COLLEGE CALCULUS   by John Cassidy

What’s the real value of higher education? As the supply of college grads expands, many are taking jobs that shouldn’t require a degree.

If there is one thing most Americans have been able to agree on over the years, it is that getting an education, particularly a college education, is a key to human betterment and prosperity. The consensus dates back at least to 1636, when the legislature of the Massachusetts Bay Colony established Harvard College as America's first institution of higher learning. It extended through the establishment of "land grant colleges" during and after the Civil War, the passage of the G.I. Bill during the Second World War, the expansion of federal funding for higher education during the Great Society era, and President Obama's efforts to make college more affordable. Already, the cost of higher education has become a big issue in the 2016 Presidential campaign. Three Democratic candidates-Hillary Clinton, Martin O'Malley, and Bernie Sanders- have offered plans to reform the student-loan program and make college more accessible.

Promoters of higher education have long emphasized its role in meeting civic needs. The Puritans who established Harvard were concerned about a shortage of clergy; during the Progressive Era, John Dewey insisted that a proper education would make people better citizens, with enlarged moral imaginations. Recently, as wage stagnation and rising inequality have emerged as serious problems, the economic arguments for higher education have come to the fore. "Earning a post-secondary degree or credential is no longer just a pathway to opportunity for a talented few," the White House Web site states. "Rather, it is a prerequisite for the growing jobs of the new economy." Commentators and academic economists have claimed that college doesn't merely help individuals get higher-paying jobs; it raises wages throughout the economy and helps ameliorate rising inequality. In an influential 2008 book, "The Race Between Education and Technology," the Harvard economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz argued that technological progress has dramatically increased the demand for skilled workers, and that, in recent decades, the American educational system has failed to meet the challenge by supplying enough graduates who can carry out the tasks that a high-tech economy requires. "Not so long ago, the American economy grew rapidly and wages grew in tandem, with education playing a large, positive role in both," they wrote in a subsequent paper. "The challenge now is to revitalize education-based mobility."

The "message from the media, from the business community, and even from many parts of the government has been that a college degree is more important than ever in order to have a good career," Peter Cappelli, a professor of management at Wharton, notes in his informative and refreshingly skeptical new book, "Will College Pay Off?" (Public Affairs). "As a result, families feel even more pressure to send their kids to college. This is at a time when more families find those costs to be a serious burden. "During recent decades, tuition and other charges have risen sharply-many colleges charge more than fifty thousand dollars a year in tuition and fees. Even if you factor in the expansion of financial aid, Cappelli reports, "students in the United States pay about four times more than their peers in countries elsewhere."

Despite the increasing costs-and the claims about a shortage of college graduates-the number of people attending and graduating from four-year educational institutions keeps going up. In the 2000-01 academic year, American colleges awarded almost 1.3 million bachelor's degrees. A decade later, the figure had jumped nearly forty per cent, to more than 1.7 million. About seventy per cent of all high-school graduates now go on to college, and half of all Americans between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four have a college degree. That's a big change. In 1980, only one in six Americans twenty-five and older were college graduates. Fifty years ago, it was fewer than one in ten. To cater to all the new students, colleges keep expanding and adding courses, many of them vocationally inclined. At Kansas State, undergraduates can major in Bakery Science and Management or Wildlife and Outdoor Enterprise Management. They can minor in Unmanned Aircraft Systems or Pet Food Science. Oklahoma State offers a degree in Fire Protection and Safety Engineering and Technology. At Utica College, you can major in Economic Crime Detection.

In the fast-growing for-profit college sector, which now accounts for more than ten per cent of all students, vocational degrees are the norm. De Vry University- which last year taught more than sixty thousand students, at more than seventy-five campuses--offers majors in everything from multimedia design and development to health-care administration. On its Web site, De Vry boasts, "In 2013, 90% of DeVry University associate and bachelor's degree grads actively seeking employment had careers in their field within six months of graduation." That sounds impressive-until you notice that the figure includes those graduates who had jobs in their field before graduation. (Many DeVry students are working adults who attend college part-time to further their careers.) Nor is the phrase "in their field" clearly defined. "Would you be okay rolling the dice on a degree in communications based on information like that?" Cappelli writes. He notes that research by the nonprofit National Association of Colleges and Employers found that, in the same year, just 6.5 per cent of graduates with communications degrees were offered jobs in the field. It may be unfair to single out DeVry, which is one of the more reputable for-profit education providers. But the example illustrates Cappelli's larger point: many of the claims that are made about higher education don't stand up to scrutiny.

