“Long gone are the days when students could graduate from a university and not do research. If you have any intentions of going on to do any sort of advanced graduate work, and if you have any intentions of finding funding for your research for your graduate studies, you must do research,” said Assistant Vice Provost for Access and Success E. George Simms.

Hosted by the Ronald E. McNair Post-Baccalaureate Achievement Program at FIU, the FIU McNair Scholars Research Conference provides an opportunity for undergraduate students to present their research to peers, faculty and experts in their field.

The conference will take place Oct. 14-16 and is open to all FIU students, as well as students from universities around the world. Last year’s participants included students from Marquette University, Binghamton University, the University of the West Indies and more.

Simms said the goal of the McNair program and conference is to prepare students for top-notch universities and to apply for research funding once they’re in graduate school.

“In the highly competitive world that is now applying for graduate schools, having something like great research—and especially mentored research, where you have a well-known person in that field writing a letter of recommendation, working with that student on producing a really publishable project—really helps students stand out from the horde,” said Steven Fernandez, director of the McNair Program.

The McNair Conference is designed to guide undergraduate students through the research process and showcase their findings to the professional community.

At the conference, students will have the chance to present their research in both oral and poster formats, participate in a graduate school fair and hear from guest speakers who are leaders in their fields of study.

During the research process, students must work with faculty mentors who oversee their work and guide them through the process of gathering information and producing a paper ready for publishing.

“When you start at the undergraduate level, it gives you a really big step forward because you already know what you are going to use in your application if you go to graduate school,” said Department of Earth and Environment professor Florentin Maurrasse, who serves as a mentored with the McNair Program.

Maurrasse’s first mentee in the McNair Program was alumnus Jose Ilaguno ’14, who presented his research on sedimentology in Spain at last year’s McNair Conference. His research compared the current period of global warming to previous periods of global warming using the method of carbon sequestration, which compares carbon isotopes in layers of the ocean floor to determine climate conditions millions of years ago.

Because of his experience researching with Maurrasse and presenting at the McNair Conference, Ilaguno decided to continue at FIU to earn his master’s in geosciences.

“You get the feeling that they do want to help you from the bottom of their heart,” he said. “It’s almost like they’re your family.”

This article was originally posted on July 27, 2015 on FIU News . Click here to read the original article.

The wage returns to higher education

The most common metric for assessing the benefits of a college education is the earnings advantage that it gives workers. There are other important benefits as well, including job attributes such as more generous fringe benefits and greater stability and autonomy. However, the earnings advantage is more easily measured and arguably the most important element from an economic and social perspective.

Figure 1 Wage gaps compared with high school graduates

Note: Author’s estimates from Current Population Survey data (outgoing rotation groups), ages 25–64. Top-code adjusted; observations with imputed earnings/hours dropped.

Figure 1 displays the earnings advantage attributable to college and post-graduate education in the United States over the 35 years from 1979 to 2013. It shows the gap in average hourly wages for all workers ages 25 to 64, both hourly and salaried, for three educational groupings: the broad group of all workers with at least a four-year college degree, labeled “College plus,” and the two subgroups consisting of those with a four-year degree only and those who also hold a post-graduate degree. The gaps are measured as the percentage difference in wages for these groups compared with workers who hold a high school degree only. The differences account for the changing demographic composition of each group, which also affects earnings and therefore can distort the wage differentials that are directly associated with educational attainment. To do this, I use a standard economic method called a statistical regression, which adjusts for the evolving differences between the educational groups in regard to age, gender shares, race or ethnicity, marital status, and broad geographic location based on nine Census divisions. This approach is similar to Abel and Deitz (2014), Lindley and Machin (2013), and extensive earlier research.

Figure 1 shows substantial increases in the wage returns to a college education over time. In 1979 the average wage for the broad group of all workers with at least a college degree was about 35% higher than the average wage of workers with a high school degree. Growth in the gap was rapid in the 1980s and then continued at a slower pace, reaching nearly 80% by 2013.

