Two years ago, 54 percent of Republicans told Pew colleges had a positive impact on the direction of the country, according to that survey. That fell to 43 percent last year and 36 percent this year. Democrats, meanwhile, have gradually become more positive about higher education, with 72 percent this year viewing higher ed as having a positive effect, up from 65 percent in 2010.
Even so, observers on both the left and the right said the Education Next findings are interesting but not necessarily surprising.
A year ago this week, a white man named Garry from North Carolina called C-SPAN to talk to a black guest about his racial prejudices. He confessed that he feared black people and wondered aloud how he might change. The guest, Heather McGhee, the president of Demos, a progressive public policy organization that advocates for equality, listened thoughtfully, nodding slowly.
Voting rights advocates fear that counties carrying out aggressive purges under legal duress will push officials to purge eligible voters.
"In a lot of these settlements, the push to remove people from the rolls may result in a lot of mistakes," Cameron Bell, an attorney for the liberal think tank Demos, said after fighting a lawsuit in Broward County, Florida. "That’s why Demos got involved, to make sure the parties weren’t reaching settlements that would lead to mistakes that would disenfranchise eligible voters."
While families across the country are sending their children back to school, immigrant families are under particular stress thanks to President Trump, who just pardoned Joe Arpaio, a former Arizona sheriff who openly racially profiled Latinos in “immigration patrols.”
[A] study by Demos, a progressive think tank which supports AVR, found that the population of voters who came onto the rolls automatically was less white than the population registered under the opt-in system.
“If we care about getting more people to and through college, we can’t do it on the cheap,” said Mark Huelsman, a senior policy analyst at Demos, a left-leaning think tank. “We’re not going to get the outcomes we want, unless we put in the public investment necessary to do so.” [...]
And all this inequality in wages, both now and stretching far back into the past, helps create one of the most gaping racial divides of all: the wealth divide. The median wealth for a white two-parent household with children was $161,300 as of 2013 — 8.5 times as big as that of the median Hispanic household and 10 times as big as that of the median black household, as the left-leaning think tank Demosreported earlier this year.
One year ago, a North Carolina white man named Garry Civitello called into C-SPAN. A black woman, Demos president Heather McGhee, was on the air. [...]
McGhee believes that Civitello's journey over the past year has assisted in reversing some of his long-held racial stereotypes, and has made him a more empathetic person.
Mark Huelsman, a senior policy analyst at Demos, a left-leaning think tank, described the propensity of elite institutions to admit wealthy students or those with a familial connection as “the affirmative action we just don’t talk about.”
From the day he launched his campaign with dire warnings about border-crossing “bad hombres,” Donald Trump has preyed on some Americans’ worst biases around immigration. Trump has since exhorted Congress to allocate tens of billions of dollars for a border wall, stepped up arrests of immigrants, separated Latino children from their parents, and pushed to expedite deportations. [...]
Some, like Mark Huelsman, a senior policy analyst at Demos, a left-leaning think tank, say the rankings’ incentives push colleges to take steps that often come at the expense of educating a wider swath of qualified students.
“If you’re a college and you’re offering a very low level of prospective debt to students, that means nothing if the people who overall have more unmet financial need, or are more likely to have to borrow, can’t get into your institution,” said Mark Huelsman, a senior policy analyst at Demos, a left-leaning think tank.
Rankings can also subtly push colleges away from spending on financial aid for needy students and, instead, toward things rewarded by the rankings, like small faculty-to-student ratios, Huelsman said. [...]
The Congressional Black Caucus budget should be implemented because it calls for racial equity in future infrastructure and investments; improving public transit infrastructure, noting that people of color are heavy users of it; and school infrastructure, saying that modernized buildings held reduce achievements gaps.
The need for books as a source of knowledge was on display in a conversation between Heather McGhee, president of liberal think tank Demos, and Chris Hayes, a Brooklyn native and cable news pundit on MSNBC. [...]
"These consumer protections are important, yet they are far from sufficient to prevent credit checks from becoming a barrier to employment," said Amy Traub, a senior policy analyst at Demos, a public-policy think tank in New York City. "My research finds that poor credit is linked to economic stress. Weak credit is correlated with unemployment, lack of health coverage and the presence of children in a household.
TRANSITIONS -- Arlene Corbin Lewis has joined the D.C. office of the public policy think tank, Demos, as the director of communications. She previously was at the Case Foundation where she was the VP for communications
Even before the Equifax breach, the integrity of credit reports was murky at best. A Federal Trade Commission report found that as many as one in five consumers had a credit error from one of the top reporting agencies (Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion). But the fundamental problem isn’t data integrity—it’s economic justice. According to a survey by the think tank Demos, declining credit was associated more with misfortunes and unforeseeable crises than with a lack of financial responsibility.
Another solution — though one that is often a struggle to achieve — is to unionize, which has worked before in industries like teaching, policing, and manufacturing. “If retail workers were able to organize strong unions across the country, there’s no reason retail jobs couldn’t be good jobs like manufacturing jobs,” Amy Traub, Associate Director for Policy and Research at public policy organizationDemos, tells Bustle.