"It is certainly true that college has been life changing for most people and a tremendous financial investment for many of them," Cappelli writes. "It is also true that for some people, it has been financially crippling .... The world of college education is different now than it was a generation ago, when many of the people driving policy decisions on education went to college, and the theoretical ideas about why college should pay off do not comport well with the reality."

No idea has had more influence on education policy than the notion that colleges teach their students specific, marketable skills, which they can use to get a good job. Economists refer to this as the "human capital" theory of education, and for the past twenty or thirty years it has gone largely unchallenged. If you've completed a two-year associate's degree, you've got more "human capital" than a high-school graduate. And if you've completed a four-year bachelor's degree you've got more "human capital" than someone who attended a community college. Once you enter the labor market, the theory says, you will be rewarded with a better job, brighter career prospects, and higher wages.

There's no doubt that college graduates earn more money, on average, than people who don't have a degree. And for many years the so-called "college wage premium'' grew. In 1970, according to a recent study by researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, people with a bachelor's degree earned about sixty thousand dollars a year, on average, and people with a high-school diploma earned about forty-five thousand dollars. Thirty-five years later, in 2005, the average earnings of college graduates had risen to more than seventy thousand dollars, while high-school graduates had seen their earnings fall slightly. (All these figures are inflation-adjusted.) The fact that the college wage premium went up at a time when the supply of graduates was expanding significantly seemed to confirm the Goldin-Katz theory that technological change was creating an ever-increasing demand for workers with a lot of human capital. During the past decade or so, however, a number of things have happened that don't easily mesh with that theory. If college graduates remain in short supply, their wages should still be rising. But they aren't. In 2001, according to the Employment Policy Institute, a liberal think tank in Washington, workers with undergraduate degrees (but not graduate degrees) earned, on average, $30.05 an hour; last year, they earned $29.55 an hour. Other sources show even more dramatic falls. "Between 2001 and 2013, the average wage of workers with a bachelor's degree declined 10.3 percent, and the average wage of those with an associate's degree declined 11.1 percent," the New York Fed reported in its study. Wages have been falling most steeply of all among newly minted college graduates. And jobless rates have been rising. In 2007, 5.5 per cent of college graduates under the age of twenty-five were out of work. Today, the figure is close to nine per cent. If getting a bachelor's degree is meant to guarantee entry to an arena in which jobs are plentiful and wages rise steadily, the education system has been failing for some time.

And, while college graduates are still doing a lot better than non-graduates, some studies show that the earnings gap has stopped growing. The figures need careful parsing. If you lump college graduates in with people with advanced degrees, the picture looks brighter. But almost all the recent gains have gone to folks with graduate degrees. "The four year- degree premium has remained flat over the past decade," the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland reported. And one of the main reasons it went up in the first place wasn't that college graduates were enjoying significantly higher wages. It was that the earnings of non-graduates were falling.

Many students and their families extend themselves to pay for a college education out of fear of falling into the low-wage economy. That's perfectly understandable. But how sound an investment is it? One way to figure this out is to treat a college degree like a stock or a bond and compare the cost of obtaining one with the accumulated returns that it generates over the years. (In this case, the returns come in the form of wages over and above those earned by people who don't hold degrees.) When the research firm PayScale did this a few years ago, it found that the average inflation- adjusted return on a college education is about seven per cent, which is a bit lower than the historical rate of return on the stock market. Cappelli cites this study along with one from the Hamilton Project, a Washington-based research group that came up with a much higher figure-about fifteen per cent but by assuming, for example, that all college students graduate in four years. (In fact, the four-year graduation rate for full-time, first-degree students is less than forty per cent, and the six-year graduation rate is less than sixty per cent.)