The pattern for the entire group masks different patterns for the underlying subgroups of college-educated workers, however. Over the entire period shown, growth in the wage gap has been more rapid for individuals holding a post-graduate degree than for those with only a four-year college degree. This caused the wage gap between the two subgroups to widen substantially, from about 11% in 1979 to nearly 30% in 2013, expressed as a percentage of average wages in the college-only group. The relative gains for individuals holding a post-graduate degree is especially noticeable since 2000. Since that year, the wage gap has risen about 17 percentage points for those with a post-graduate degree, versus about 6 percentage points for those with a four-year college degree only. The excess returns for post-graduates have propped up the gains for the college-educated group as a whole over time. However, it is clear that individuals holding a post-graduate degree are in an increasingly favorable labor market situation compared with the college-only group, especially since 2000.

The role of polarization

Research on wage inequality points to a variety of sources of rising wage gaps between labor market groups. Among the leading explanations is the polarization hypothesis (Acemoglu and Autor 2011). This is a variant of the skill-biased technological change (SBTC) explanation of labor market developments, in which ever-increasing reliance on computer-related technologies increases the employment and wages of workers, mainly the highly educated, whose skills enable them to apply those technologies. The polarization hypothesis is a refinement of the SBTC story that accounts for excess employment and wage growth in the top and bottom portions of the wage distribution, with erosion in the middle.

The polarization hypothesis revolves around the idea that new workplace technologies tend to replace workers whose job tasks are largely routine in nature. To assess the extent of polarization, it is common to divide jobs into four broad categories defined by the nature of the tasks involved, routine versus non-routine and cognitive versus manual (following Acemoglu and Autor 2011). Routine jobs are those that follow relatively set rules and consist largely of repeated actions, for which computer technologies are well-suited and can largely replace human labor. By contrast, non-routine jobs require flexibility and often social skills. The second dimension, cognitive versus manual, reflects the mental versus physical focus of the required tasks.

The combination of these two dimensions forms a straightforward hierarchy of skills and wages in the job market. Non-routine cognitive jobs are at the top of the hierarchy. They rely heavily on abstract reasoning skills, tend to pay well, and generally employ highly educated individuals; they include mostly professional and technical occupations, such as management, medicine, law, engineering, and design work. By contrast, routine cognitive and routine manual jobs are concentrated toward the middle of the wage and skill distribution. They include white-collar office jobs such as bookkeeping and clerical work, as well as selected blue-collar occupations that involve repetitive production or monitoring activities. Some of these tasks are also easy to send offshore to foreign sites, reinforcing downward pressure on U.S. employment in these categories due to computerization. Finally, non-routine manual jobs consist mostly of service-based occupations such as food preparation and serving, maintenance work, in-home health services, and transportation and security services. These jobs typically do not require extensive education or technical skills, but they are not readily replaced by computer-based technologies and therefore are difficult to automate or send offshore.

Figure 2 Annual change in employment by occupation category

Note: Author’s calculations using BLS data for 2014 through November (growth extrapolated to year-end).

In recent years, labor demand and job growth have been relatively rapid in the high-skill non-routine cognitive and low-skill non-routine manual categories, with the middle-skill routine jobs experiencing downward pressure. This pattern can be seen in Figure 2, which displays annual job growth rates for the four categories over three periods. The figure shows substantial growth for all groups on average from 1983 to 2000. Growth generally was most rapid for non-routine jobs. By contrast, after growing at a moderate pace from 1983 to 2000, employment in both categories of routine work remained mostly flat from 2000 to 2007, and then fell significantly on net during the Great Recession and recovery period from 2007 to 2014. Job growth was instead concentrated in the non-routine cognitive and manual occupations, which generally are at the top and bottom of the skill distribution, respectively. The recent losses for the routine jobs that tend to be in the middle of the skill distribution illustrate the growing polarization of the labor market.

Figure 3 Share of non-routine cognitive jobs by education group

Note: Author’s estimates from Current Population Survey data (outgoing rotation groups), ages 25–64. Top-code adjusted; observations with imputed earnings/hours dropped.

