactSet consensus of $22.3 billion.

Ozempic, Wegovy and Rybelsus, which are made by Novo Nordisk
NOVO.B,
+0.17%

NOVO.B,
+0.17%,
and Mounjaro, which is made by Eli Lilly & Co.
LLY,
+1.34%,
have become so popular in the U.S. that supplies have at times run short and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has been forced to warn patients against using knockoff versions.

The drugs are administered by injection and mimic the effects of GLP-1, a gut hormone that can help control blood-sugar levels and reduce appetite. GLP stands for glucagon-like peptide.

Ozempic, Rybelsus and Mounjaro have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for treatment of Type 2 diabetes, while Wegovy is approved for people with obesity and for certain people with excess weight combined with weight-related medical problems.

Last year, more than 5 million prescriptions for Ozempic, Mounjaro, Rybelsus or Wegovy were written for weight management, up from 230,000 in 2019, according to data and analytics firm Komodo Health.

Obesity drugs could be a $54 billion market by 2030, up from $2.4 billion in 2022, Morgan Stanley said in a report last year. Reports of people who take GLP-1 drugs seeing improvements in addictive behaviors such as smoking and drinking have lately amplified interest in the medications.

For more, read: The dark side of the weight-loss-drug craze: eating disorders, medication shortages, dangerous knockoffs

Drug companies, including Lilly and Pfizer Inc.
PFE,
-0.32%,
are now working to develop treatments in the form of pills that could be more convenient alternatives to the injectables.

See now: Weight-loss drugs in development aim to replace injections with pills

Rite Aid’s overall numbers surprised on the upside, as its loss was narrower than expected and revenue beat the consensus estimate.

For more, see: Rite Aid’s stock soars 7.5% after company surprises with earnings that are less bad than feared

Eleanor Laise contributed.

[ad_2]

Source link

June 29, 2023
Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions, says race cannot be a factor

[ad_1]

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Thursday struck down affirmative action in college admissions, declaring race cannot be a factor and forcing institutions of higher education to look for new ways to achieve diverse student bodies.

The court’s conservative majority overturned admissions plans at Harvard and the University of North Carolina, the nation’s oldest private and public colleges, respectively.

Chief Justice John Roberts said that for too long universities have “concluded, wrongly, that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned but the color of their skin. Our constitutional history does not tolerate that choice.”

Justice Clarence Thomas, the nation’s second Black justice who had long called for an end to affirmative action, wrote separately that the decision “sees the universities’ admissions policies for what they are: rudderless, race-based preferences designed to ensure a particular racial mix in their entering classes.”

Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in dissent that the decision “rolls back decades of precedent and momentous progress.”

Both Thomas and Sotomayor, the two justices who have acknowledged affirmative action played a role in their admissions to college and law school, took the unusual step of reading a summary of their opinions aloud in the courtroom.

In a separate dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson — the court’s first Black female justice — called the decision “truly a tragedy for us all.”

Jackson, who sat out the Harvard case because she had been a member of an advisory governing board, wrote, “With let-them-eat-cake obliviousness, today, the majority pulls the ripcord and announces ‘colorblindness for all’ by legal fiat. But deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life.”

The vote was 6-3 in the North Carolina case and 6-2 in the Harvard case. Justice Elena Kagan was the other dissenter.

President Joe Biden was expected to comment on the decision from the White House later Thursday.

Two former presidents offered starkly different takes on the high-court ruling.

Former President Donald Trump, the current GOP presidential frontrunner, wrote on his social media network that the decision marked “a great day for America. People with extraordinary ability and everything else necessary for success, including future greatness for our Country, are finally being rewarded.”

Former President Barack Obama said in a statement that affirmative action “allowed generations of students like Michelle and me to prove we belonged. Now it’s up to all of us to give young people the opportunities they deserve — and help students everywhere benefit from new perspectives.”

The Supreme Court had twice upheld race-conscious college admissions programs in the past 20 years, including as recently as 2016.

