Infographic Friday

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Happy National Insurance Awareness Day!

From Visually.

Happy National Sunglasses Day!

Good news for college graduates

Of course, they probably have to move to cities to earn these salaries. I wonder what the median salary is? From CNN Money.

Starting salary for the class of 2018: $50,390

There should be a lot more job openings for the college class of 2018, but starting salaries won't be much higher than last year. 

Graduates with a bachelor's degree can expect to earn an average of $50,390 annually in their first jobs, according to a new survey by consulting firm Korn Ferry, little changed from the previous year. 

"With the 2018 US inflation rate hovering just over 2%, real wages for this year's grads are virtually flat," said Maryam Morse, Korn Ferry Senior Client Partner.

But it should be easier to find a job than in previous years. The unemployment rate recently dropped below 4% for the first time since 2000.

Pay will vary by industry. Those in science, technology, engineering and math-related fields earn significantly more than average. 

For example, the survey found that average pay for entry-level software developers is $67,236, while customer service reps start at just $35,360. It analyzed salaries across 310,000 entry-level positions from about 1,000 organizations across the country. 

Another big variable is where you live.

Turmoil over post-tenure review

At the UT campus. Has the new policy put academic freedom down a slippery slope? Or allowed faculty to shine and/or improve? From the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Frustrated Faculty Struggle to Defend Tenure Before It’s Too Late

Professors in Tennessee have seen that contempt play out close to home. Knoxville faculty still remember when, three years ago, the system president presented a cost-cutting plan that called for enacting a "de-tenure process." Joseph A. DiPietro quickly walked back the phrasing, but the damage was done. It was a move that, in hindsight, served as a harbinger of the climate to come. A year later, in 2016, lawmakers cut the funding for the Office of Diversity and Inclusion on the Knoxville campus. 

Since then, battles have continued, over an effort to outsource the facilities operations of the system’s campuses, a proposal to sharply downsize the Board of Trustees and strip it of faculty and student representation, and bills that would have made humanities courses optional for students or required professors to post their syllabi and required readings online.

"There’s just greater micromanaging by the board and legislators," said Bruce Mac­Lennan, an associate professor of computer science who has been at Knoxville for 31 years. "This is a pattern we’ve seen over many years." 

And it’s not just in Tennessee. In recent years, lawmakers or college governing boards have altered professors’ expectations of what tenure means at public institutions in places like Wisconsin, Arkansas, and Kentucky. And top administrators at many colleges have supported tougher post-tenure review polices, like the one approved in late March in Tennessee, that faculty worry will begin to weaken tenure’s protections. Tenure is already something that most of the professoriate can’t count on; only about 30 percent of professors are employed with tenure or are on track to earn it. 

The Tennessee policy, unforeseen by faculty, baffled professors from the outset — largely because the system’s current post-tenure review policy, strengthened after two years of discussion and triggered by poor annual evaluations, was only four months old. It had yet to be added to the faculty handbook. The proposal also angered them because it included a single sentence that initially gave the board the power to direct the administration to conduct a review of a tenured professor at any time. And it was buried in a document nearly 50 pages long. 

"For a change of this significance, there should have been some warning," MacLennan said. 

The proposed policy sparked a turbulent chain of events here, including a hastily called town-hall meeting for faculty to plot out a plan to fight back, a rally that drew about 100 people, and a faculty survey that laid bare the opposition — 77 percent of the faculty who responded said they were against it.

Happy National HVAC Tech Day!

HVAC Industry Infographic [Infographic] by the team at TimePayment

Average student debt

Across the country. From MSN.com.

The Average Student Loan Debt in Every State

Average Student Loan Debt in Tennessee: $26,981

• 60 percent of graduates have debt

• Tennessee's ranking for average student loan debt rose three places from the prior year to 34th-highest this year. The state was tied for 18th-highest percentage of graduates with debt.

Beautiful? Really?

Happy National Martini Day!

From Visually.