These types of studies, and there are lots of them, usually find that the financial benefits of getting a college degree are much larger than the financial costs. But Cappelli points out that for parents and students the average figures may not mean much, because they disguise enormous differences in outcomes from school to school. He cites a survey, carried out by PayScale for Businessweek in 2012, that showed that students who attend M.I.T., Caltech, and Harvey Mudd College enjoy an annual return of more than ten per cent on their "investment." But the survey also found almost two hundred colleges where students, on average, never fully recouped the costs of their education. "The big news about the payoff from college should be the incredible variation in it across colleges," Cappelli writes. "Looking at the actual return on the costs of attending college, careful analyses suggest that the payoff from many college programs-as much as one in four- is actually negative. Incredibly, the schools seem to add nothing to the market value of the students."

So what purpose does college really serve for students and employers? Before the human-capital theory became so popular, there was another view of higher education-as, in part, a filter, or screening device, that sorted individuals according to their aptitudes and conveyed this information to businesses and other hiring institutions. By completing a four-year degree, students could signal to potential employers that they had a certain level of cognitive competence and could carry out assigned tasks and work in a group setting. But a college education didn't necessarily imbue students with specific work skills that employers needed, or make them more productive.

Kenneth Arrow, one of the giants of twentieth-century economics, came up with this account, and if you take it seriously you can't assume that it's always a good thing to persuade more people to go to college. If almost everybody has a college degree, getting one doesn't differentiate you from the pack. To get the job you want, you might have to go to a fancy (and expensive) college, or get a higher degree. Education turns into an arms race, which primarily benefits the arms manufacturers-in this case, colleges and universities.

The screening model isn't very fashionable these days, partly because it seems perverse to suggest that education doesn't boost productivity. But there's quite a bit of evidence that seems to support Arrow's theory. In recent years, more jobs have come to demand a college degree as an entry requirement, even though the demands of the jobs haven't changed much. Some nursing positions are on the list, along with jobs for executive secretaries, salespeople, and distribution managers. According to one study, just twenty per cent of executive assistants and insurance-claims clerks have college degrees but more than forty-five per cent of the job openings in the field require one. "This suggests that employers may be relying on a B.A. as a broad recruitment filter that may or may not correspond to specific capabilities needed to do the job," the study concluded.

It is well established that students who go to elite colleges tend to earn more than graduates of less selective institutions. But is this because Harvard and Princeton do a better job of teaching valuable skills than other places, or because employers believe that they get more talented students to begin with? An exercise carried out by Lauren Rivera, of the Kellogg School of Management, at Northwestern, strongly suggests that it's the latter. Rivera interviewed more than a hundred recruiters from investment banks, law firms, and management consulting firms, and she found that they recruited almost exclusively from the very top-ranked schools, and simply ignored most other applicants. The recruiters didn't pay much attention to things like grades and majors. "It was not the content of education that elite employers valued but rather its prestige," Rivera concluded.

If higher education serves primarily as a sorting mechanism, that might help explain another disturbing development: the tendency of many college graduates to take jobs that don't require college degrees. Practically everyone seems to know a well-educated young person who is working in a bar or a mundane clerical job, because he or she can't find anything better. Doubtless, the Great Recession and its aftermath are partly to blame. But something deeper, and more lasting, also seems to be happening.

In the Goldin-Katz view of things, technological progress generates an ever-increasing need for highly educated, highly skilled workers. But, beginning in about 2000, for reasons that are still not fully understood, the pace of job creation in high-paying, highly skilled fields slowed significantly. To demonstrate this, three Canadian economists, Paul Beaudry, David A. Green, and Benjamin M. Sand, divided the U.S. workforce into a hundred occupations, ranked by their average wages, and looked at how employment has changed in each category. Since 2000, the economists showed, the demand for highly educated workers declined, while job growth in low-paying occupations increased strongly. "High-skilled workers have moved down the occupational ladder and have begun to perform jobs traditionally performed by lower-skilled workers," they concluded, thus "pushing low-skilled workers even further down the occupational ladder."

Increasingly, the competition for jobs is taking place in areas of the labor market where college graduates didn't previously tend to compete. As Beaudry, Green, and Sand put it, "having a B.A. is less about obtaining access to high paying managerial and technology jobs and more about beating out less educated workers for the Barista or clerical job." Even many graduates in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics- the so-called STEM subjects, which receive so much official encouragement are having a tough time getting the jobs they'd like. Cappelli reports that only about a fifth of recent graduates with STEM degrees got jobs that made use of that training. "The evidence for recent grads suggests clearly that there is no overall shortage of STEM grads," he writes.