But that was before the three appointees of former President Donald Trump joined the court. At arguments in late October, all six conservative justices expressed doubts about the practice, which had been upheld under Supreme Court decisions reaching back to 1978.

Lower courts also had upheld the programs at both UNC and Harvard, rejecting claims that the schools discriminated against white and Asian American applicants.

The college admissions disputes are among several high-profile cases focused on race in America, and were weighed by the conservative-dominated, but most diverse court ever. Among the nine justices are four women, two Black people and a Latina.

The justices earlier in June decided a voting rights case in favor of Black voters in Alabama and rejected a race-based challenge to a Native American child protection law.

The affirmative action cases were brought by conservative activist Edward Blum, who also was behind an earlier affirmative action challenge against the University of Texas as well as the case that led the court in 2013 to end use of a key provision of the landmark Voting Rights Act.

Blum formed Students for Fair Admissions, which filed the lawsuits against both schools in 2014.

The group argued that the Constitution forbids the use of race in college admissions and called for overturning earlier Supreme Court decisions that said otherwise.

Roberts’ opinion effectively did so, both Thomas and the dissenters wrote.

The only institutions of higher education explicitly left out of the ruling are the nation’s military academies, Roberts wrote, suggesting that national security interests could affect the legal analysis.

Blum’s group had contended that colleges and universities can use other, race-neutral ways to assemble a diverse student body, including by focusing on socioeconomic status and eliminating the preference for children of alumni and major donors.

The schools said that they use race in a limited way, but that eliminating it as a factor altogether would make it much harder to achieve a student body that looks like America.

At the eight Ivy League universities, the number of nonwhite students increased by 55% from 2010 to 2021, according to federal data. That group, which includes, Native American, Asian, Black, Hispanic, Pacific Islander and biracial students, accounted for 35% of students on those campuses in 2021, up from 27% in 2010.

The end of affirmative action in higher education in California, Michigan, Washington state and elsewhere led to a steep drop in minority enrollment in the states’ leading public universities.

They are among nine states that already prohibit any consideration of race in admissions to their public colleges and universities. The others are: Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Nebraska, New Hampshire and Oklahoma.

In 2020, California voters easily rejected a ballot measure to bring back affirmative action.

A poll last month by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research showed 63% of U.S. adults say the court should allow colleges to consider race as part of the admissions process, yet few believe students’ race should ultimately play a major role in decisions. A Pew Research Center survey released last week found that half of Americans disapprove of considerations of applicants’ race, while a third approve.

The chief justice and Jackson received their undergraduate and law degrees from Harvard. Two other justices, Elena Kagan and Neil Gorsuch, went to law school there, and Kagan was the first woman to serve as the law school’s dean.

Every U.S. college and university the justices attended, save one, urged the court to preserve race-conscious admissions.

Those schools — Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Notre Dame and Holy Cross — joined briefs in defense of Harvard’s and UNC’s admissions plans.

Only Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s undergraduate alma mater, Rhodes College, in Memphis, Tennessee, was not involved in the cases.

[ad_2]

Source link

June 29, 2023
WHO poised to declare aspartame ‘possibly carcinogenic to humans,’ Reuters reports

[ad_1]

The World Health Organization’s cancer research arm is poised to declare the artificial sweetener aspartame as “possibly carcinogenic to humans” as early as next month, Reuters reported, citing two sources with knowledge of the matter.

Aspartame is used in products ranging from diet Coca-Cola
KO,
-0.93%
to Mars’ Extra chewing gum and certain Snapple drinks. The move will be the first by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, or IARC, the news agency reported.

The IARC ruling was finalized earlier this month after a meeting of its external experts. The meeting considered whether something is a potential hazard or not, based on all the published evidence. It did not consider, however, how much of a product can be safely consumed; that advice is made by a separate WHO expert committee on food additives, called JECFA — the Joint WHO and Food and Agriculture Organization’s Expert Committee on Food Additives) — as well as by national regulators.