We were talking about college graduates leaving Iowa

When I lived there almost 30 years ago. It's still going on. All the young people seem to be moving to cities. From Slate.

Oh, the Places You’ll Go! What the selectiveness of your college says about where you’re likely to move after.

“There seem to be two different migrations going on,” observed Robert Kelchen, a professor at Seton Hall and author of a January paper on interstate migration of young graduates. “The selective schools seem to be sending a lot more graduates to the coast, and the less selective schools seem to be sending graduates, when they go out of state, to the Sun Belt states.” 

It’s not that big research universities that are easier to get into, like Oklahoma State or Texas A&M, aren’t sending kids to these high-gravity cities—but by and large their graduates are more likely to wind up moving nearby. For U.S. colleges, this pattern is the norm rather than the exception. More than half of recent University of Memphis grads stay in Memphis; more than half of Southern Methodist grads stay in Dallas. 

All this is fuel for a familiar debate in state legislatures when it comes time to debate how much to fund higher education. Lower-tier universities often advertise the fact that their graduates wind up sticking around, while higher-tier universities counter that while they may send grads nationwide, they’re also magnets for smart people from other states.

As Douglas Webber, a professor at Temple, reminded me, there is yet another divide among young college graduates that helps explain different data sets—the one between older and younger millennials. High-cost cities may be raking in young college graduates who are so-called job-first movers, but at some point, housing costs may drive them away. Where do they go next? Probably to low-cost Sun Belt metros, just like their parents. 

The Emsi data—which appears to show “creative class” cities hoovering up young co-eds—doesn’t always jibe with some big, long-term shifts underway between states. According to American Community Survey data compiled by Kelchen and Webber, college graduates between 2013 and 2015 were flowing out of the Midwest and the Northeast and into Washington state, Hawaii, California, Colorado, North Carolina, and Nevada. (Why Nevada? Likely because its low total number of graduates—the state had only 25,000 resident, Nevada-born graduates in 2010—translates any migration increases into bigger percentage gains.) In some places, like New York, highly educated immigrants make up for the loss of native-born grads. 

The overriding trend, though, is that college graduates are moving to big cities. And what the states battling persistent, long-term brain drain of young graduates have in common—the bottom five are the Dakotas, West Virginia, Iowa, and Mississippi—is a lack of them. Dual-earner couples have a much easier time in big labor markets. They’re flocking, above all, to places where they exist. 

Happy National Flip Flop Day!

by ZocDoc.

From Visually.

Happy Flag Day

From Visually.

Two Tennessee cities

Make this list of the fifty worst cities to live in. Cities had have population over 50,00 and nine categories were examined: crime, demography, economy, education, environment, health, housing, infrastructure, and leisure. Detroit and Flint Michigan topped the list, with St. Louis third. God help me, I love lists like this. From 24/7 Wall Street.

50 Worst Cities to Live In

36. Knoxville, Tennessee
> Population: 186,238
> Median home value: $128,000
> Poverty rate: 25.4%
> Pct. with at least a bachelor’s degree: 35.1% 

About one in every four Knoxville residents live in poverty, well above the 14% share of Americans and the second highest poverty rate of any large city in the state. Poorer areas often struggle with crime, and in Knoxville, both violent and property crimes are more than twice as common as they are nationwide. 

While the city struggles with low incomes and higher crime rates, the home of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville also has some positive attributes common in college towns. For example, 35.1% of residents have a bachelor’s degree, a larger share than is typical nationwide. Additionally, the city has a greater than average concentration of bars and restaurants than the United States as a whole. 

4. Memphis, Tennessee
> Population: 652,752
> Median home value: $96,800
> Poverty rate: 26.9%
> Pct. with at least a bachelor’s degree: 25.6% 

In Memphis, serious financial hardship and high crime rate detract from the overall quality of life of many residents. Some 26.9% of area residents live in poverty, the largest share of any city in the state and well above the 14.0% U.S. poverty rate. Poorer cities often struggle more with crime, and Memphis is no exception. There were 1,830 violent crimes in the city for every 100,000 residents in 2016, a higher violent crime rate than in all but three other U.S. cities and nearly five times the comparable U.S. violent crime rate.