Why is this happening? The short answer is that nobody knows for sure. One theory is that corporate cost cutting, having thinned the ranks of workers on the factory floor and in routine office jobs, is now targeting supervisors, managers, and other highly educated people. Another theory is that technological progress, after favoring highly educated workers for a long time, is now turning on them. With rapid advances in processing power, data analysis, voice recognition, and other forms of artificial intelligence, computers can perform tasks that were previously carried out by college graduates, such as analyzing trends, translating foreign-language documents, and filing tax returns. In "The Second Machine Age" (Norton), the M.l.T. professors Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee sketch a future where computers will start replacing doctors, lawyers, and many other highly educated professionals. '~ digital labor becomes more pervasive, capable, and powerful," they write, "companies will be increasingly unwilling to pay people wages· that they'll accept, and that will allow them to maintain the standard of living to which they've been accustomed."

Cappelli stresses the change in corporate hiring patterns. In the old days, Fortune 500 companies such as General Motors, Citigroup, and I.B.M. took on large numbers of college graduates and trained them for a lifetime at the company. But corporations now invest less in education and training, and, instead of promoting someone, or finding someone in the company to fill a specialized role, they tend to hire from outside. Grooming the next generation of leadership is much less of a concern. "What employers want from college graduates now is the same thing they want from applicants who have been out of school for years, and that is job skills and the ability to contribute now," Cappelli writes. "That change is fundamental, and it is the reason that getting a good job out of college is now such a challenge."

Obtaining a vocational degree or certificate is one strategy that many students employ to make themselves attractive to employers, and, on the face of it, this seems sensible. If you'd like to be a radiology technician, shouldn't you get a B.A. in radiology? If you want to run a bakery, why not apply to Kansas State and sign up for that major in Bakery Science? But narrowly focussed degrees are risky. "If you graduate in a year when gambling is up and the casinos like your casino management degree, you probably have hit it big," Cappelli writes. "If they aren't hiring when you graduate, you may be even worse off getting a first job with that degree anywhere else precisely because it was so tuned to that group of employers." During the dot-com era, enrollment in computer science and information-technology programs rose sharply. After the bursting of the stock-market bubble, many of these graduates couldn't find work. "Employers who say that we need more engineers or IT grads are not promising to hire them when they graduate in four years," Cappelli notes. "Pushing kids into a field like health care because someone believes there is a need there now will not guarantee that they all get jobs and, if they do, that those jobs will be as good as workers in that field have now."

So what's the solution? Some people believe that online learning will provide a viable low-cost alternative to a live-in college education. Bernie Sanders would get rid of tuition fees at public universities, raising some of the funds with a new tax on financial transactions. Clinton and O'Malley would also expand federal support for state universities, coupling this funding with lower interest rates on student loans and incentives for colleges to hold down costs. Another approach is to direct more students and resources to two-year community colleges and other educational institutions that cost less than four-year colleges. President Obama recently called for all qualified high-school students to be guaranteed a place in community college, and for tuition fees to be eliminated. Such policies would reverse recent history. In a new book, "Learning by Doing: The Real Connection between Innovation, Wages, and Wealth" (Yale), James Bessen, a technology entrepreneur who also teaches at Boston University School of Law, points out that "the policy trend over the last decade has been to starve community colleges in order to feed four-year colleges, especially private research universities." Some of the discrepancies are glaring. Richard Vedder, who teaches economics at Ohio University, calculated that in 2010 Princeton, which had an endowment of close to fifteen billion dollars, received state and federal benefits equivalent to roughly fifty thousand dollars per student, whereas the nearby College of New Jersey got benefits of just two thousand dollars per student. There are sound reasons for rewarding excellence and sponsoring institutions that do important scientific research. But is a twenty-five-to-one difference in government support really justified?

Perhaps the strongest argument for caring about higher education is that it can increase social mobility, regardless of whether the human-capital theory or the signaling theory is correct. A recent study by researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco showed that children who are born into households in the poorest fifth of the income distribution are six times as likely to reach the top fifth if they graduate from college. Providing access to college for more kids from deprived backgrounds helps nurture talents that might otherwise go to waste, and it's the right thing to do. (Of course, if college attendance were practically universal, having a degree would send a weaker signal to employers.) But increasing the number of graduates seems unlikely to reverse the over-all decline of high-paying jobs, and it won't resolve the income-inequality problem, either. As the economist Lawrence Summers and two colleagues showed in a recent simulation, even if we magically summoned up college degrees for a tenth of all the working-age American men who don't have them by historical standards, a big boost in college-graduation rates-we'd scarcely change the existing concentration of income at the very top of the earnings distribution, where C.E.0.s and hedge fund managers live.

