A small group of Goddard College staff is ending its nearly monthlong strike today, after the union reached a tentative agreement with the Vermont institution that includes raises.
Danielle Kutner, co-chair of the Goddard College Staff Union, said the union also fought off management’s planned incorporation of a “management rights” clause.
She said that, if that had been included in the contract, the union would have been reduced to bargaining over “how to mitigate impact of [a] policy as opposed to the policy itself.”
Most Popular
“Given the prior experience, it’s really important to Goddard as an institution and the people who choose to work at Goddard that things remain democratic,” said Kutner, who is the college’s student life manager and interim community life coordinator.
The tentative agreement, which union members must now vote on, is for a one-year contract with 5.75 percent raises for those making under $20 an hour and 3 percent raises for those making over that.
“We got everybody close to $20 an hour, if not at $20,” Kutner said. She said the union has 25 to 30 regular dues-paying members.
Goddard president Dan Hocoy said, “We really believe not only in fair wages but a livable wage, especially for those making under $20 an hour. So we’re very happy to provide those salary increases, you know, given that the inflation is at 40-year highs.”
Hocoy also said all college employees are getting an extra week of vacation “in light of all the stress that has been incurred by everyone working so hard at the college, both during the strike and just generally.”
“It was difficult to see our community split like that,” he said. “So I’m quite delighted we were able to come to an agreement with the UAW staff union, and I’m grateful for the collaborative spirit I’ve seen in ratifying this agreement between the college and the union, and I believe we can now work together in a similar collaborative fashion.”
Jennifer Barton, the administrative law judge who handled the two professors’ appeals, wrote that the university’s open-ended language made it impossible to tell why they were terminated, the Reflector reported.
“The most important consequence of ESU’s omission is that it undermines the already limited appeal rights reserved for the employee, almost to the point of nonexistence,” Barton wrote, according to the Reflector.
The trustees discussed the plan at a meeting Wednesday. One trustee asked for a delay in the scheduled vote on the deal on Monday.
“This is the first deal I’ve received a lot of important information, [and] on a deal this big, I need time to digest it,” said trustee Steve Cox. “Let us consider this, [because] I hate to be rushed.”
Most Popular
Trustee Ted Dickey spoke in favor of the deal.
“If we’re not willing to disrupt our own business, someone else” will, Dickey said. An affiliation with Phoenix would help the Arkansas system appeal to a new audience and create cash flow.
“This is a sustainable model,” Dickey said. “Raising tuition every year is a broken, non-sustainable model.”
Trustee Kelly Eichler agreed. An affiliation with Phoenix “seems like a lifeline to us,” she said.
That lackluster “reputation” Phoenix has to some is “hard to shake,” however, said trustee Sheffield Nelson. “I think the best thing to do is stay clear of it.”
It’s “hard for me to understand why this is an outstanding deal for” the system, as it feels as though “we’re losing focus on the state of Arkansas,” said board chairman Morril Harriman.
The union representing police officers at Duquesne University reached an agreement with the institution Tuesday to end a strike that started Monday, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported.
No details were released on the agreement, which must be approved by the union’s members. But issues that led to the strike included wages, retirement, health care and seniority.
The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Educational Testing Service are teaming up to develop a new way to evaluate competency-based learning.
The two organizations announced today that they are partnering to create a set of tools designed to assess the qualitative skills that many of today’s employers consider most important—such as creative thinking, work ethic and ability to collaborate.
The organizers assert that such tools could potentially be better indicators of a student’s future success than the traditional Carnegie unit, or credit hour, the measure first introduced in 1906 that correlates proficiency in a subject with the amount of time spent studying it. The new tools would also allow students to account for learning completed outside of the classroom, such as at a job or internship.
Most Popular
The initiative comes at a time when traditional testing is under increased scrutiny, especially since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, with fewer and fewer colleges requiring applicants to submit SAT or ACT scores. The exams have also been criticized for being racially biased against Black test takers and weak predictors of student success.
ETS, a major testing organization responsible for exams including the GRE, Praxis and TOEFL, is moving away from its focus on testing to become a “data insights” company, Tim Knowles, president of the Carnegie Foundation, said in an interview with Inside Higher Ed. The new competency-based initiative could help ETS fill the testing void.
The project will initially be focused on high school and middle school, Knowles said. But he believes the assessments will ultimately have valuable applications for higher education: not only could they be utilized as a metric in the college admissions process, but they could also eventually be translated into college credits—in much the same way AP exam scores are—that guide course placements for students and determine how quickly they progress through a curriculum.
Knowles also suggested that such assessments could potentially stand in for a college degree, at least in terms of demonstrating competency when applying for jobs.
Higher education’s “real existential threat is whether there are pathways to purposeful careers that don’t depend on a degree,” he said. “And, frankly, if you get the assessment architecture right and you can actually assess whether people know and can do particular things, then where they learned them is totally irrelevant.”
He acknowledged such a shift will take time.
“That won’t be driven by this particular initiative,” he said. “But that’s what I think is the thing that the future could bring that will be very disruptive to the current model.”
New Life for an Old Idea
Conversations about how institutions—both at the K-12 and postsecondary levels—could better assess learning have been ongoing for decades; some institutions have already begun using competency-based evaluations in specific programs. The American Association of Colleges and Universities introduced VALUE rubrics in 2009, which, according to its website, are utilized by 2,700 colleges and universities worldwide. The rubrics are designed to help educators “evaluate student performance reliably and verifiably across sixteen broad, cross-cutting learning outcomes.”
According to Charla Long at the Competency-Based Education Network, fields like teaching and nursing also utilize such assessments in various capacities, such as to evaluate nursing students’ compassion.
Long believes the joint ETS–Carnegie Foundation project is a significant opportunity for the two influential institutions to help legitimize and scale the work already being done in the field of competency-based assessment.
“Them getting into this will be game-changing,” she said. “We just want it to be informed by the great innovations that are already underway.”
Some critics, however, argue that focusing on competency-based methods of measuring learning fails to recognize how existing college systems and assignments impart those same skills; in other words, it doesn’t acknowledge the ways that learning subjects like history, chemistry or Spanish through traditional methods can help students become successful communicators, critical thinkers and collaborators, among other things.
“The purpose of high school, one of its primary purposes, is to educate citizens, and the education of citizens means providing them access to a liberal education,” said Johann Neem, a history professor at Western Washington University and the author of What’s the Point of College? (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019).