Two of the top ten

Are in Iowa. I haven't been to Ithaca or Ann Arbor, but I've visited the rest. From Realtor.com.

The Best Affordable College Towns for Recent Grads—and Everyone Else

"People go [to college towns] with the intention of pursuing a degree ... but find these places have lots of the advantages of much larger places," says Blake Gumprecht, author of "The American College Town." He's also a graduate of the University of Kansas, in Lawrence, one of the towns that made our list. 

To find these top college towns best suited to putting down roots, we looked at the 700 largest markets around the country. We included only those with at least one four-year university with at least 10,000 undergraduates. Then we ranked them based on a variety of factors, including their percentage of college students, unemployment rates, home appreciation, and median income.* 

The biggest cities didn’t make our list—they're so large that the percentage of students isn’t as dominant as in smaller communities. In case you're wondering, if we had simply  looked at the country’s 50 largest metropolitan areas, Boston, the nation's ultimate college mecca, would come out on top, thanks to schools such as Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Boston University. But with so many other nonstudent residents, nearly 675,000 just in its city limits, Boston didn't make our list.

Goals

The golden fleece of management mythology. Could the work we put into writing goals be put to better use. Hmmmm. From Amy Leschke-Kahle, writing in Forbes.

The Myth of Goals: An Honest Observation of What We All Wish Was True

Have you ever asked yourself why the goals we set last year somehow became virtually irrelevant by about March? Aren't goals supposed to be impermeable in helping us align, get the right work done, and create a means for measuring performance? Wouldn't it be great if goals made all those things happen? 

It's not that goals in and of themselves are bad; it's just that we use them badly.
Here are a few things to consider that will reveal how your organization is thinking about goals – and if they are truly achieving what you set out for them to do. 

Myth #1: SMART goals are smart 

While SMART (Specific Measurable Achievable Realistic Timely) goals were designed to standardize the goal development process, most SMART goals are actually not so smart. Do you have a valid, countable metric that determines success or did you make up a metric so you could check your "M" box? Are you confident that the work can be done in the specified time frame so you have a "T" or did you just guess? SMART often forces us to smoosh our work into a confining framework that often doesn't fit the actual work to be done. Sure, sometimes our work is SMART-worthy in which case we should absolutely use SMART. But let's not make everyone force fit their big chunks of work into a model that only works some of the time. 

Myth #2: Everyone should have goals 

If something is good for someone – it should be good for everyone, right? If only humans were that simple. Most people perform cycle work. Even highly skilled knowledge workers such as nurses, mechanics, and software engineers often do the same type of work every day. The context may change, but the work itself is doesn't really vary most of the time. So, goals really may not serve them. Why then should people whose work doesn't merit unique projects be forced to make goals? 

Myth #3: Measuring goals indicates employee performance 

The reason many organizations require employees to have goals is because they don't consider what else they could measure. At least goals give us something. But how much of your employee's time at work is spent working on the work outlined in "goals"? And does having more goals really mean more productivity? It's rare an employee's entire job is spent working on super specific, well planned out work. We have three big chunks of our jobs:

Infographic Friday

Seven regrets?

I've had a few. But then again too few to mention....What would you change if you could do college over? I don't suppose waiting until word processing existed would be an option. From Campus Grotto.

The 7 Deadly Regrets of Former College Students

After four years of college, you sit at graduation and realize just how fast the time went. During this time, a slight sense of anxiety sets in as you begin a new chapter of your life and you realize all the opportunities that were presented to you in college have come to an end. As your college life comes to a close, it is easy to think of the things you could have done, rather than what you did do. 

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”
- Mark Twain 

Here are 7 of the biggest regrets from those who went to college. This article isn’t meant for college grads to regret any lost opportunities they had in college, but rather to inform current and future college students of what former college students wish they had done differently.... 

