Infographic Friday

Tennessee's most iconic

Restaurant? I might have thought of the Bluebird Cafe but at least I had the city correct. From MSN.com.

The Most Iconic Restaurant in Every Single U.S. State

Tennessee: Loveless Café 

Since 1951, this charming, family-run café in southwest Nashville has been known for checker-clothed tables and some of the best biscuits, country ham and gravy the South has to offer. 

8400 Tennessee Highway 100, Nashville; 615-646-9700 or lovelesscafe.com

Netflix for textbooks

Another option for students to avoid debt. Anecdotally, I hear about students in classes never buying textbooks because they are too expensive. Or photocopying someone else's text. Perhaps we could include this streaming fee as a part of tuition. From NBC.com.

Textbooks are expensive. Here are some ways to cut down on the cost.

A new survey by Cengage, a global education and technology company, shows that all too often students simply can’t swing the cost of textbooks, with nearly half of current and former college students (43 percent) saying they’ve skipped meals to afford course materials, and 31 percent taking fewer classes to manage the financial burden. 

“That students are skipping meals to afford textbooks strikes me as unconscionable,” Michael E. Hansen, CEO of Cengage tells NBC News BETTER. “And then you have students saying they won’t pursue a major because it is too expensive. We're complaining — rightly so — about needing more women in STEM, so why put these extra barriers in front of them? It was quite earth shattering from my perspective to see how society is forcing people to make these trade-offs.” 

A DIGITAL STREAMING SERVICE FOR TEXTBOOKS COULD SOLVE THE PROBLEM 

However alarming the findings of the survey, they weren’t published without a reason and a ready solution. Cengage recently launched Cengage Unlimited, a subscription-based platform, which (much like Netflix does for television shows, or Spotify does for music) gives students access to a digital library of textbooks (any of the more than 22,000 Cengage has published or licensed). It costs $119 per semester or $180 a year. If you prefer a hard copy, you can rent a physical textbook for a semester for $7.99 (the cost of shipping and returning), and you can also keep six e-books for up to a year after your subscription ends. A subscription also gives access to study materials that students can customize as they see fit.

Tennessee Reconnect

Seems to be a big success. I received an early breakdown on Reconnect students (before the applications had exceeded 20,000) that revealed 24% of the adult applicants prefered online courses, but an equal percentage preferred evening courses. While access is always important, there's a certain percentage of adults who don't like online learning. From Inside Higher Education. 

Tens of Thousands of Adults Line Up for Free College in Tennessee

State officials had initially anticipated 8,000 adult learners to apply for the program, which expanded the popular tuition-free Tennessee Promise. But a week before the start of the new college semester, more than 30,000 adults had applied for the scholarship according to state education officials. 

Tennessee is one of only a handful of states that has a tuition-free program for older adults.

“It’s surpassing all expectations,” said Mike Krause, executive director of the Tennessee Higher Education Commission. “Now we need to make sure all adults enter campus environments this week and next week ready to succeed.” 

While many two-year institutions across the country are seeing enrollment declines, the coming influx of adults on Tennessee’s community and technical college campuses means all of the institutions will see double-digit increases in students attending, Krause said. 

While the number of applications for the program has been surprising to Tennessee officials, far fewer adult students may actually enroll. 

Heidi Leming, vice chancellor for student success with the Tennessee Board of Regents, said the number of students who do enroll in courses may decrease to about 9,000 as many of the applicants decide not to attend college this fall.

It's good to be the flagship

Even when football is down. From The Tennessean.

UT Knoxville's largest freshman class in history moving in

The University of Tennessee, Knoxville will be bustling as the school brings in its largest freshman class in history — a total of more than 5,150 students. 

Many of them already call the Volunteer State home.

“We expect more students from right here in Tennessee in this class,” said Fabrizio D’Aloisio, assistant vice provost for enrollment management and director of undergraduate admissions at UT Knoxville. 

He attributes the influx of in-state students to the university's amped-up communication efforts with more emails, more print materials and more travel to Tennessee high schools.