Industry groups immediately pushed back on Thursday.

“Consumers deserve facts, and the fact is aspartame is one of the most widely studied food ingredients and has repeatedly been determined to be safe by global scientific and regulatory authorities, which is why the Calorie Control Council is gravely concerned about any unsubstantiated assertions that contradict this conclusion,” said Robert Rankin, president of the Calorie Control Council in emailed comments.

The IARC is not a regulatory agency, an ingredient expert or a food safety authority, Ranking added.

“Their sole focus is to find substances that could cause cancer, and they have classified things like aloe vera, low-frequency magnetic fields, and pickled vegetables as possibly causing cancer. Consumers want context and that is what’s missing from these misleading claims,” he said.

Kate Loatman, executive director of the International Council of Beverages Associations (ICBA), agreed.

“While it appears IARC is now prepared to concede that aspartame presents no more of a hazard to consumers than using aloe vera, public health authorities should be deeply concerned that this leaked opinion contradicts decades of high-quality scientific evidence and could needlessly mislead consumers into consuming more sugar rather than choosing safe no- and low-sugar options – all on the basis of low-quality studies,” Loatman said in a statement.

In May, the WHO advised people not to use nonsugar sweeteners for weight control, warning that they may increase the risk of Type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular diseases and mortality in adults.

[ad_2]

Source link

June 29, 2023
The banking crisis has eased but a credit crunch still threatens the U.S. economy

[ad_1]

Financial disruptions in 2008 contributed to the deep economic downturn that came to be known as the Great Recession. Could recent bank failures similarly lead to a broad U.S. recession?

The $532 billion of assets of the three banks that failed in March and April 2023 exceed the inflation-adjusted value of $526 billion of assets of the 25 banks that failed in 2008. Yet the current situation differs in many ways from the underlying economic circumstances at the outset of the Great Recession.

Still, that experience, as well as others, show how financial distress can lead to macroeconomic weakness which then contributes to further financial distress, resulting in a downward spiral during which credit becomes tight, investment is curtailed and growth stalls.

Bank distress can have adverse consequences for borrowers and the broader economy. One source of recent U.S. bank vulnerabilities is the rapid increase in interest rates. Banks take in deposits that can be withdrawn in the short term and use them to make loans and invest in securities at interest rates that are fixed for some time.

As interest rates rise, the value of banks’ existing portfolio decreases as new investments at higher rates are more attractive. By one estimate, the U.S. banking system’s market value of assets is $2.2 trillion lower than suggested by their book value of assets accounting for loan portfolios held to maturity.

These book losses are realized if banks have to sell those assets to cover withdrawals from depositors. At the same time banks face challenges in maintaining deposit levels, depositors are less willing to place their money in low-return checking and savings accounts as higher-interest opportunities become increasingly available.

Banks that failed in 2023 have had specific weaknesses that made them particularly vulnerable. Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), for example, was particularly exposed to risk from rising interest rates as it had heavily invested in longer-term government bonds which lost market value as interest rates rose and its management failed to hedge against this risk.

SVB was also especially vulnerable to a run by depositors because over 90% of the value of its deposits exceeded the $250,000 amount guaranteed by the Federal through the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). Depositors holding accounts in excess of this guaranteed amount, both individuals and companies (whose accounts were used for making payroll, among other reasons) are only partially protected in case of bank failure so they have an incentive to withdraw funds at the first sign of trouble.

Moreover, depositors were connected to each other through business and social groups, so news traveled quickly seeding the conditions for a classic bank run at Twitter speed. Signature Bank also had about 90% of its assets uninsured and its portfolio was heavily concentrated in crypto deposits. Both banks grew rapidly with inadequate risk and liquidity management practices in place and, while regulators had raised concerns about these risks, they had not taken more forceful actions to address them, according to a GAO report. Meanwhile, First Republic Bank, catered to wealthy depositors and for this reason also had a high share of uninsured deposits that made it more vulnerable to a bank run as its bond assets lost value amidst rising interest rates.