If competency-based assessments become central to students’ education, “we may actually have less well-prepared citizens,” he argued. “We may lose track of the fundamental purpose of public education, which is the education of citizens. The education of workers is a secondary purpose.”
Neem also said that by requiring students to take such assessments, institutions would limit the freedom of teachers and professors to determine learning outcomes in their own courses—though Knowles argues that they would only give teachers additional, valuable tools for supporting their students’ progress.
Over all, Knowles said, educators and state leaders are enthusiastic about competency-based assessments and have indicated that they will embrace such assessments once they exist.
“I don’t see any constituency, whether it’s K-12 educators, state officials, leaders or employers, whatever their partisan sort of footing may be, I don’t see any of them pushing back or leaning back,” he said. “At the root of it is we’re trying to set young people up with the skills they need for success, whether they go right into the workforce after high school, or they go to college and then go to the workforce. People are aligned around that.”
First Steps
The preliminary phase of the project involves answering a deceptively simple question: What skills should institutions focus on assessing? That requires deciding on skills that both predict future success and can be validly and reliably measured, Knowles said. They hope to identify these skills within the next four to six weeks.
From there, researchers will investigate how to actually measure those abilities.
“A key part of the research effort is to develop a comprehensive skills framework, identifying and defining the key future skills that matter for work, life, and education. The skills will go beyond traditional cognitive skills to include affective and behavioral skills,” Amit Sevak, the president and CEO of ETS, told Inside Higher Ed in an email. “We will start with a short list of skills related to how learners reason, create, collaborate, and persevere, among others. Given ETS’s position as the world’s leading assessment and measurement organization, the framework will also feature discussions of innovative assessment approaches to measuring learning and experiences gained from both in school instruction and out of school experiences.”
The Carnegie Foundation and ETS are hoping the project will culminate in a multistate pilot program, starting in about a year. During the pilot, the project leaders will work with educators and other stakeholders to observe assessments in action and evaluate their fairness and precision in capturing learned skills, as well as the way different classroom conditions impact the results and more.
While it is unclear what these potential assessment approaches will look like, Sevak noted that they will be “very different from the standardized tests we know today,” focused more on measuring progress than assigning a numerical score.
According to Long, this view is aligned with existing work in the realm of competency-based assessment; she said that traditional standardized tests rarely show off a student’s actual capabilities.
She used the example of a teaching candidate: if asked on a multiple-choice quiz how they would manage a pupil who was behaving badly, most education students would choose the correct answer—they would speak calmly to the child about their behavior. But that doesn’t show whether they could actually keep their cool under pressure in the same way a simulation might, Long said.
“We would lean heavily toward performance-based demonstrations of the competency,” she said. “We would want to put them in the situation and watch them do it.”
As if there weren’t already enough layoff fears in the tech industry, add ChatGPT to the list of things workers are worrying about, reflecting the advancement of this artificial intelligence-based chatbot trickling its way into the workplace.
The rate of layoffs is on track to pass the job loss numbers of 2001, the worst year for tech layoffs due to the dot-com bust.
As layoffs continue to mount, workers are not only scared of being laid off, they’re scared of being replaced all together. A recent Goldman Sachs report found 300 million jobs around the world stand to be impacted by AI and automation.
But ChatGPT and AI shouldn’t ignite fear among employees because these tools will help people and companies work more efficiently, according to Sultan Saidov, co-founder and president of Beamery, a global human capital management software-as-a-service company, which has its own GPT, or generative pretrained transformer, called TalentGPT.
“It’s already being estimated that 300 million jobs are going to be impacted by AI and automation,” Saidov said. “The question is: Does that mean that those people will change jobs or lose their jobs? I think, in many cases, it’s going to be changed rather than lose.”
ChatGPT is one type of GPT tool that uses learning models to generate human-like responses, and Saidov says GPT technology can help workers do more than just have conversations. Especially in the tech industry, specific jobs stand to be impacted more than others.
Saidov points to creatives in the tech industry, like designers, video game creators, photographers, and those who create digital images, as those whose jobs will likely not be completely eradicated. It will help these roles create more and do their jobs quicker, he said.
“If you look back to the industrial revolution, when you suddenly had automation in farming, did it mean fewer people were going to be doing certain jobs in farming?” Saidov said. “Definitely, because you’re not going to need as many people in that area, but it just means the same number of people are going to different jobs.”
Just like similar trends in history, creative jobs will be in demand after the widespread inclusion of generative AI and other AI tech in the workplace.
“With video game creators, if the number of games made globally doesn’t change year over year, you’ll probably need fewer game designers,” Saidov said. “But if you can create more as a company, then this technology will just increase the number of games you’ll be able to get made.”
Due to ChatGPT buzz, many software developers and engineers are apprehensive about their job security, causing some to seek new skills and learn how to engineer generative AI and add these skills to their resume.
“It’s unfair to say that GPT will completely eliminate jobs, like developers and engineers,” says Sameer Penakalapati, chief executive officer at Ceipal, an AI-driven talent acquisition platform.
But even though these jobs will still exist, their tasks and responsibilities could likely be diminished by GPT and generative AI.
There’s an important distinction to be made between GPT specifically and generative AI more broadly when it comes to the job market, according to Penakalapati. GPT is a mathematical or statistical model designed to learn patterns and provide outcomes. But other forms of generative AI can go further, reconstructing different outcomes based on patterns and learnings, and almost mirroring a human brain, he said.
As an example, Penakalapati says if you look at software developers, engineers, and testers, GPT can generate code in a matter of seconds, giving software users and customers exactly what they need without the back and forth of relaying needs, adaptations, and fixes to the development team. GPT can do the job of a coder or tester instantly, rather than the days or weeks it may take a human to generate the same thing, he said.
Generative AI can more broadly impact software engineers, and specifically devops (development and operations) engineers, Penakalapati said, from the development of code to deployment, conducting maintenance, and making updates in software development. In this broader set of tasks, generative AI can mimic what an engineer would do through the development cycle.
While development and engineering roles are quickly adapting to these tools in the workplace, Penakalapati said it’ll be impossible for the tools to totally replace humans. More likely we’ll see a decrease in the number of developers and engineers needed to create a piece of software.
“Whether it’s a piece of code you’re writing, whether you’re testing how users interact with your software, or whether you’re designing software and choosing certain colors from a color palette, you’ll always need somebody, a human, to help in the process,” Penakalapati said.
While GPT and AI will heavily impact more roles than others, the incorporation of these tools will impact every knowledge worker, commonly referred to as anyone who uses or handles information in their job, according to Michael Chui, a partner at the McKinsey Global Institute.