Infographic Friday

by GrubHub.

From Visually.

Because math jokes never get old

I worked part-time as a sports reporter

And took journalism courses in college. But my career path shifted. Journalism today is nothing like it use to be. No one reads newspapers anymore. But maybe the next generation will revive them. From The Atlantic.

Student Journalism in the Age of Media Distrust

Fast-forward nearly half a century, and the attacks being made on journalism are too lengthy to list, but they flow from the top. President Donald Trump doesn’t keep a list of reporters he finds to be enemies so much as he tries to publicly shame, vilify, and discredit them on social media and in speeches. He has called journalists everything from “the enemy of the people” to “very dangerous & sick” and repeatedly decried the media as “fake news.” But just like during the ’60s and ’70s, there’s  a whiplash news cycle. And across the country, students have renewed interest in journalism. 

Madeline Purdue, the editor in chief of The Nevada Sagebrush at the University of Nevada at Reno, has taken note of this uptick in intrigue. The rhetoric from the president has trickled down to the campus level, she told me in an email. Some students who are upset with articles the Sagebrush publishes retaliate by calling the paper “fake news”  or trying to personally discredit reporters. Still, she says, “there is a higher interest among my peers in not only reading the news and being up to date on current events, but also pursuing a career in journalism.” 

Several college-paper editors I spoke with shared similar anecdotes. But it’s hard to find good empirical data on the total number of journalism students in the U.S. (The Grady College of Journalism and Communication at the University of Georgia released its last report in 2014.) However, individual colleges have been keeping data, and they say enrollment is up. 

Columbia University, the University of Southern California, and Northwestern University are among institutions that have also seen applications to their programs increase. Gail Wiggins, the interim chair of the journalism department at North Carolina A&T University, told me that the department saw a 6 percent increase in enrollment from 2016 to 2017. North Carolina A&T requires incoming students to write about why they chose journalism as their course of study, Wiggins said. More and more students, she told me, write that “they want to tell their own stories … they want to provide truthful information to improve their communities.”

I recently had dinner

In the city ranked fifth in fastest income growth. In the whole country. Morristown. Who knew? Number one was Jacksonville, North Carolina. From 24/7 Wall Street. 

Cities Where Incomes Are Growing the Fastest

5. Morristown, TN 

> Per capita income growth in 2016: 4.1%
> 5 yr. per capita income growth: 9.7%
> Per capita income: $39,351
> May 2018 unemployment: 3.6% 

Some 25.4% of Morristown’s workforce is employed in manufacturing, one of the largest shares of any U.S. city. Like many cities dependent on manufacturing, Morristown suffered substantial economic decline during the Great Recession. Unemployment rose from 4.3% in June 2007 to 13.3% in June 2009. 

In recent years, however, Morristown has made a substantial comeback. Per capita income in the area rose by 4.1%, from $37,814 in 2015 to $39,351 in 2016, the fifth largest increase of any city. Unemployment has also fallen to 3.6%, now lower than the national unemployment rate of 3.8%.

Should all salaries

At your college or university be posted on your website? True, if you work for a public institution, your salary is public information. But it's not typically shared extensively. It seems when salaries are kept secret, people tend to feel underpaid. Morale can improve with transparency if everyone feels they are treated fairly and/or at market value. Of course, at many of our institutions, that's not the case, unfortunately. From Time.

The Case For and Against Salary Transparency

What are the benefits of pay transparency?

Employees might be happier 

Companies like Whole Foods and New-York based analytics firm SumAll have adopted salary transparency policies. Buffer, a social media startup, took transparency a step further by publishing all employee salaries publicly on their website. 

There isn’t comprehensive research on how pay transparency affects employees because so few companies have these policies, according to Todd Zenger, presidential professor of strategy and strategic leadership at the University of Utah’s David Eccles School of Business. But anecdotal evidence from Buffer and SumAll suggests it can make workers more productive and satisfied. 