Commercial banks reduce lending when their deposits fall or when they otherwise cannot meet regulatory requirements. Deposits represent an important source of banks’ ability to lend. As a bank’s deposits decrease, it has less resources available for lending since other sources of funds are not as easily obtained.

A bank may also cut lending in an effort to satisfy regulations such as meeting or exceeding the Capital Adequacy Ratio. Regulators require banks to have enough capital on reserve to handle a certain amount of loan losses. The Capital Adequacy Ratio decreases when loans fail and the bank sees its loan loss reserves decline. The bank can then increase its Capital Adequacy Ratio by using funds that would otherwise be devoted to commercial loans or by shifting from loans to other assets that are less risky (such as government securities).

There is evidence that this effect contributed to the cutback in bank lending in New England in the 1990-1991 U.S. recession when there was a collapse in that region’s real estate market. A bank may choose to reduce lending if there are concerns about solvency even if it is not yet hitting up against the formal capital adequacy ratio requirement.

Read: San Francisco at risk of more falling ‘dominos’ as $2.4 billion of office property loans come due through 2024

A credit crunch occurs when borrowers who would otherwise receive loans are precluded from doing so because of a restriction on the supply of loans by banks. But a reduction in bank lending could also reflect a decrease in borrowers’ demand for loans.

Researchers have used a variety of methods to identify when there is a credit crunch rather than just a lower demand for loans. For example, a credit crunch could be identified through looking for differential borrowing, employment, and performance patterns by bank-dependent companies as compared to those that have access to financing through bond or equity markets. Bank-dependent companies are typically smaller than those that have access to other types of financing.

Credit crunches due to bank distress can undermine investment and economic growth. An early and influential analysis by Ben Bernanke, who went on to chair the Federal Reserve and served during the 2008 Great Financial Crisis, analyzed the effects of bank failures during the Great Depression. He found that bank failures had a particularly strong effect in reducing the amount of borrowing by households, farmers, and small businesses in that period, which contributed to the severity and duration of the Great Depression.

The U.S. banking system has been made more resilient since that time, but there is still evidence of the effect of a credit crunch on regional U.S. economies. The April 2023 IMF Global Financial Stability Report argued that a credit crunch in the United States could reduce lending by 1%, which would lower GDP growth by almost 0.5 percentage points.

Michael Klein is the executive editor of EconoFact. He is the William L. Clayton Professor of International Economic Affairs at The Fletcher School at Tufts University.

This commentary was originally published by EconoFact: Banks, Credit Crunches, and the Economy.

More: Justice Department to weigh updating banking competition rules

Also read: Senators make headway on clawing back pay from failed banks’ CEOs, as key committee advances bill

[ad_2]

Source link

June 28, 2023
Nvidia, AMD stocks fall on report of new U.S. ban on AI chip exports to China

[ad_1]

Shares of Nvidia Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. slumped in the extended session Tuesday following a report that the Biden administration is considering a new ban on sales of AI chips to China.

Nvidia shares
NVDA,
+3.06%
A fell 3% after hours, following a 3.1% gain to close at $418.76, while AMD shares
AMD,
+2.68%
also fell 3%, after a 2.7% gain in the regular session to close at $110.39.

Late Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal reported the Commerce Department could further block sales of AI chips to China unless U.S. companies first obtain a special license.

The ban would follow upon similar actions last year that threatened $400 million in Nvidia sales, but the company found a workaround in supplying a version of products that avoided the ban.

Read: AMD launches new data-center AI chips, software to go up against Nvidia and Intel

Both Nvidia and AMD have launched new AI chips this year: Nvidia in March and AMD earlier in the month. Last year’s release of Open AI’s ChatGPT generative AI — with billions of dollars invested by Microsoft Corp.
MSFT,
+1.82%
— resulted in an explosion of interest in artificial-intelligence technology, prompting luminaries to herald the technology as the biggest thing in tech since … you name it.