“These technologies enable the ability to create first drafts very quickly, of all kinds of different things, whether it’s writing, generating computer code, creating images, video, and music,” Chui said. “You can imagine almost any knowledge worker being able to benefit from this technology and certainly the technology provides speed with these types of capabilities.”
A recent study by OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, found that roughly 80% of the U.S. workforce could have at least 10% of their work tasks affected by the introduction of learning models in GPT tech, while roughly 19% of workers might see 50% of their tasks impacted.
Chui said workers today can’t remember a time when they didn’t have tools like Microsoft Excel or Microsoft Word, so, in some ways, we can predict that workers in the future won’t be able to imagine a world of work without AI and GPT tools.
“Even technologies that greatly increased productivity, in the past, didn’t necessarily lead to having fewer people doing work,” Chui said. “Bottom line is the world will always need more software.”
Faculty members at Eastern Illinois University voted to suspend their strike, as of 8 this morning, according to their union, University Professionals of Illinois.
However, the offer was not endorsed by the union’s bargaining team, because “the administration did not offer union members a chance to do work that was missed during the strike.” This type of provision is “a common piece of end-of-strike agreements,” the union said.
A vote on the agreement will take place next week.
Most Popular
Faculty strikes continue at Chicago State and Governors State Universities, and at Rutgers University at New Brunswick, Camden and Newark.
Texas senators are advancing three bills that would end tenure for future professors; ban what the legislation defines as diversity, equity and inclusion activities; and force colleges and universities to fire professors who “attempt to compel a student” to adopt a belief that any “social, political or religious belief is inherently superior to any other.”
All three only affect public institutions.
That third bill, Senate Bill 16, passed the Senate 18 to 12 Wednesday and is now in the House of Representatives. All Democrats voted against it, all present Republicans voted for it and one Republican senator, Phil King, was absent.
Most Popular
The other two bills, Senate Bill 17, on DEI, and 18, banning tenure, have already passed the Senate Education Committee.
None of the bills’ original lead sponsors returned requests for comment Thursday. The Texas Tribune, which has been reporting on the bills, said the University of Texas at Austin didn’t respond to a question about its interpretation of the legislation’s impact if it passes.
Florida has garnered much attention for Republicans’ targeting of DEI there, but Texas’s recent legislation reinforces that another large Southern state is putting it in the crosshairs.
Antonio Ingram, assistant counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, said, “It’s important to look at these bills in the context of what they would be doing as a trifecta.” He called them an attack on “multiracial democracy” in a state that has become majority minority.
He also noted the severity of the bills’ punishments.
SB 16’s required firing for attempts to “compel” beliefs would be despite tenure for any newly contracted professors—and SB 18 would bar tenure for professors anyway if they don’t have it by Sept. 1, 2023. SB 17, which bars what the legislation defines as DEI programming and training, would render a university ineligible for state money for a whole fiscal year if the state auditor determined it had “spent state money in violation.”
Senate Bill 16 includes this:
A faculty member of an institution of higher education may not compel or attempt to compel a student enrolled at the institution to adopt a belief that any race, sex or ethnicity or social, political or religious belief is inherently superior to any other race, sex, ethnicity or belief.
It then says,
If an institution of higher education determines that a faculty member of the institution has violated this section, the institution shall discharge the faculty member.
“It could be you have a student who is disgruntled with their grade,” Ingram said. “And they report to, you know, their school, ‘My professor is compelling me to believe certain topics, I want to bring a grievance.’ The only remedy for violating Senate Bill 16 is termination. There are no progressive penalties.”
Joe Cohn, legislative and policy director for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, said “removing tenure is an extraordinary penalty.”
“I think that there’s little doubt that the state can take measures to protect freedom of conscience, but they should be listening to stakeholders to do it carefully, with proportional consequences,” Cohn said. He said “reasonable people” could disagree on whether SB 16’s consequence, and it being a one-strike offense, is proportional.
He said SB 16 would be strengthened if lawmakers changed it to say, more specifically, that professors couldn’t compel students to “personally express” a belief that those students don’t hold.
SB 18 is the simplest bill, saying, “An institution of higher education may not grant an employee of the institution tenure or any type of permanent employment status” after Sept. 1.
It would allow universities to establish “an alternate system of tiered employment status for faculty members, provided that the system clearly defines each position and requires each faculty member to undergo an annual performance evaluation.” It doesn’t specify further how that could work.
Cohn urged the rejection of this legislation.
“I think the state should be extremely hesitant to end tenure moving forward,” he said. “You know, academic freedom is the lifeblood of higher education, and institutions of higher education can’t thrive in an environment where faculty don’t have strong academic freedom rights. FIRE has never taken the position that tenure is the only way to protect faculty’s academic freedom, but the state hasn’t proposed anything else to fill the void.”
“They’re just revoking tenure,” he said. “And in our experience, tenure has been one of the most important tools to defend the free speech and academic freedom rights of faculty who have disfavored views. And legislators who are concerned about the shrinking number of conservative voices in the academy should be wary about stripping one of the most effective protections that has prevented the academy from screening out dissenters.”
Jeff Blodgett, president of the Texas Conference of the American Association of University Professors, said, “Tenure is critical for preserving academic freedom, and the one mistake that some of the legislators make … is that they seem to think that faculty are not evaluated every year, and they are.”
Adam Kissel, a visiting fellow in higher education reform at the Heritage Foundation, has supported SB 18. He said Thursday that “tenure is this awful cliff” that effectively limits academic freedom.
He provided his testimony in support of SB 18 late last month to senators.
“Tenure is a make-or-break, all-or-nothing decision made first of all by their colleagues in their academic department,” Kissel said of junior faculty members. “If a junior scholar fails to earn tenure within about seven years, he is normally expected to leave the institution. As a result, junior faculty walk on eggshells for years. If they are too successful, they risk the jealousy of colleagues. If they are too innovative in their scholarship, they risk alienating their colleagues. If they are too outspoken about anything, or if they do not mimic their colleagues’ political and social views, junior faculty risk alienating the people who are going to vote on their future.”
SB 17 would ban “influencing hiring or employment practices at the institution with respect to race, sex, color or ethnicity, other than through the use of color-blind and sex-neutral hiring processes in accordance with any applicable state and federal antidiscrimination laws.”