Hailley Griffis, Buffer’s public relations manager, says job applications to work at Buffer significantly increased after the company made its compensation data public. SumAll CEO Dane Atkinson told Business Insider in 2017 that transparency made employees more productive and collaborative. And a 2016 study published in the Journal of Business and Psychology found that employees were more likely to ask for help from the right people when they knew what their colleagues make. 

“If I don’t know my co-worker’s pay, I assume that I might not be getting paid as much, and I decrease my performance,” says Elena Belogolovsky, who authored the 2016 study when she worked as an assistant professor of human resources studies at Cornell. “When people don’t know each other’s pay, they assume they are underpaid.” 

But when employees are able to compare, they might realize they’re being paid market rate and spend a lot less time being dissatisfied, says Chandra Childers, a senior research scientist at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research.

Infographic Friday

[Source: U.S. Census Bureau]

21 states are more miserable than we

So why is it so many of the happiest states (Hawaii is the exception, natch.) are so darned cold? South Dakota? Vermont? Minnesota? North Dakota? And poor West Virginia. Last again, with Louisiana just above it.

America’s Happiest (and Most Miserable) States

29. Tennessee 

• Residents who like what they do every day: 74.8% (23rd highest)
• Residents w/ a strong social relationship: 76.8% (9th highest)
• Residents in near perfect physical health: 53.3% (17th lowest)
• Poverty rate: 15.8% (11th highest)
• Violent crime rate: 632.9 per 100,000 (4th highest) 

Americans with lower incomes are less likely to report a high level of well-being, and in Tennessee, the median annual household income of $48,547 is about $9,000 below the median U.S. income. The larger than typical share of state residents who struggle to afford food, at 16.7%, underscores the financial hardship many in the state face. 

When it comes to personal well-being, money is often less important than a strong sense of purpose, and in Tennessee, 64.1% of respondents have a leader in their life who makes them enthusiastic about the future, the sixth largest share among states. Adults in the state are also more likely than most to learn something new and enjoy their work on a daily basis.

39 states are ahead of us

With healthier senior populations. Louisiana, Arkansas, and Mississippi, not surprisingly, make up the basement. From 24/7 Wall Street.

Best States for Healthy Retirement

40. Tennessee
> Disability, 65+: 37.1% (20th highest)
> Obesity rate, 65+: 28.6% (25th highest)
> Flu vaccine in the past year, 65+: 56.8% (16th lowest)
> Life expectancy at birth: 76.3 years (8th lowest) 

According to the CDC, nearly 1 in 5 deaths in the United States are caused by smoking cigarettes, and in Tennessee, 13.2% of seniors smoke often or every day, the highest share of any state. Smoking can also lead to high blood pressure, which increases the risk of developing coronary heart disease and stroke. Some 68% of seniors in the state have high blood pressure, the sixth highest share of any state. 

Poor mental health can significantly hinder quality of life. In Tennessee. 8.3% of older adults report frequent mental distress, or at least 14 mentally unhealthy days in a given month. For perspective, only 7.3% of seniors nationwide report the same.

Thank you for being

A Friend. Reach out in the darkness. You've got a friend in me. You're my best friend. Sorry, I can't come up with any more. Some tips on connecting with other people, from The Atlantic.

How to Make Friends, According to Science

So what should you do if your social life is lacking? Here, too, the research is instructive. To begin with, don’t dismiss the humble acquaintance. Even interacting with people with whom one has weak social ties has a meaningful influence on well-being. [7] Beyond that, building deeper friendships may be largely a matter of putting in time. A recent study out of the University of Kansas found that it takes about 50 hours of socializing to go from acquaintance to casual friend, an additional 40 hours to become a “real” friend, and a total of 200 hours to become a close friend. [8] 

If that sounds like too much effort, reviving dormant social ties can be especially rewarding. Reconnected friends can quickly recapture much of the trust they previously built, while offering each other a dash of novelty drawn from whatever they’ve been up to in the meantime. [9] And if all else fails, you could start randomly confiding in people you don’t know that well in hopes of letting the tail wag the relational dog. Self-disclosure makes us more likable, and as a bonus, we are more inclined to like those to whom we have bared our soul. [10] 

The academic literature is clear: Longing for closeness and connection is pervasive. Which suggests that most of us are stumbling through the world pining for companionship that could be easily provided by the lonesome stumblers all around us. So set aside this article (after you’ve renewed your subscription and clicked every ad on the website, of course), turn to someone nearby, and try to make a friend. You both could probably use one. 