Read: Bill Gates says AI is only the second revolutionary tech advancement in his lifetime

News of the possible ban happened to follow a claim earlier in the day from Baidu Inc.
BIDU,
+3.09%
on the Chinese search company’s blog, which said its Ernie 3.5 version AI outperformed ChatGPT’s earlier version “in comprehensive ability scores,” and its latest iteration, GPT-4, which was released in mid-March, “in several Chinese-language capabilities.”

Baidu’s claim appeared to be based upon performance metrics published in China Science Daily. On Wall Street, ADRs of Baidu were down 0.7% after hours, following a 3.1% gain to close at $143.90.

As of Tuesday’s close, Nvidia shares were up 187% in 2023, and AMD shares were up 70% for the year.

Read: Snowflake adds partnerships with Nvidia and Microsoft for AI double play

Shares of Super Micro Computer Inc.
SMCI,
+4.47%,
which have benefited from AI, also declined 3% after hours, while shares of Intel Corp.
INTC,
+2.28%,
which supplies chips to data centers, saw shares decline 1% after hours.

[ad_2]

Source link

June 27, 2023
‘This is a game changer’: Ahead of Amazon Prime Day, a new law makes it harder for online sellers to hawk fake or stolen products

[ad_1]

Shopping online has just gotten safer.

The INFORM Consumers Act, which went into effect Tuesday, aims to limit the sales of stolen and counterfeit products on e-commerce platforms.

The measure, which requires e-commerce sites to verify and disclose information about their high-volume third-party sellers, was passed into law following a lobbying campaign to address counterfeit products after being left out of the bipartisan Chips and Science Act last year.

All online marketplaces, including eBay, Etsy, Poshmark and Amazon’s third-party sales platform, will now be required to collect information from high-volume sellers, defined as those selling 200 items or more totaling at least $5,000 over the previous 12 months. These third-party sellers must submit information such as a government-issued ID, a bank-account number, a working email address and phone number, and a taxpayer identification number.

Customers will also be able to find the verified contact information for bigger third-party sellers — those with sales of over $20,000 a year — and to get in touch with them outside of the e-commerce platform. In the past, consumers often had to engage within the platform operator in order to communicate with a seller.

Those bigger sellers will also have their full names and physical addresses listed on their product pages in addition to their contact information, according to the Federal Trade Commission’s business guide.

“This is a game changer,” said Teresa Murray, director of the consumer watchdog office at U.S. PIRG, a nonprofit that lobbies on behalf of the public interest. “For bad guys, stealing items has generally been the difficult part. Selling things online once you’ve stolen them is easy. We hope that with the INFORM Act, it’s not nearly as easy in the future.”

“‘The only people opposing this may be thieves.’”

— Teresa Murray, U.S. PIRG

The act goes into effect just weeks before Amazon Prime Day, when the world’s biggest e-commerce site rolls out discounts for Prime members. This year, Prime Day will be held over two days, on July 11 and 12.

Picks: Amazon Prime Day is July 11-12. You’ll need the $139-a-year Prime membership to access the deals, but is it actually worth it?

Also see: Amazon sued by FTC, which alleges people were ‘tricked and trapped’ into Prime subscriptions

Several e-commerce platforms, including Amazon and eBay, supported the INFORM Consumers Act. TechNet, a national network of technology CEOs and senior executives representing what it calls the innovation economy, wrote to leaders in Congress last December, saying the law would improve consumer safety and increase transparency.

In a statement provided to MarketWatch, eBay
EBAY,
+2.32%
said it “fully supports transparency and is committed to a safe selling and buying experience for our customers. We were proud to support” the law “to protect consumers from bad actors who seek to misuse online marketplaces, while also ensuring important protections for sellers. We are fully prepared to comply with the new law.”