It would also ban “promoting differential treatment of or providing special benefits to individuals on the basis of race, color or ethnicity” and “conducting trainings, programs or activities designed or implemented in reference to race, color, ethnicity, gender identity or sexual orientation, other than trainings, programs or activities developed by an attorney and approved in writing by the institution ’s general counsel and the office of the attorney general for the sole purpose of ensuring compliance with any applicable court order or state or federal law.”
That bill generally says the ban doesn’t apply if federal law requires something.
“DEI fundamentally has a remedial aspect,” Ingram said.
He said the University of Texas at Austin “didn’t let in Black undergraduate students until the 1950s, and so when you have that legacy of … state-sponsored exclusions, of course there are still gross disparities in Black and brown faculty on campus today, and in order to remediate those disparities you have to be intentional.”
Cohn said FIRE is generally neutral on that bill. He said it supports a section banning soliciting DEI statements in hiring.
“I think the state would be better off talking about, you know, how they should avoid compelling applicants or faculty who are up for promotion from being compelled to issue statements on any” political or ideological subject, he said.
“What you don’t want in your legislation is to fight political litmus tests by imposing your own, signaling … one and only one point of view,” he said.
In 1969, I was 11 years old, and I remember wanting to jump off a dock in the Thousand Islands where my parents and I vacationed one Labor Day weekend. It was so hot. I did not have my bathing suit on, just a top and shorts, and my mom said, “Take off your shirt and jump.” I couldn’t do it. I had already internalized a self-consciousness about my physical being. I had just started to develop. Already I had the awareness that something was happening to alter my perceptions of how to look, act and be at this otherwise tender age, especially with boys, some of whom had been my friends as long as I could remember. And with those perceptions, with that self-consciousness, came a sense of embarrassment and even something akin to shame.
Reading about the adverse experience of vulnerable young women and social networking, I am not sure much has changed. Society continues to set young women into various degrees of anxiety about body image. What intrigues me about these discussions, however, is how much we do not talk about those social influences that exist outside and apart from technology. Larger social forces set the context of unanswered questions and unaddressed concerns for young women. The sites exacerbate body image anxieties, but they do not create them. Technology, whether it is social networking or AI, becomes the target for a very complex mix of societal dynamics.
No doubt, technology plays a role. When the Meta whistle-blower Frances Haugen described in testimony before Congress how Mark Zuckerberg blew her off when she explained that Instagram acted in deleterious ways toward vulnerable teenage girls, I was as disgusted as I was not surprised by his failure to respond. The possessor of a preternatural teenage mentality himself, he could not be expected to think differently. For all his Caesar Augustus self-image, Mark Zuckerberg is a standard product of his adolescent male upbringing in a society that still, many decades later, has done very little to make teenage years for young women easy. Before we start setting rules that might truly impede innovation and handicap our ability to compete globally, let us be sure we know what influences are causes, in what contributing degree or kind and what are the concomitant effects on vulnerable young women and in some cases young men too.
Most Popular
I am not optimistic. If on matters of technology-influenced concerns, say the most benign of them all—a national data breach law—we cannot get federal consensus in Congress, can you imagine how anyone would be willing to take on the complexities of male and female teen-age socialization? I can hear the corporate campaign money members of Congress now: “What had you done to do deserve … a school shooting, a drug or alcohol dependency, an eating disorder, suicidal ideation, a teen-age pregnancy or responsibility for one?” The list goes on and on …
I am all for personal responsibility, but we now live in a society that has become increasingly allergic to sociological dynamics. Those dynamics are too hard to look at. They bring up too many ghosts. They expose feelings and behaviors that bring us sadness, disgust and regret. Better not to look. Just find the villain and knock him/her/it off. Critical race theory. Transgender adolescents. New technology. I am old enough now to remember how Bush père used Willie Horton and race in the 1988 presidential campaign, Bush Junior pounced on gays in 2004, and of course Trump used migrants in 2016. My bet is that we will hear a whole lot less about the issues that animate media today after the election in 2024. They will not be resolved. They simply will not be pumped up like helium balloons rising for distinctly political purposes.
Technological issues, too, will remain. I will be curious to watch how hypocritical we will, or will not, be to attack with vitriol the CEO of a foreign-owned and wildly successful social networking site for all the world to see when so much of our own U.S. terrain grossly fails privacy and security controls. Or what, exactly, will be done about section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Even though simple reform is available. A content moderation policy for every platform without substance except due process (i.e. consistency) and user means of communicating with platforms to address harms such as nonconsensual disclosure is all that is necessary. Still, Congress will do nothing. Too much money breathes into our representatives’ coffers from Big Tech that wants no regulation whatsoever, even lightweight and common-sense fixes.
I am intrigued by the targeting of technology, especially social networking and now AI, by politicians and commentators alike. In 2017, through the University of Massachusetts Bepress Scholar Works, I published a book about information technology in higher education. The title is Humanity’s Canvas. As we did with the internet, we are now doing with social networking and AI: throwing our humanity on a canvas and then we are shocked at what we see. In fact, we are so shocked that we must find villains to explain it.
We need to hold the mirror up to ourselves. If we do, we may see a very different picture. And might we also enjoy the benefit of that exercise. After a quarter century of “technology exceptionalism,” we may place technology in its property place. It plays a significant role, one that should be addressed as neither hero nor villain, but like so many other social, market and legal factors, the subject of much-needed public policy.
Fifty faculty members at Harvard University have created the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard.
In an op-ed in The Boston Globe, Steven Pinker and Bertha Madras detail the attacks on academic freedom nationally and note that Harvard has not been immune. Pinker is Johnstone Professor in the Department of Psychology. Madras is professor of psychobiology at Harvard Medical School.
“The embattled ideal of academic freedom is not just a matter of the individual rights of professors and students. It’s baked into the mission of a university, which is to seek and share the truth—veritas, as our university, Harvard, boasts on its seal,” they said.
Most Popular
“The reason that a truth-seeking institution must sanctify free expression is straightforward. No one is infallible or omniscient. Mortal humans begin in ignorance of everything and are saddled with cognitive biases that make the search for knowledge arduous,” they added. “These include overconfidence in their own rectitude, a preference for confirmatory over disconfirmatory evidence, and a drive to prove that their own alliance is smarter and nobler than their rivals. The only way that our species has managed to learn and progress is by a process of conjecture and refutation: Some people venture ideas, others probe whether they are sound, and in the long run the better ideas prevail.”