1) Wish they had gone to class more 

Whether it is boredom, lack of a challenge, scheduling the class too early, or simply having no interest in the subject matter, the excuses for not going to class can pile up. If you realized just how much you are actually paying per class, you’d be more inclined to go and get your money’s worth. 

While some classes for your major will be required, you are free to choose from a wide selection of classes to make your class schedule more stimulating. Take classes that sound interesting or select subjects that are totally new to you, maybe you will stumble upon something you had no idea you liked or you even know existed. Taking a variety of classes will open you up to new ideas, new people, new professors, and will help keep your mind fresh rather than overtaxing yourself on a single subject

While correlation doesn't mean causation

It's probably a good bet that Tennessee Promise increased community college graduation rates. And that's a good thing. There is still much room for improvement, just like there is for university graduation rates. From The Tennessean.

Community college graduation rates jumped after Tennessee Promise, numbers show

About a quarter of all 2015 Tennessee Promise students received a college degree after five semesters in the program, according to newly compiled data on the program. 

The 21.5 percent of students that graduated through five semesters, while still low, is a big jump over the previous year's community college graduation rate in 2014, when the program didn't exist, according to Tennessee Board of Regents numbers. 

The 2015 graduation numbers were almost seven points higher than the 2014 group. 

The popular statewide program, whose first class began in fall 2015, is a "last dollar" scholarship that provides tuition-free community and technical college to Tennessee students. 

The numbers show that overall, 3,257 students in the 2015 cohort earned a degree or certificate within five semesters, an 82 percent increase over the students in the 2014 cohort before Tennesse Promise. 

The newly released numbers also show the number of students who earned a degree or technical certificate through five semesters increased from 1,790 in the 2014 group of students to 2,857 in the 2015 TN Promise group, a 60 percent increase.

The middle of nowhere in Tennessee

Is here. From 24/7 Wall St.

The Middle of Nowhere in Every State

42. Tennessee

> Middle of nowhere: Clark Creek terminus, Rocky Fork State Park
> Distance from nearest city: 3 hours, 8 minutes
> GPS coordinates: 36°05'15"N, 82°35'15"W

Higher education eh...

Like Liberals threatened to do, college students are looking at Canadian colleges and universities. I bet there are very few lazy rivers on campus, though. From The Pacific Standard.

MORE AMERICAN STUDENTS ARE BEING LURED TO CANADIAN UNIVERSITIES

When Jacob Klemmer was deciding which college to attend, he made a deal with his parents: If Klemmer attended a university in Canada, they would pay all his costs; if he chose an American college, he would have to pay the difference. 

Klemmer's choice, to attend McGill University in Montreal, saved his family thousands of dollars and has allowed him to attend college debt-free. 

"That wasn't the only factor," says Klemmer, 19, who is now studying computer science at McGill. "Rent is also very cheap here, so very few students live in student housing after the first year. Also, I'd be lying if I said the drinking age [18] isn't a plus." 

Klemmer is part of a growing trend among college-bound Americans who are heading north for their post-secondary education. Klemmer is a native of Middlebury, Vermont; his two roommates are from Long Island and Colorado. The Canadian government issued 6,349 study permits to Americans in 2016, up from 5,683 the previous year. (Final figures were not yet available for 2017.) All three roommates point to skyrocketing tuition rates in the United States as their reason for expatriating.

Americans owe nearly $1.2 trillion in student loan debt, higher than car and credit card loans and second only to mortgage debt. After completing a four-year degree, the average college graduate will have to repay more than $37,000. 

With the favorable exchange rate, McGill costs American citizens about half of what a student might pay at an American private college. That includes room and board and mandatory health insurance—the latter provided for a nominal fee. For those with dual citizenship, like Klemmer (who's mother is Canadian), it's even cheaper. Klemmer's in-country tuition of about $9,000 a year includes rent and utilities. He would have had to pay almost $33,000 to attend the University of Vermont.

Happy National Leave the Office Early Day!

From Visually.