The Studies: 

[7] Sandstrom and Dunn, “Social Interactions and Well-Being” (Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, July 2014)
[8] Hall, “How Many Hours Does It Take to Make a Friend?” (Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, March 2018)
[9] Levin et al., “Dormant Ties” (Organization Science, July–Aug. 2011)
[10] Collins and Miller, “Self-Disclosure and Liking” (Psychological Bulletin, Nov. 1994)

Happy International Left Handed Day!

Find more great infographics on NerdGraph Infographics

I would have guessed

Sewanee: The University of the South. I seem to recall it winning this kind of competition before. My Alma Mater represents Iowa on this list from MSN.

The most beautiful college campus in every state

Rhodes College – Memphis, Tennessee 

The campus of Rhodes College in Memphis is another example of the Collegiate Gothic architecture so popular among universities in the United States, but these buildings have a distinctive look thanks to the pleasingly uniform use of brown sandstone.

Sunk cost fallacy

This motivates us more than most people realize. How often do we continue some program or project at work because we've spent a lot of time and money on it already. All that work would be wasted! From Time.

The Sunk Cost Fallacy Is Ruining Your Decisions. Here's How

If you’ve ever let unworn clothes clutter your closet just because they were expensive, or followed through on plans you were dreading because you already bought tickets, you’re familiar with the sunk cost fallacy. 

“The sunk cost effect is the general tendency for people to continue an endeavor, or continue consuming or pursuing an option, if they’ve invested time or money or some resource in it,” says Christopher Olivola, an assistant professor of marketing at Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business and the author of a new paper on the topic published in the journal Psychological Science. “That effect becomes a fallacy if it’s pushing you to do things that are making you unhappy or worse off.”

This idea often applies to money, but invested time, energy or pain can also influence behavior. “Romantic relationships are a classic one,” Olivola says. “The longer you’ve been together, the harder it is to break up.” 

Humans get caught in this psychological trap for several possible reasons, Olivola says. Sticking with the plan, even when it no longer serves you, could be an attempt to correct cognitive dissonance: the mental disconnect between paying for something and not getting the expected return on investment. It could also be a knee-jerk reaction to regret. Or, Olivola says, it could be an attempt to convince others, and ourselves, that we’re not wasteful.

“All of these things are irrational, in the sense that you should realize the money is gone,” Olivola says. “But I do think people do these things because they want to convince themselves that they’ve managed to recapture the loss.”

Hmmmm. Cleveland, Tennessee

Was a big surprise. But the title is a bit misleading, since the methodology seeks to find the cities where concentrated poverty is increasing the most. Maybe that means the same thing as hardest hit, but maybe not. Hardest hit is a squishy term, of course. Other cities around here on the list include Greenville, North Carolina, Owensboro, Kentucky, and Harrisonburg, Virginia. From 24/7 Wall Street.

The City Hit Hardest by Extreme Poverty in Every State

42. Tennessee: Cleveland
> 2010-2016 increase in concentrated poverty: +15.1 ppts (6.5% to 21.6%)
> 2010-2016 increase in concentrated poverty: +3,414 people (1,177 to 4,591)
> 2010-2016 avg. annual GDP growth: +1.4% (Tennessee: +2.5%)
> Unemployment: 20.2% (poor neighborhoods) 8.3% (all other)

While the share of poor Americans living in extreme poverty neighborhoods nationwide fell from 14.0% in 2010 to 11.6% in 2016, the concentrated poverty rate in Cleveland rose from 6.5% to 21.6% — the largest increase of any metro area in Tennessee and the ninth largest in the country. 