Etsy
ETSY,
+3.45%
said it “has long been supportive of the INFORM Act passing into law, as a balanced and thoughtful approach to make the ecommerce landscape safer for both consumers and sellers.” In a statement provided to MarketWatch, the company said, “We are taking appropriate steps to comply with the INFORM Act requirements.”

Amazon
AMZN,
+1.45%
and Poshmark, owned by South Korea–based Naver Corp.
035420,
-0.59%,
did not immediately respond to MarketWatch requests for comment.

Some analysts, however, said the new law lacks stronger protections that were included the SHOP SAFE Act, an earlier bill that did not get passed by Congress. The INFORM Act, they noted, does not hold online platforms liable when a third party sells harmful counterfeit products or when the platform has not followed certain best practices.

“Notably, the legislation is supported by Amazon and other marketplaces as it’s seen as a watered-down bill that would head off more stringent legislation like the SHOP SAFE Act,” Ben Koltun, director of research at Beacon Policy Advisors, wrote in a note last year.

So how can consumers spot counterfeit or stolen items? A guide from PIRG has tips, such as keeping an eye out for products with suspiciously low prices or featuring misspellings or mislabeling or low-quality, photoshopped photos in their listings.

PIRG also cautions consumers about purchasing medications online. Always check the legitimacy of online pharmacies, it says.

“Many online marketplaces haven’t been doing enough to protect consumers from sellers who appear to be peddling stolen or counterfeit goods,” Murray said. “The only people opposing this [new law] may be thieves.”

Victor Reklaitis contributed.

[ad_2]

Source link

June 27, 2023
Are the robots coming for us? Ask AI.

[ad_1]

As we enter artificial intelligence’s brave new world, humans have naturally come to fear what the future holds. Do computers like HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey pose an existential threat? Or in an incident not from Hollywood fiction, an Air Force official’s recent remarks implying that a drone had autonomously changed course and killed its operator, only to be later declared a hypothetical, certainly raised alarm.

Closer to home for most of us, the release of large language models like ChatGPT have renewed worries about automation, reminiscent of earlier fears about mechanization. AI has advanced far beyond rote data-storage tasks and can even pass the bar exam, or write news, or research papers, leading to fears of massive white-collar unemployment.

But, as new research looking at data of job churn over the past two decades finds, the impact of automation on workers and industries is, in fact, pretty hard to predict given the complexity of the labor market, requiring carefully crafted policies that take these nuances into account.

First, changes in exposure to automation are not intuitive: they do not easily mesh with “blue-collar” and “white-collar” jobs, as typically defined. Instead, automation is more closely linked to the tasks and characteristics of each job, such as repetitiveness and face-to-face interactions. That translates to the three most automation-exposed jobs: office and administrative support, production, and business and financial operations occupations.

Meanwhile, the three least automation-exposed jobs are in personal care; installation, maintenance and repair occupations; and teaching. In other words, even with the Internet of Things controlling your HVAC system, it cannot fix itself when it needs new refrigerant, but its smart-panel interface can help the technician diagnose the problem remotely quickly and know what equipment to bring for a repair. But back-end accountants in that company may not fare as well in the AI jobs sweepstakes.

While automation can displace workers, history suggests that new technology also tends to boost productivity and create new jobs. Consider the automobile: while horses and buggies are outdated, we still need humans to drive (at least until autonomous vehicles come to full fruition), and the assembly line helped automate manufacturing with entire new classes of jobs created for every part of a car and all its electronic systems, with almost 1 million U.S. workers in auto manufacturing today.

But automation has continued in the auto industry over the decades, with robots helping to make hard and heavy physical labor tasks easier, without fully displacing workers. So there is a push-pull with automation, and the relative sizes of these countervailing effects remains an area of active scholarly debate.