What will the new group do? “Naturally, since we are professors, we plan to sponsor workshops, lectures, and courses on the topic of academic freedom. We also intend to inform new faculty about Harvard’s commitments to free speech and the resources available to them when it is threatened. We will encourage the adoption and enforcement of policies that protect academic freedom. When an individual is threatened or slandered for a scholarly opinion, which can be emotionally devastating, we will lend our personal and professional support.”
“Harvard is just one university, but it is the nation’s oldest and most famous, and for better or worse, the outside world takes note of what happens here. We hope the effects will spread outside our formerly ivy-covered walls and encourage faculty and students elsewhere to rise up. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, and if we don’t defend academic freedom, we should not be surprised when politicians try to do it for us or a disgusted citizenry writes us off.”
Last year we reported some results from our comprehensive faculty survey on student transfer conducted at the City University of New York, the nation’s largest urban public university, with over 220,000 matriculated students across its 20 predominantly undergraduate institutions. Our findings were based on the responses of almost 3,900 full- and part-time faculty across community and bachelor’s-granting college sectors, for an overall response rate of 22 percent and a response rate among full-time faculty of 33 percent.
The central point of that piece was how little faculty across both sectors know about vertical transfer—transfer from community to bachelor’s colleges. Vertical transfer is the most common form of transfer, and it is important for promoting equity and social mobility in the U.S. Community colleges are where many low-income, underrepresented minority and first-generation college students start college. If those students want bachelor’s degrees—and at least 80 percent of them do —then they need to transfer from community to bachelor’s colleges.
Our data suggested that both community and bachelor’s college faculty lack basic information about the transfer status and challenges of their students, the transfer policies and practices that exist in their colleges and across the university, and the implications of those policies and practices for transfer student outcomes. We argued that what faculty don’t know or get wrong about transfer can inadvertently harm students.
Whereas our earlier post summarized general findings across community and bachelor’s college faculty, the focus here is on our central research question: What are the potentially consequential transfer-related differences in experiences and views of community and bachelor’s college faculty? As the sending and receiving colleges in vertical transfer, these two sectors are uniquely interlocked. Yet, by definition, they have different missions and goals and, in practice, they have different levels of power and influence. Bachelor’s colleges hold more cards in vertical transfer because only they have the power to deny students admission and credits—and ultimately the bachelor’s degrees they seek. If faculty from community and bachelor’s colleges have unequal power, little transfer-related information and different experiences, perceptions and concerns, then it can be very hard for them to come together to support transfer students in reaching their goals.
What we found, in fact, was pervasive, systematic differences between community and bachelor’s college faculty in what they know, do and perceive about vertical transfer matters, and what they think should be done, if anything, to facilitate vertical transfer.
Most Popular
In general, community college faculty reported being more aware of transfer-related matters than did bachelor’s college faculty. For example, 52 percent of community college faculty reported knowing which of their students are transfer-involved students compared with 32 percent of bachelor’s faculty. When asked how they know the transfer status of their students, 70 percent of community college faculty said that they ask their students directly, compared with only 21 percent of bachelor’s college faculty. Community college faculty reported being more engaged in transfer activities than bachelor’s faculty: for example, 36 percent reported communicating with colleagues from other colleges a few times a year on matters like course articulation and curricular alignment, compared with 27 percent of bachelor’s faculty.
Faculty perceptions of the support for transfer students also varied by sector. Community college faculty were more likely than bachelor’s faculty to report that there are opportunities at their colleges for vertical transfer students to get advice tailored for them (50 percent versus 38 percent). On seven-point scales where 7 means strongly agree, community college faculty were more likely than bachelor’s faculty to agree that bachelor’s faculty do not do enough to make vertical transfer students feel valued (averages of 4.6 versus 3.3). Community college faculty were more likely to report that, in some people’s minds, there is a stigma attached to attending a community college (averages of 5.4 versus 4.6).
Faculty perceptions about the value of community college coursework and student academic preparedness again varied sharply by sector. On seven-point scales, bachelor’s faculty were more likely than community college faculty to agree that students learn more in a bachelor’s course than a community college course with the same name (averages of 5.4 versus 4.5). Bachelor’s faculty were more likely than community college faculty to agree that it is sometimes advisable for vertical transfer students to retake courses in their major at the bachelor’s college even if they did well in those community college courses (averages of 3.9 versus 3.4). Bachelor’s faculty were also more likely than community college faculty to agree that bachelor’s-college starters are more academically prepared for advanced work than are community-college starters (averages of 5.0 versus 4.5).
The survey also asked faculty to indicate what aspects of the transfer process challenge students. In both sectors, faculty named getting transfer credits applied to bachelor’s degree requirements as the top challenge (63 percent of community college faculty and 57 percent of bachelor’s faculty), followed by having financial aid last until receipt of the bachelor’s degree. But after that, perceptions of major challenges diverged: 52 percent of community college faculty named being admitted to the desired bachelor’s major as a significant challenge compared to 36 percent of bachelor’s faculty, and 55 percent of bachelor’s faculty named getting credits evaluated in time to register as a major challenge, compared to 40 percent of community college faculty. Only 33 percent of community college faculty named getting good grades in bachelor’s programs as a major challenge, compared to 44 percent of bachelor’s faculty.
Clearly, faculty from both sectors see challenges in transfer. What do they think might improve the process? When asked whether the CUNY Central Office should do more to facilitate credit transfer, 57 percent of community college faculty said yes, compared to 40 percent of bachelor’s faculty; 4 percent of community college faculty said no, compared with 11 percent of bachelor’s faculty.
CUNY’s community colleges are open access, but CUNY’s bachelor’s colleges are selective to varying degrees. CUNY’s data show that its most selective colleges pose more challenges for transfer students than selective colleges, for example, by taking longer to evaluate accepted transfer students’ transcripts. To better understand the potential effects of selectivity of bachelor’s colleges, we compared the survey responses of faculty from the five most selective bachelor’s colleges with those of the other five (selective) bachelor’s colleges. In comparison with faculty from the selective colleges, faculty from the most selective colleges reported less engagement with transfer, less awareness of the conditions of transfer students, less support for transfer students in their colleges, less confidence in community college coursework and the academic preparedness of community college students, and less interest in resources or data to improve transfer.
These findings support these conclusions:
Where faculty sit, whether in community or bachelor’s colleges, in selective or most selective bachelor’s colleges, is where they stand on transfer issues.
Faculty from both community and bachelor’s college sectors care about vertical transfer, but they seem to care most about different things. Community college faculty are more concerned about how their students are treated at bachelor’s colleges; bachelor’s college faculty are more concerned about the level of academic preparedness of vertical transfer students. Both concerns are legitimate, but they are not aligned and therefore may conflict.