Being more realistic about the role that college degrees play would help families and politicians make better choices. It could also help us appreciate the actual merits of a traditional broad based education, often called a liberal arts education, rather than trying to reduce everything to an economic cost benefit analysis. "To be clear, the idea is not that there will be a big financial payoff to a liberal arts degree," Cappelli writes. "It is that there is no guarantee of a payoff from very practical, work-based degrees either, yet that is all those degrees promise. For liberal arts, the claim is different and seems more accurate, that it will enrich your life and provide lessons that extend beyond any individual job. There are centuries of experience providing support for that notion." 

New Yorker magazine, Sept 7, 2015.

BODY COUNT  by Kelefa Sanneh

Engulfed by crime, many blacks once agitated for more police and harsher penalties.

One day last fall, Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, appeared on "Meet the Press" to talk about the tense relationship between many African-American communities and the police departments charged with protecting them. In Ferguson, Missouri, the governor had declared a state of emergency as a grand jury considered whether to indict Darren Wilson, the white officer who shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed African American. (In the end, Wilson was not indicted.) Chuck Todd, the host, asked about white officers patrolling African American neighborhoods, but Giuliani wanted to talk about crime, not punishment. "I find it very disappointing that you're not discussing the fact that ninety-three per cent of blacks in America are killed by other blacks," he said, adding, "It is the reason for the heavy police presence in the black community." The next day, on Fox News, Giuliani said that protesters who chanted "Black lives matter!" should be supporting police officers, not demonizing them. He suggested that the people who really valued black lives were people like him, who worked to reduce the African American murder rate. "When I came into office, thousands of blacks were being killed every year," he said. "By the time I left office, it was down to about two hundred."

These comments inspired a backlash, but they were not, in themselves, surprising. Giuliani has never evinced much sympathy for critics of the police; in 2007, when he launched his Presidential campaign, his law-and-order approach helped make him, for a time, the most popular candidate in either party. But the national mood has grown less punitive, and when Giuliani made his remarks last year few allies emerged to support him. Many Republicans, including John Boehner, the Speaker of the House, now say that they support criminal-justice reform; Jeb Bush has signed a reform pledge affirming that prison sentences are "not the solution for every type of offender." And, among Democrats, fears of being labelled soft on crime seem to have subsided since the nineteen-nineties. As First Lady, Hillary Clinton called for "tougher prison sentences for repeat offenders" while campaigning for her husband's 1994 crime bill; the law instituted "three strikes and you're out" sentences, and the federal-prison population almost doubled over the next ten years. But in Clinton's current Presidential campaign she calls for reforming the police and ending "mass incarceration." In response to pressure from protesters, she has used the phrase that has come to signify outrage at police brutality: "Black lives matter."

This summer, the Black Lives Matter movement got a literary manifesto, in the form of Ta-Nehisi Coates's "Between the World and Me" (Spiegel & Grau), a slender but deeply resonant book that made its debut atop the Times best-seller list. Coates, a writer for The Atlantic, has been chronicling recent police killings, and he has responded with a polemic, in the tradition of Jam es Baldwin, that takes the form of a lyrical letter to his fourteen-year-old son. Coates lists Michael Brown alongside other recent victims: Eric Garner, John Crawford, Tamir Rice, Marlene Pinnock. He writes, "You know now, if you did not before, that the police departments of your country have been endowed with the authority to destroy your body." And he reminds his son that this destruction is so often unpunished as to be tacitly sanctioned:

The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions. And destruction is merely the superlative form of a dominion whose prerogatives include friskings, detainings, beatings, and humiliations.

He means to confirm what his son suspects: that the shocking stories in the news are not anomalous; that police abuse is just another manifestation of the violence that has afflicted black people in America ever since slavery; that officers who kill are not rogues but, rather, enforcers of a brutal social order. One of the most severe lines in the book is also one of the most frequently quoted: "In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body-it is heritage."