“ It is rare for an entire job class to disappear overnight; changes mainly take place over generations ”

Second, it is rare for an entire job class to disappear overnight; changes mainly take place over generations. The research shows that newer generations of workers, perhaps deterred by the job insecurity observed in earlier generations and lured by high wages in the technology sector, are less inclined to enter automation-prone jobs than those before them. However, after embarking down those career paths, workers tend to stay in their fields, even if the prospects of automation loom large, likely because reskilling is time-consuming and expensive. It is relatively easy for recent high school graduates to opt for tech-centric college degrees like computer science, but learning new skills like coding is more difficult for mid-career professionals in automation-susceptible fields like manufacturing.

Adjustments to automation can be slow on the business side as well. Incorporating automated technology takes time because modern production tasks tend to be so intertwined that automating one part of a business can affect all other operations. For example, when AT&T, once the country’s largest firm, began replacing telephone operators with mechanical switchboards, they found that operators had become central to the complex production system that grew around them, which is why there are fewer operators today, but some still exist.

Third, the research found that the share of workers in highly automation-exposed occupations tends to be clustered, ranging from about 25% to 36% across commuting zones. The least-exposed areas in the U.S. are across the Mountain West, thanks to the area’s high shares of workers in management, retail sales and construction (which hasn’t had much automation or productivity improvement in decades but additive manufacturing may be a game-changer), as well as those on the East and West coasts, with their more innovative finance and tech industries.

On the other hand, those most exposed to automation tend to be located in the Great Plains and Rust Belt, namely due to agriculture. In spite of the fact that U.S. agriculture has been exposed to automation for over a century (more efficient machines and advances in biotechnology), it has become even more technology-driven recently, making ag workers more likely to be impacted by automation.

Read: How artificial intelligence can make hiring bias worse

So will the robots take over your job soon? More likely, they will make our jobs easier and more efficient. Trying to slow the adoption of technology is both futile and counterproductive: taxing or overregulating tech adoption may backfire, especially given global competitiveness and other countries who may not pause. While the advent of a new era of automation is likely to be both gradually incorporated and result in complements to human labor rather than full replacement, thoughtful policies can help disrupted workers transition to new and better opportunities, ensuring we can harness the transformative power of automation and foster a future of work that benefits all.

Eric Carlson is associate economist at the Economic Innovation Group; DJ Nordquist is EIG’s executive vice president.

More: AI is ready to take on menial tasks in the workplace, but don’t sweat robot replacement (just yet)

Also read: ‘Make friends with this technology’: Yes, AI is coming for your job. Here’s how to prepare.

[ad_2]

Source link

June 26, 2023
Kansas’ attorney general is moving to block trans people from changing their birth certificates

[ad_1]

TOPEKA, Kan. — Transgender people born in Kansas could be prevented from changing their birth certificates to reflect their gender identities if the state’s conservative Republican attorney is successful with a legal move he launched late Friday.

Attorney General Kris Kobach filed a request in federal court asking a judge to end a requirement for Kansas to allow transgender people to change their birth certificates. He is not seeking to undo past changes, only prevent them going forward.

U.S. District Judge Daniel Crabtree imposed the requirement in 2019 to settle a lawsuit filed by four transgender Kansas residents against three state health department officials. The suit challenged a policy that critics said prevented transgender people from making changes even after transitioning, legally changing their names and obtaining new driver’s licenses and Social Security cards.

It wasn’t clear whether Kobach’s effort would succeed, given a U.S. Supreme Court decision in 2020 declaring a federal law barring sex discrimination in employment also prevents discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity.

Also in 2020, federal judges in Idaho and Ohio struck down rules against transgender people changing their birth certificates. But this month, federal judges in Tennessee and Oklahoma dismissed challenges to two of the nation’s few remaining state policies against such changes.

Kobach’s move appears to be in keeping with a new, sweeping Kansas law taking effect July 1 that rolls back transgender rights and was enacted by the Republican-controlled Legislature over Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly’s veto. A memo filed electronically with the request by Kobach shortly before midnight cited the law as a reason to revisit the 2019 settlement.