Given that faculty in different sectors tend to have different views, and that many faculty, especially bachelor’s faculty in the most selective institutions, do not perceive that transfer is a priority at their colleges, it is no surprise that it can be difficult for faculty to work together across institutions to smooth transfer paths.
The most selective bachelor’s colleges may be the least welcoming of interventions that facilitate and increase vertical transfer of all higher education institutions.
There is little reason to think that entrenched views, policies and practices are going to change spontaneously. For meaningful changes to occur, higher education leaders—especially those in bachelor’s-granting institutions—will need to make the case for facilitating vertical transfer and vigorously incentivize and support this work. Vertical transfer is not only an equity issue, it is also a window into institutional effectiveness. When vertical transfer doesn’t work—when prospective transfer students are given nonoptimal advice about course-taking, or bachelor’s faculty deny the transfer of degree-applicable credits—then students, their families, their communities and taxpayers—and ultimately the reputations and enrollments of the institutions themselves—all lose out.
Given the stakes in vertical transfer, if higher education leaders fail to act soon, then their institutions may lose highly valued autonomy in determining their own policies and practices, and state legislatures (as they already have in many states) may move in to fill the void.
Vita Rabinowitz, a social psychologist, is a Leadership Fellow of the Heckscher Foundation for Children and professor emerita of Hunter College. She is a former provost of Hunter College and former executive vice chancellor and university provost and interim chancellor of CUNY. Yoshiko Oka is a research analyst in the CUNY Office of Applied Research, Evaluation and Data Analytics. Alexandra W. Logue, an experimental psychologist, is a research professor at the Center for Advanced Study in Education, Graduate Center, CUNY, and a former executive vice chancellor and university provost of the CUNY system.
Eric Hsu remembers a time when he was 10 days away from payday and had just $32 left. He had no savings.
“I used the remaining money I had to buy loaves of white bread and I ate that for all three meals until my pay came in,” he told CNBC Make It.
“Sometimes I would think, I am not earning little, I would actually think I’m earning an upper-middle income salary. But I still feel really poor every month.”
Hsu belongs to a group of people in Taiwan, typically young and single workers, called the “yue guang zu” — the so-called “moonlight clan.”
The term describes being broke at the end of each month, or as Hsu describes it, “Money comes in from my left hand and out from the right.”
This behavior is very different from their parents’, who literally saved every single cent they have.
Chung Chi Nien
Hong Kong Polytechnic University
The term originated from Taiwan but is now also frequently used in mainland China and Hong Kong to describe the younger generation, said Chung Chi Nien, a chair professor from Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
An estimated 40% of young singles who live in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen are living paycheck to paycheck, according to a local report.
“This behavior is very different from their parents’, who literally saved every single cent they have. But the younger generation spends every single cent they have,” said Chung, who specializes in economic sociology.
The rising cost of living has put more individuals at risk of being in the “moonlight clan,” especially those with low income, said Chung.
While Taiwan’s inflation rate of 2.4% is much lower compared with many parts of the world, consumer prices and food costs are still on the rise.
For 34-year-old A-Jin, fixed expenses like insurance, utilities and transportation already take up “more than half” of her salary of 30,000 New Taiwan dollars (about $985) a month, she told CNBC Make It.
“I’d be left with NT$10,000 a month for food and other expenses. Eating out now costs around NT$300 a day. There is no way to save,” said A-Jin, who works in the service industry.
“If an emergency happens to me, like a car accident — I would not have any cash to deal with it.”
But for some others, it’s the “you only live once” mentality that’s encouraging them to spend what they can — even if it means taking on debt.
Ever since Hsu started working 10 years ago, the civil engineer struggled to accumulate any savings because he was trying to pay off his student debts.
“Instead of saving leftover money I had at the end of the month, I decided to pay off my debts instead,” according to CNBC’s translation of his Mandarin comments.
I did let it get out of hand and was like, since I have a credit card, let’s purchase a car while I have it.
But when a serious knee injury took him out of work for two weeks without pay, Hsu realized he was unable to support himself.
“I thought, since I can use a credit card to pay for things and make my life easier, why not?”
But before he knew it, he had as many as four credit cards and almost 70% of his salary each month was going into paying off such debts — leaving little left to save.
Hsu acknowledged that while half his debt was for necessary daily expenses, the other half was incurred because of his “lifestyle choices and desires.”
“I did let it get out of hand and was like, ‘since I have a credit card, let’s purchase a car while I have it,’” 38-year-old Hsu said.
“With online shopping, you also get exposed to a plethora of things you can buy and the fact that you can make purchases so easily did not help.”
The concept of “moonlight clan” reflects the disillusionment that young people feel about life these days, said Chung, the professor. It’s much like other terms that have gained popularity in China in the past two years, such as “tang ping” and “bai lan.”
“In the context of East Asia, the moonlight clan’s parents have experienced very successful industrialization and fulfilled their goals in their lives,” he added.
“But that is a different reality for this generation … they see the success of their parents, but simply cannot achieve it. There’s a huge gap between expectation and reality.”
The “moonlight clan” exists mainly because house ownership is no longer attainable for the young in Taiwan — thanks to the lack of affordable housing, said Chung.
It could be anything from buying a cup of coffee from Starbucks, to going on an overseas trip — things that will give you a small sense of happiness to compensate for the loss of an overall goal in life.
Chung Chi Nien
Professor, Hong Kong Polytechnic University
According to the U.N. Habitat, housing is considered affordable when the house-price-to-income ratio is 3.0 or less.
“The expectation to buy your own house, get married and build your own family is now way too far to reach,” Chung said.
“Young people would rather give up that dream and spend money on things they are guaranteed to get today.”
These things are called “xiao que xin” — which means “small, but very certain happiness” in Mandarin.
“It could be anything from buying a cup of coffee from Starbucks, to going on an overseas trip — things that will give you a small sense of happiness to compensate for the loss of an overall goal in life,” Chung told CNBC Make It.
Hsu agreed, sharing a common saying in Taiwan that describes the current state of affairs: “Houses are not for living, but for investing.”
“A three-bedroom now costs NT$20 million. How long do I need to save with my annual salary of NT$720,000?”
“You would only be serious about doing something if you have a strong goal. Without the possibility of buying a home, it’s like, ‘There’s no point making money if you don’t spend it,’” he added.