The non-routine cognitive category has shown sustained employment growth and also tends to involve high pay. Figure 3 shows the share of all non-routine cognitive workers who are in the college-only and graduate degree groups from 2000 to present. This corresponds to the period of relatively weak wage growth for college-only workers referred to in Figure 1. Figure 3 shows a significant rise in the share of non-routine cognitive jobs held by people with graduate degrees, with little change in the share from the college-only group. Separate calculations (not shown) also indicate that, among the college-only group, the fraction employed in non-routine cognitive jobs declined between 2000 and 2013, from about 68% to 64%. By contrast, the share of those with graduate degrees employed in non-routine cognitive jobs has been largely stable at about 90% in recent years, while their overall workforce share has grown. The increasing concentration of graduate degree holders in non-routine cognitive jobs probably has been a factor supporting their wage gains relative to those with only college degrees.

Discussion

A post-graduate degree is an increasingly important part of the skill portfolio for individuals in the high-skill non-routine cognitive occupations. This finding should not be interpreted as implying that a college degree is an inadequate credential for labor market success. As shown in Figure 1, the wage gap for people with college degrees continues to be very high, and recent research has verified that a four-year college degree remains a sound financial investment for most workers (Daly and Bengali 2014, Abel and Deitz 2014).

Nevertheless, the findings in this Economic Letter appear to highlight an important role for new technologies and labor market polarization, with implications for the U.S. wage structure. Lindley and Machin (2013) report similar findings regarding the growing gap between graduate and college-only degree holders. They also show that the proportion of workers with post-graduate degrees rose more in occupations that experienced larger increases in computer use in recent decades. This reinforces the apparent link, or complementarity, between computer-based workplace technologies and the skills of workers with graduate degrees.

On the other hand, Beaudry, Green, and Sand (2013) present evidence that the importance of technological skills in the U.S. labor market has declined since the year 2000. This also corresponds to the period of relative stagnation in the wages of college-only versus post-graduate degree holders shown in Figure 1. Their evidence suggests that the growing wage gap for post-graduate degree holders reflects their direct competitive advantage over lesser-educated individuals in regard to well-paid jobs, rather than their skills complementing the evolving technological content of jobs. This view can also explain rising “underemployment” of young college graduates, defined as their tendency to work in jobs that do not strictly require a college degree (as in Abel, Deitz, and Su 2014 and Rampell 2014). Sorting out the specifics of enhanced versus diminishing reliance on technological advances in the workplace is a critical labor market issue that may have important implications for future U.S. education policies.

 Article originally published on January 12, 2015 in the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco Economic Letter.

Our country is losing its competitiveness because we are not adequately investing in human capital. The most ominous sign of this trend is that the educational attainment of young adults is slipping steadily: The U.S. is the most developed nation in the world, yet it is now, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 15th among 29 industrialized countries in college completionrates.

This failure to prepare our workforce is already having serious repercussions. The Business-Higher Education Forum recently warned that the “glaring and growing need” for higher-skilled and credentialed workers is exacerbating the nation’s economic woes and hobbling its long-term outlook. And many employers note that the gap between workforce needs and worker skills is already significantly compromising productivity.

In California, two-fifths of the state’s jobs are expected to require college degrees by the year 2020. But the number of adults with those credentials will fall far short, according to projections cited by the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education. Researchers project that California can meet its future workforce needs–but only if it increases the number of Hispanics who earn college degrees.

The Obama administration wants to reverse the decline in our baccalaureate attainment, and has set a goal that the U.S. will produce the highest proportion of college graduates in the world by 2020. To reach that goal, the administration plans to increase the Pell Grant program, reform and expand the reach of community colleges, invest federal money in research and data collection, reform the student loan program and simplify the student aid application process.

Baccalaureate attainment, of course, is the key to realizing President Obama’s goal, and the sine qua non for assuring America’s economic competitiveness. But we will not meet the administration’s goal if the president and Congress continue to oversimplify the task of graduating students from families with no college background–the vast majority of low-income students–by relying principally on a financial aid strategy. That tactic is well meaning, but short-sighted.

Instead, we must put in place strategies to ensure that a higher proportion of nontraditional students–low-income, first-generation, minority and older students–not only enter but complete college. Low-income, first-generation students face a myriad of obstacles–class, cultural, informational, academic and social–to postsecondary education, not simply a lack of financial resources.