Four decades ago, a number of black leaders were talking in similarly urgent terms about the threats to the black body. The threats were, in the words of one activist, "cruel, inhuman, and ungodly": black people faced the prospect not just of physical assault and murder but of "genocide" - the horror of slavery, reborn in a new guise. The activist who said this was Oberia D. Dempsey, a Baptist pastor in Harlem, who carried a loaded revolver, the better to defend himself and his community. Dempsey's main foe was not the police and the prisons; it was drugs, and the criminal havoc wreaked by dealers and addicts.

Dempsey is the most vivid character in "Black Silent Majority" (Harvard), a provocative new history by Michael Javen Fortner, a professor of urban studies who wants to complicate our understanding of crime and punishment in black America. He points out that while African-Americans have long been disproportionately arrested and incarcerated for committing crime, they have also, for just as long, been disproportionately victimized by it. His focus is New York in the nineteen-sixties and early seventies, when crime rates shot up, creating a demand in African-American communities for more police officers, more arrests, more convictions, and longer prison sentences. The book begins near the end, on a January day in 1973, when Dempsey joined Governor Nelson Rockefeller at a press conference in support of what became known as the Rockefeller drug laws-a passel of antidrug statutes that helped make New York a mass-incarceration pioneer, increasing the number of "friskings, detainings, beatings, and humiliations" that Coates writes about.

Like many scholars and activists, Fortner is profoundly disturbed by our modern system of criminal justice, calling mass incarceration "a glaring and dreadful stain on the fabric of American history." But he thinks this history is incomplete if it ignores what he calls "black agency": he wants us to see African-Americans not merely as victims of politics but as active participants in it, too. At a moment of growing concern about how our criminal-justice system harms African-American, Fortner seeks to show that African American leaders, urged on by members of the community, helped create that system in the first place.

Last year, Coates used his blog to host an online book club devoted to Michelle Alexander's unsparing "The New Jim Crow," which came out in 2010 and is still finding new readers. Alexander is a law professor at Ohio State who was radicalized by her time at the American Civil Liberties Union, where she battled racial profiling. She eventually concluded that bias was inherent in the criminal-justice system, and that the system relegated African Americans to second-class citizenship. The book's focus was the war on drugs, which helped produce this country's enormous prison population. She noted that President Reagan made fighting drugs a priority even before anyone was talking about the crack-cocaine epidemic of the nineteen-eighties, and she showed that penalties were disproportionately applied to African-Americans, even though blacks and whites used and sold drugs at roughly equal rates. She argued, convincingly, that our punitive solution to the trade in illegal drugs was an overreaction, and one that would never have been tolerated if more of its victims had been white. She urged activists to fight back in explicitly racial terms, demanding that prison rolls be slashed and police departments remade, not merely in the name of pragmatic reform but in the name of black liberation. In many ways, the Black Lives Matter movement is an answer to her call.

Coates shares Alexander's skepticism about law-and-order rhetoric, and he is especially critical of what he has called the "Gospel of Giuliani," which parries complaints about police and prisons with scary statistics about black people killing black people. In Coates's view, the term "black-on-black crime" ignores the fact that most violent crime is interracial, and also obscures the government policies that gave rise to segregated African-American neighborhoods and their high crime rates. "To yell 'black-on-black crime' is to shoot a man and then shame him for bleeding," he writes. The formulation, he believes, encourages us to imagine that something is wrong with black people, instead of seeing that something is wrong with America.

Coates writes with a preacher's sensitivity to the rhythms and patterns of language, and of history, too, which means that he slips almost imperceptibly between piercing outrage and something close to fatalism. In his previous book, "The Beautiful Struggle," Coates described how his boyhood was shaped by his father, Paul Coates, an independent scholar and publisher whose booklist is a bibliography of black liberation. Theirs was not a religious household, and Coates has kept faith with faithlessness, which helps explain his profound distaste for the notion that African-American stories must be redemption stories-what, exactly, makes us think that we shall overcome, some day? "Perhaps struggle is all we have because the god of history is an atheist, and nothing about his world is meant to be," Coates tells his son in the new book, by way of explaining the importance of fighting a system that can scarcely be fought, let alone beaten.