A-Jin said she has no long-term financial or life goals and has “completely given up” on buying her own home.
“As long as I have food to eat and my stomach can be full, I won’t die. That’s enough for me,” she said.
“Since everything else is impossible, I just think of how I can be kinder to myself, that’s all.”
For Hsu, he considers the toughest days to be behind him. After his experience, he canceled his credit cards two years ago and committed to saving one third of his salary each month.
To not know whether you have enough money for food until the next payday was a very scary state to be in — but that was my own doing and the punishment fits the crime.
However, he still considers himself part of the “moonlight clan” because he remains uncertain about whether he’d survive another emergency.
“I still have no long-term financial goals … My priority is to clear the remainder of my credit card debts. I am solely driven by the fear of going hungry again,” he said.
“To not know whether you have enough money for food until the next payday was a very scary state to be in — but that was my own doing and the punishment fits the crime.”
Harvard University announced a $300 million gift on Tuesday.
The funds, from business leader and philanthropist Kenneth C. Griffin, will support the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, which will be renamed in Griffin’s honor.
Most Popular
Counting the most recent gift, Griffin has given Harvard more than $500 million.
Apple founder Steve Jobs has continued to inspire even after his death in 2011. Just this week, in fact, Tim Cook — Apple’s AAPL current CEO and chief operating officer for a decade-plus under Jobs — mused in a GQ interview on life lessons imparted by his predecessor.
And now anyone who wants to get an intimate glimpse into Jobs’s wisdom and reflections on his life, which was cut short at just 56, can download a curated collection of personal correspondence, speeches and interviews — for free.
Cardinal Stritch University, in Milwaukee, will close at the end of the semester.
Dan Scholz, president of the university, said in a video message that he was “profoundly sad” and “devastated” by what he called a “necessary” decision.
“I wish there was a different path we could pursue. However, the fiscal realities, downward enrollment trends, the pandemic, the need for more resources and the mounting operational and facility challenges presented a no-win situation.”
Rutgers University faculty declared a strike Sunday night and are expected to appear on picket lines today.
The strike was called by the faculty unions at the Camden, Newark and New Brunswick campuses. It will be one of the largest faculty strikes in history, and the first ever at Rutgers.
More than 9,000 faculty members as well as part-time lecturers and graduate students are covered by unions on strike. They teach more than 67,000 students.
Most Popular
President Jonathan Holloway said the two sides were making good progress at negotiating a contract and classes would take place today.
The faculty unions disagreed. They released a list of items on which they are negotiating and the status of their proposals.
The unions are affiliated with both the American Association of University Professors and the American Federation of Teachers.
We are thrilled to announce the relaunch of our website, insidehighered.com. This major milestone allows our editorial team to provide even more forward-looking insights and services to the entire higher education community, empowering individuals and organizations to excel and transform learners’ lives. We have modernized its design, improved the user experience, added new features and implemented several security upgrades.
What’s New
For our readers, we changed the site’s navigation and structure to make it easier to explore our extensive coverage and find the news and information most important to you. We streamlined our pages for a smoother, more engaging reading experience, and the website is faster on all types of devices, from laptops to smartphones.
Frequent readers of our publication may notice our new logo on the site. We designed this logo in partnership with Times Higher Education (THE), which acquired Inside Higher Ed last year. The new design aligns the two brands while keeping Inside Higher Ed true to the bold and independent journalism that has defined our publication since our launch nearly 20 years ago.
What Remains
All of Inside Higher Ed’s hallmark news, op-eds, data, analysis and job-seeker services remain free and accessible to all. We will continue to cover all of higher education and write about the diverse topics our readers value. For those readers who have bookmarked specific articles and resources or like to search through our archive, we have brought our entire portfolio to the new site. The login process for members and registered users, including existing login credentials, is the same.
We hope you will take a moment to explore the new site and features today, and we would love to hear your thoughts on our new site. Please send your feedback to [email protected].
America’s employers added a solid 236,000 jobs in March, suggesting that the economy remains on solid footing despite the nine interest rate hikes the Federal Reserve has imposed over the past year in its drive to tame inflation.
The unemployment rate fell to 3.5%, just above the 53-year low of 3.4% set in January.
At the same time, some of the details of Friday’s report from the Labor Department raised the possibility that inflationary pressures might be easing and that the Fed might soon decide to pause its rate hikes. Average hourly wages were up 4.2% from 12 months earlier, down sharply from a 4.6% year-over-year increase in February.
Measured month to month, wages rose 0.3% from February to March, a tick up from a mild 0.2% gain from January to February. But even that figure signaled a slowdown from average wage increases in the final months of 2022.
Last month’s job gain marked a moderation from the sizzling 326,000 that were added in February.
“Today’s report is a Goldilocks report,’’ said Daniel Zhao, lead economist at Glassdoor. “It’s hard to find a way it could have been better. We do see that the job market is cooling, but it’s still resilient.’’
In another sign that might reassure the Fed’s inflation fighters, a substantial 480,000 Americans began looking for work in March. Typically, the bigger the supply of job seekers, the less pressure employers feel to raise wages. The result can be an easing of inflation pressures.
The percentage of people who either have a job or are looking for one — the so-called labor force participation rate — reached 62.6% in March, the highest level in three years. And the share of working-age Americans — those ages 25 to 54 — who have jobs rose to 80.7%, the highest point since 2001.
“Americans, by and large, are looking for work and finding it,” Zhao said.
In its report Friday, the government also revised down its estimate of job growth in January and February by a combined 17,000.
“The labor market continues to soften,” said Sinem Buber, an economist at the job firm ZipRecruiter. ”That should reduce inflationary pressures in the coming months and give the Federal Reserve greater confidence regarding the inflation outlook.”
Last month’s job growth was led by the leisure and hospitality category, which added 72,000. Among that sector’s industries, restaurants and bars gained 50,000.
State and local governments added 39,000, healthcare companies 34,000. But construction companies cut 9,000 jobs, that sector’s first such decline since January 2022. And factories reduced payrolls slightly for a second straight month, reflecting a slowdown in U.S. manufacturing.
Though unemployment remains higher for people of color than for white Americans, the unemployment rate for Black workers fell last month to 5% — the lowest jobless rate for African Americans in government records dating to 1972.
With job growth still brisk across the economy, many employers are still struggling to fill positions.
In North Carolina’s Outer Banks, Clark Twiddy said his family company, which sells property and helps homeowners rent to vacationers, still faces what he calls “the tightest job market of anyone’s lifetime.’’