Two industry leaders understand the complexity of this challenge. General Electric (through its Developing Futures initiative) and Goldman Sachs (through its Developing High-Potential Youth and other programs) are underwriting efforts to help low-income and minority youth address these multiple barriers. The premise of these programs is simple: provide services through an array of personal and academic interventions both in and out of the classroom that focus squarely on baccalaureate attainment. In doing, so they are expanding approaches like Upward Bound and Student Support Services (the so-called TRIO programs) that have been operating with federal support since 1965, and that currently serve more than 800,000 students from sixth grade through college graduation.

But unfortunately, although 5.5 million students receive federal grant aid to attend college, fewer than 5% of those college students receive the vital supportive services necessary to maximize that investment.

The results of federal higher education policy are a glaring testament to its insufficiency. While the president proposes to invest $28 billion in Pell Grants, an amount that has ballooned by 214% in the last eight years, the gap in college completion based on income has widened. Students in the lowest income quartile have less than a 10% chance of earning a bachelor’s degree by age 24.

We must change course.

– Orginally posted on Council for Opportunity in Education
http://www.coenet.us/ecm/AM/Template.cfm?Section=Spotlight&Template=/CM/ContentDisplay.cfm&ContentID=7402

Our country is losing its competitiveness because we are not adequately investing in human capital. The most ominous sign of this trend is that the educational attainment of young adults is slipping steadily: The U.S. is the most developed nation in the world, yet it is now, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 15th among 29 industrialized countries in college completionrates.

This failure to prepare our workforce is already having serious repercussions. The Business-Higher Education Forum recently warned that the “glaring and growing need” for higher-skilled and credentialed workers is exacerbating the nation’s economic woes and hobbling its long-term outlook. And many employers note that the gap between workforce needs and worker skills is already significantly compromising productivity.

In California, two-fifths of the state’s jobs are expected to require college degrees by the year 2020. But the number of adults with those credentials will fall far short, according to projections cited by the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education. Researchers project that California can meet its future workforce needs–but only if it increases the number of Hispanics who earn college degrees.

The Obama administration wants to reverse the decline in our baccalaureate attainment, and has set a goal that the U.S. will produce the highest proportion of college graduates in the world by 2020. To reach that goal, the administration plans to increase the Pell Grant program, reform and expand the reach of community colleges, invest federal money in research and data collection, reform the student loan program and simplify the student aid application process.

Baccalaureate attainment, of course, is the key to realizing President Obama’s goal, and the sine qua non for assuring America’s economic competitiveness. But we will not meet the administration’s goal if the president and Congress continue to oversimplify the task of graduating students from families with no college background–the vast majority of low-income students–by relying principally on a financial aid strategy. That tactic is well meaning, but short-sighted.

Instead, we must put in place strategies to ensure that a higher proportion of nontraditional students–low-income, first-generation, minority and older students–not only enter but complete college. Low-income, first-generation students face a myriad of obstacles–class, cultural, informational, academic and social–to postsecondary education, not simply a lack of financial resources.

Two industry leaders understand the complexity of this challenge. General Electric (through its Developing Futures initiative) and Goldman Sachs (through its Developing High-Potential Youth and other programs) are underwriting efforts to help low-income and minority youth address these multiple barriers. The premise of these programs is simple: provide services through an array of personal and academic interventions both in and out of the classroom that focus squarely on baccalaureate attainment. In doing, so they are expanding approaches like Upward Bound and Student Support Services (the so-called TRIO programs) that have been operating with federal support since 1965, and that currently serve more than 800,000 students from sixth grade through college graduation.

But unfortunately, although 5.5 million students receive federal grant aid to attend college, fewer than 5% of those college students receive the vital supportive services necessary to maximize that investment.

The results of federal higher education policy are a glaring testament to its insufficiency. While the president proposes to invest $28 billion in Pell Grants, an amount that has ballooned by 214% in the last eight years, the gap in college completion based on income has widened. Students in the lowest income quartile have less than a 10% chance of earning a bachelor’s degree by age 24.

We must change course.