The memo argued Crabtree’s order makes it “impossible” to follow the new state law and that since the Legislature “has spoken,” the state health department, which handles birth certificates, is now “bound to execute the law as written.”

Kobach already had scheduled a Monday afternoon news conference at the Statehouse to discuss enforcement of the new law.

Crabtree’s 2019 order blocked a policy imposed by former Republican Gov. Sam Brownback’s administration that was among the toughest against birth certificate changes in the U.S. Kelly is a strong supporter of LGBTQ+ rights and her administration agreed to settle the lawsuit less than six months after she took office.

That decision came almost a year after Crabtree declared the Kansas policy violated transgender people’s constitutional rights to due legal process and equal treatment under the law. His order notes that federal courts in Idaho and Puerto Rico had struck down no-change policies. Kobach’s memo called those rulings outdated.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas and the LGBTQ+-rights legal group Lambda Legal, representing the four Kansas residents, condemned Kobach’s move. Lamda Legal’s Omar Gonzalez-Pagan called it “unnecessary and cruel.”

Kansas ACLU Executive Director Micah Kubic added in a statement: “Mr. Kobach should rethink the wisdom — and the sheer indecency — of this attempt to weaponize his office’s authority to attack transgender Kansans just trying to live their lives.”

The new Kansas law is designed to prevent transgender people from using restrooms, locker rooms and other single-gender facilities associated with their identities. At least nine other states have such laws, mostly focused on public schools.

Kobach has said he believes the new Kansas law also prevents transgender people from changing their driver’s licenses, though the law contains no specific enforcement mechanisms. Lawmakers wrote the bill so it could prevent transgender people from changing their birth certificates, except for the 2019 federal court order, without specifically mentioning either birth certificates or driver’s licenses.

For weeks, a project of Kansas Legal Services, a nonprofit law firm, encouraged transgender Kansans to change their driver’s licenses before the new law took effect. Kelly’s administration, which oversees the licensing of drivers, hasn’t said whether it believes such changes would still be allowed under the new law.

Ellen Bertels, the attorney spearheading the effort, said that while a transgender person could sue after the law takes effect to protect people’s right to change their driver’s licenses, a lawsuit from a state official against Kelly’s administration could seek to prevent such changes.

“That’s it’s kind of the obvious place that they would end up,” Bertels said.

As for birth certificates, the small number of states not allowing transgender people to change them shrunk through previous federal court challenges like the one in Kansas.

The ACLU of Montana plans to challenge a rule imposed there last year barring people from changing the sex listed on their birth certificates, according Alex Rate, one of its attorneys. The state has tightened its rules since GOP Gov. Greg Gianforte took office in 2021, and the dispute there has played out before a state-court judge.

Previously, starting in 2017 when Democrat Steve Bullock was governor, Montana allowed transgender people to change their birth certificates by filling out an affidavit.

LGBTQ+ rights advocates say changing birth certificates, driver’s licenses and other records to reflect a transgender person’s gender identity is key to affirming their identities and often greatly improves their mental health.

Policies against changing birth certificates and other documents have practical implications for transgender residents, too. For example, Kansas requires voters to show a photo ID at the polls or when obtaining an absentee ballot.

Critics of the new Kansas law contend it is designed to legally erase transgender people.

It declares that state law recognizes only two genders, male and female, and defines them based on a person’s “biological reproductive system” at birth. A woman is someone whose system “is designed to produce ova,” while a male only is someone with a system “designed to fertilize the ova of a female.”

The law then declares “important governmental objectives” of protecting people’s health safety and privacy justify having sex-segregated spaces in line with those definitions.

___

Associated Press Writer Amy Hanson in Helena, Montana, contributed to this story.

___

Follow John Hanna on Twitter: https://twitter.com/apjdhanna

[ad_2]

Source link

June 24, 2023