Twiddy & Co. has sharply raised entry-level pay for seasonal workers — it hires 500 to 600 a year — to $18-$20 an hour from $13-$14 in 2019.
Service companies like his, Twiddy said, have to treat employees as respectfully as they do customers, knowing that the best ones have ample job opportunities elsewhere.
“There’s no algorithm that cleans up a bathroom or a kitchen,’’ he said. “We have to pay more. We have to train more. We have to engage more.’’
For his 175 full-time employees, Twiddy has offered perks — from allowing flexible work-at-home schedules to taking the staff on group trips to Nashville and Las Vegas.
His business is still booming, thanks to Americans’ pent-up demand to take vacations. Despite his higher costs, he said, “I’m making more money at what I’m doing than I’ve ever done.”
More than two years of labor shortages have led some companies to turn to machines to try to improve efficiency. Walmart, the nation’s largest retailer and private employer, for example, has embarked on a major push toward automation.
By the 2026 fiscal year, the company says it expects roughly two-thirds of its stores to be served by automation, with a majority of items that are processed through its warehouses to move through automated facilities. The change will involve robotic forklifts that unload goods from trailers instead of having workers do the manual work. Walmart said such moves will require roles that demand less physical labor yet could provide higher pay.
Despite last month’s healthy job growth, the latest economic signs suggest that the economy is slowing, which would help cool inflation pressures. Manufacturing is weakening. America’s trade with the rest of the world is declining. And though restaurants, retailers and other services companies are still growing, they are doing so more slowly.
For Fed officials, taming inflation is Job One. They were slow to respond after prices started surging in the spring of 2021, concluding that it was only a temporary consequence of supply bottlenecks caused by the economy’s surprisingly explosive rebound from the pandemic recession.
Only in March 2022 did the Fed begin raising its benchmark rate from near zero. In the past year, though, it has raised rates more aggressively than it had since the 1980s to attack the worst inflation bout since then.
And as borrowing costs have risen, inflation has steadily eased. The latest year-over-year consumer inflation rate — 6% — is well below the 9.1% rate it reached last June. But it’s still considerably above the Fed’s 2% target.
The Labor Department on Thursday said it had adjusted the way it calculates how many Americans are filing for unemployment benefits. The tweak added nearly 100,000 jobless claims to its figures for the past two weeks and might explain why heavy layoffs in the tech industry this year had yet to show up on the unemployment rolls. The Fed has expressed hope that employers would ease wage pressures by advertising fewer vacancies rather than by cutting many existing jobs.
The March numbers are the last jobs report the Fed will see before its next meeting May 2-3. But its policymakers will gain a clearer view of inflationary pressures next week, when the Labor Department issues reports on prices at the consumer and wholesale levels.
Some economists are holding out hope that the economy can avoid a recession despite the ever-higher borrowing rates the Fed has been engineering.
“Today’s job market does not look like one that’s about to tip into recession,’’ Zhao said. “I wouldn’t bet against the job market.’’
The U.S. stock market is closed Friday, April 7, for the Good Friday holiday, but the bond market will be briefly open.
Friday morning has seen the release of the monthly jobs report for March, a key piece of economic data that households, investors and industry leaders will be following for clues to how much further progress the Federal Reserve has been making in its inflation fight.
The numbers: The U.S. added a robust 236,000 new jobs in March, defying the Federal Reserve’s hopes for a big slowdown in hiring as the central bank struggles to tame inflation. The consensus economist forecast called for a nonfarm-payrolls expansion of 238,000.
The solid increase in employment last month followed a revised 326,000 gain in February and a gain of 472,000 in January.
While the increase in hiring was the smallest monthly rise in more than two years, the number of jobs created last month was much greater than is typical.
The U.S. economy has shown recent signs of stress.
The unemployment rate, meanwhile, slipped to 3.5% from 3.6% as more people searched for and found work. That’s another sign of labor-market vigor.
There was some good news in the report for the Fed, though.
Wage growth continued to moderate closer to level the Fed would prefer. Hourly wages increased a mild 0.3% last month, the government said Friday.
The increase in pay over the past year also slowed again to a nearly two-year low of 4.2% from 4.6% in February.
What’s more, the share of people working or looking for work rose a tick to 62.6%. That’s the highest labor-force participation rate since February 2020, the last month before the pandemic’s onset.
When more people look for work, companies don’t have to compete as hard for workers via higher pay.
Still, the U.S. has added a whopping 1 million–plus new jobs in the first three months of the year. The labor market is not cooling off as much as the Fed would like.
“ The Black unemployment rate fell to 5% last month, the lowest level since records began being kept in the early 1970s. ”
Key details: About one-third of the new jobs created last month — 72,000 — were at service-sector companies such as bars and restaurants whose employment still has not returned to prepandemic levels.
Americans are going out to eat a lot and spending relatively more on services than on goods.
Government employment increased by 47,000. Hiring also rose at professional businesses and in healthcare. Retailers cut 15,000 jobs.
Employment fell slightly in manufacturing and construction, or goods-producing industries, which are under more pressure from rising interest rates.
The strong labor market has benefited all groups, but especially Black Americans. The Black unemployment rate fell to 5% last month, the lowest level since records began being kept in the early 1970s.
Big picture: The ongoing tightness in the labor market could inflame inflation and even push the Fed to raise interest rates more than currently forecast to try to get prices under control.
Higher borrowing costs reduce inflation by slowing the economy, but most Fed rate-hike cycles since World War II have been followed by recession.
On the flip side, the U.S. economy is starting to show more signs of deterioration due to the series of rapid Fed interest-rate increases since last year.
If these trends continue the economy — and inflation — are bound to slow.
The U.S. is still growing for now, however, and the labor market remains an oasis of strength.
Low unemployment and rising wages have allowed Americans to keep spending. And so far they’ve keep the economy out of a widely predicted recession.
Looking ahead: “The U.S. labor market is losing some momentum, but remains far too vibrant for the Fed to pause [its rate-hike campaign] in May,” said senior economist Sal Guatieri at BMO Capital Markets
“Although job growth is gradually slowing, it remains too strong for the Federal Reserve,” said Sal Guatieri of PNC Financial Services.
Market reaction: Futures contracts on the Dow Jones Industrial Average YM00, +0.19%
rose 64 points, or 0.2%, to 33,723. S&P 500 futures ES00, +0.24%
gained 9.75 points, or 0.2%, to 4,141.75. Stock trading resumes again on Monday.