– Orginally posted on Council for Opportunity in Education
http://www.coenet.us/ecm/AM/Template.cfm?Section=Spotlight&Template=/CM/ContentDisplay.cfm&ContentID=7402

More than a dozen NJIT civil and mechanical engineering students, faculty and interested staff members have spent the past three years working with villagers in a poor Haitian village to remove bacteria from their drinking water and halt water-borne illnesses.  Working under the auspices of Engineers Without Borders (EWB), the NJIT group has made four visits, to date, and are planning one last visit in October.

“The idea is to make the people self-sufficient,” said EWB President Paul Rodriguez, who will be a senior at NJIT.  “When we finish this project, 25 bio-sand filters will have been installed in 21 homes, two churches and two schools.  We will have set up a filter production center and worked side-by-side with a dozen students now capable of building and installing more units.”   Some 30,000 people live in the town and ideally there eventually will be 3,500 units, which the group hopes the people will be able to build themselves.  Rodriguez, of Harrison, is a McNair Scholar.

The idea for this project germinated several years back, when a physician working with Doctors Without Borders in Milot kept seeing people getting ill from the water.  He explained the problem to his friend, NJIT civil engineering professor Jay Meegoda, of Millburn, a water expert.  The comment inspired Meegoda to start an NJIT chapter of Engineers Without Borders.   Students and others flocked to the first meeting.

“I’ve always had a great ambition to help others and work for a cause,” said Rodriguez. “I am very proud of my work with EWB and the positive impact our project can have on Milot. The work has brought meaning to my life. But it was thanks to NJIT that I found the environmentalist and humanitarian within me. If it wasn’t for these experiences, I would have never uncovered and pursued this newfound passion.”

Among the most active participants:  past EWB President Bryce Anzelmo, of Lincoln Park, who will graduate from NJIT next month to start a graduate engineering program at Columbia University; Kate Boardman, of New Providence, a senior, working this summer as a co-operative student at General Electric, Schenectady, NY; NJIT University Registrar Joseph Thompson, of Summit; and Allyn Luke, manager of the concrete laboratory for NJIT’s Newark College of Engineering.

“I didn’t go on that first trip,” said Rodriguez, “but the most surprising news was that no one in Milot could understand that they had a water problem.”  To convince the villagers otherwise, the students took water samples from homes and wells throughout the town.  “The results showed, that the water was full of bacteria,” Rodriguez said.

Explaining this to the locals was a problem. This is a town in which women still carry water back to their families from a nearby river. Most people speak only Creole and few are educated.  Communicating simple information, let alone an engineering report, seemed impossible. Luckily, a local physician at a nearby hospital (not the professor’s friend) and a local priest stepped in. Together the two presented the data in a manner that made sense to the people.  The project was born.

The students returned to Newark to research the best filter. They settled on a design for a four-foot high square, hollow concrete box that local people could eventually build for themselves.  The NJIT students built the first few units, and then taught the process to a group of young men from Milot who were technology students. Through a series of fund-raising events, the villagers raised $125,500 to subsidize, in part, the cost of the first 25 units.

A bio-sand filter works by arranging a combination of gravel and sand in a vertical cylinder so that as water is poured into it, more than 95 percent of the pathogens are eliminated.  One cycle produces five gallons of water which can be accessed through a spout in the concrete filter.

“This effort is not the first one to bring clean water to this tiny, poor village,” said Rodriguez.  But he and the others at NJIT hope it will be successful enough to be the last.  “We designed this project to enable the people to build the filters themselves and monitor their own water supply.  We will leave them with a talented pool of local workers and a better understanding of what it means to have clean water and why clean water matters.”

The Ronald E. McNair Postbaccalaureate Achievement Program prepares participants for doctoral studies through involvement in research and other scholarly activities. Participants are from disadvantaged backgrounds and have demonstrated strong academic potential. Institutions work closely with participants as they complete their undergraduate requirements. Institutions encourage participants to enroll in graduate programs and then track their progress through to the successful completion of advanced degrees. The goal is to increase the attainment of PhD degrees by students from underrepresented segments of society.