Income segregation can contribute to large disparities in homeownership, employment, and other socioeconomic outcomes, particularly in urban areas. In Cleveland, just 32.2% of heads of household living in extreme poverty neighborhoods own their homes, and 20.2% of the labor force is unemployed. By comparison, 70.3% of heads of household outside of extreme poverty neighborhoods in the metro area own their homes, and 8.3% of the labor force is unemployed.

Only an old English major like I

Would be interested in the proper uses of dashes and hyphens--I love me some dashes. And I have to confess, I didn't realize there were so many options. From James Harbeck, writing in The Week.

Dashes and hyphens: A comprehensive guide

Em-dash: — 

The em dash is meant to be as long as the full height of the font — not that it always is. The em dash is the archetype of the dash. It's the all-purpose punctuation that can be swapped in place of a comma, a colon, a semicolon, parentheses, or whatnot — but if you use too many of them, your reader will end up breathless from all that dashing around. And there are rules, to be sure. Pay an editor to know them for you. 

Actually, the rules are still evolving. A century or so ago it was common and accepted to put a colons or semicolons after a dash; now it's forbidden. Even if you're using them in place of parentheses and would normally put a comma after — like this —, by the rules of Chicago (and others) you must ditch the comma. 

Also supposedly forbidden is putting a space on either side of an em dash; if you want to use spaces, according to those who pronounce on such things, use an en dash (which is why MS Word converts -- to – between spaces). But some publications ignore this counsel, as is their right — The Week, for one. 

The em dash can also be used to indicate when someone has been cut off, as well as to attribute speech to someone (as at the end of a quotation) and, in some European texts, in place of quotation marks to indicate when someone is speaking. So in theory you could get something like this: 

—They couldn't hit an elephant at this dist—
—John Sedgwick (last words)

Infographic Friday

Source: TopMastersInEducation.com

Sadly, this list doesn't go far back enough

To the Dark Ages when I was in college. I was a different time: phones had cords, we all used typewriters, eight tracks were the hottest technology, and faculty smoked as they taught class. Students too. I'm pretty sure, though, that the most popular major at the time was business. From Stacker.

Most popular college major the year you graduated college

As the world continues to change drastically each and every day, so do the goals and aspirations of young people figuring out their lives as they embark on their respective educational journeys. More technologically driven corporations are taking over the global economy and America's youth is following suit, as science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) majors are more popular amongst college students than ever before. Between 2010 and 2016, the number of students enrolled in STEM majors at the undergraduate level or higher has risen 43%, indicating a shift away from humanities in favor of more empirical sciences. A look at the top areas of study over the past few decades speaks to the way in which cultural and economic shifts impact educational preferences. 

Using data from the National Center for Education Statistics, Stacker listed the five most popular college majors from every year between 1980 and 2016. Each major is listed, along with the total number of degrees earned in the field that year, as well as information on whether the number increased or decreased from the year prior.

The state of professional development in higher education

Academic Impressions has a nifty infographic summarizing its finding on the impact of professional development on job satisfaction and retention. Studies like this always remind me of those continuing education deans who run large professional development and workforce training operations but refuse to let their secretaries off an hour a day to take a class. Sigh. I received this in an email, and the following is a summary:

Beating Turnover in Higher Education

• 71% of higher education employees would be more likely to stay at their institution if they had increased access to professional development.
• Department leaders over-estimate how much support they are providing for professional development.
• One in three higher-ed staff report that the culture of their department is not supportive of learning and growth.
• When a department doesn't have a learning culture, six times as many staff report that they're extremely likely to leave the institution.
• Department leaders say professional development is important, but it is rarely incentivized or accounted for in performance appraisal, and in higher ed, most supervisors do not work with their staff to develop personalized professional development plans.
• Professional development is key to building the capacity of your staff and decreasing turnover.