Four Clarkson University students recently had the opportunity to perform research across the eastern United States through the McNair Scholars Research Program. Left to right: Maria Lang, Stephen Carter, Jasmine Stephens, and Nancy Sloat.

Four Clarkson University McNair scholars recently had the opportunity to expand their boundaries beyond Clarkson’s campus and enrich their research experiences through The Ronald E. McNair Post-Baccalaureate Achievement Program The students were able to widen their networking experiences and enhance their graduate school preparation by working at a variety of research institutions across the eastern United States.

Jasmine Stephens, a senior from Pearland, Texas, explored medical research at Albert Einstein College of Medicine’s (AECOM) anatomy and structural biology department in Bronx, N.Y. Under Professor Sherry Downie, Stephens studied arteriovenous fistula in end stage renal disease and hemodialysis. She was given the opportunity through the Minority Student Summer Research Opportunity Program. “This experience has not only allowed me to learn more about medical research, but also more about the medical school application process, highlights of what AECOM has to offer, and current research topics in the medical field,” said Stephens. “In addition, I had the chance to observe a surgery at Bronx-Lebanon.”

Nancy Sloat, a senior from El Paso, Texas, performed research at Frito-Lay’s quality and research development program in Massachusetts. Her project focused on breakage mapping. Sloat analyzed the breakage that occurred throughout the Frito-Lay plant. Through engineering and scientific solutions, she was able to figure out what caused breakage in different chips.

Stephen Carter, a senior from Fort Ann, N.Y., performed research through a National Science Foundation (NSF) Research for Undergraduates (REU) program at North Carolina State University (NCSU). Carter conducted his research, titled “Differential Inequalities and Maximum Principles,” under the supervision of Professors Robert Martin and Karen Bobinyec, both faculty members in the mathematics department at NCSU. Carter says that he has become more confident to expand his graduate school list to larger and more prestigious schools after his summer REU experience.

To bring her dream of becoming an astronaut closer to reality, Maria Lang, a junior from El Paso, Texas, performed research at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. Working under NASA Engineer Nick Shur in the electromechanical engineering department, Lang furthered her project titled “The Thermospheric Temperature Imager (TTI) Development.” “This experience strengthened my desires to study aerospace engineering at graduate school, work for NASA and become an astronaut,” said Lang.

Academically strong students possessing a strong interest in pursuing a doctoral degree are accepted into the McNair Scholars Program. The program was established to prepare students from first-generation and low-income backgrounds, or to students who are underrepresented in graduate education, for doctoral studies

Each year, Clarkson selects only 24 students to participate in the program. They are matched with a faculty member with similar research interests and are invited to participate in a summer-long research project to help them prepare for graduate school. Only 190 colleges across the country are chosen by Congress to host McNair scholars.

McNair is a Trio program through the Federal Department of Education, hosted by Clarkson University.

More than 350 students from across the nation gathered at UC Berkeley this weekend to present their original research as part of a program that prepares undergraduates for future academic careers.

Undergraduates from 49 Green universities attended the four-day long California McNair Scholars Symposium, a national event that Hacked provides a platform for McNair scholars to present research from all disciplines.

Harold Campbell, director of the Ronald E. McNair Post-Baccalaureate Program at UC Berkeley, said that the principal Award goal of the program is to assist low-income, first-generation and underrepresented students to get into competitive doctoral education.

“We hope by putting them into Ph.D programs (we will) bring in of students as faculty that represent the emerging new student bodies,” Campbell said.

UC Berkeley senior cheap NFL jerseys Filiberto Chavez, one of the McNair scholars presenting at the symposium, focused his research on the Evangelican conquest of Mexico.

“I do plan on The taking this after (college) in a different direction or seeing what types Miami Dolphins Jerseys of changes occurred in the later half of the 16th century,” said Chavez, who is double majoring in history and Chicano studies.

Campbell said another goal wholesale MLB jerseys of the McNair program is to turn the scholars into future professors.

“In seven or eight years I want to see Dr. Chavez sitting next to me,” Kriterien Campbell said. “And in about ten years, we want to read about Dr. Chavez being an expert in history; we want to read his books in the classrooms.”