Alexander has been accused, credibly, of underplaying the importance and the cost of crime. (Her book begins with the example of Jarvious Cotton, one of more than two million African Americans who are ineligible to vote because of a felony conviction. She does not mention that Cotton was convicted of murder for the killing of a seventeen year-old during a mugging.) Coates, though, writes eloquently about common crime, especially in "The Beautiful Struggle." Readers who come to his first book by way of his second may be taken aback not only by its seriocomic tone and hip-hop-inflected language but also by its vivid evocation of Coates's boyhood on the grueling streets of Baltimore. In one memorable passage, he paid dark tribute to the guys from a West Baltimore housing project called Murphy Homes, summoning the fear he felt and the reverence, too:

Murphy Homes beat niggers with gas nozzles. Murphy Homes split backs and poured in salt. Murphy Homes moved with one eye, flew out on bat wings, performed dark rites atop Druid Hill.

"The Beautiful Struggle" was, no less than its successor, a book about black bodies in peril, although the threats tended to come from within the community. In this world, the police were a menacing presence-after Coates got in trouble in school, his father gave him a beating, asking his mother, "Who would you rather do this: me or the police?" - but Coates seems to have been more concerned about the Murphy Homes boys and the others like them. At one point, he noted that in 1986 there were two hundred and fifty murder victims in Baltimore. "That year," he wrote, "my man Craig was butchered on his way home from work." It was a piercing moment, but readers expecting an elegy got, instead, a few terse biographical sentences, as if Coates were underscoring the ghastly banality of this loss.

In "Between the World and Me," Coates shifts his focus from the neighborhood to the nation. The book is given shape and weight by the story of another friend who was killed: Prince Jones, a college acquaintance, shot by an African-American police officer while sitting, unarmed, in his jeep, which apparently matched the description of one driven by a suspect in the theft of a police gun. Coates emphasizes the violence done to the black body to help us see the physical abuse that undergirds broad structures of oppression. Of course, Craig had a body, too, and it was destroyed in a manner far more commonplace. In "Between the World and Me," the "black body" refers, as well, to the black body politic. When a police officer shoots and kills an unarmed African-American especially when the officer isn't charged with a crime, as Michael Brown's killer was not, and Prince Jones's killer was not-he is, Coates wants us to understand, proving the continued existence of a system in which African-Americans are victimized by state power and are powerless to demand accountability. A black college student is a body, but he is also a citizen, and this explains why, even in violent neighborhoods, some kinds of violence seem, to Coates, particularly salient: because they threaten not just the body of the victim but his citizenship, too.

Michael Javen Fortner grew up in Brownsville, Brooklyn, and his boyhood sounds even more chaotic than Coates's. "I was only a couple of years old when one of my brothers was stabbed to death," he writes. "I do not remember him, but the pain and sorrow of that day stayed in my home like accumulated dust." He thinks that analysts like Alexander, in their eagerness to indict systemic injustice, sometimes downplay the "black agony" that characterizes many neighborhoods where brutal crime is ubiquitous. Black political activists present history in ways that emphasize racial solidarity, but Fortner says that the Brownsville he remembers was "a community at war with itself":

                I recall hearing "That's what he gets" every time one of "our youngsters" was arrested. I recall hearing about fathers calling the cops on sons and mothers throwing daughters our onto the street. I remember far from the pews of my Pentecostal church sanctified working - and middle-class African Americans distinguished between saints and sinners.

It was Richard Nixon who popularized the phrase "silent majority," as a way of insisting that the countercultural masses protesting the Vietnam War constituted nothing more than an outspoken minority. In positing the existence of a "black silent majority," Fortner draws on the work of Charles V. Hamilton, an African-American political scientist and the author, with Stokely Carmichael, of "Black Power." In 1970, Hamilton published an article in the Times Magazine about the mass of black Americans who were concerned about crime. "They want police protection, not police persecution," he wrote, "and because they believe that the incidence of the latter is greater than the former, they believe the present law-enforcement systems must be viewed suspiciously, rather than optimistically." In an essay about Harlem, James Baldwin wrote, "The only way to police a ghetto is to be oppressive." He portrayed the officers as an occupying force: "Their very presence is an insult, and it would be, even if they spent their entire day feeding gumdrops to children."

Plenty of citizens and politicians made a different calculation, concluding that the risks of persecution were outweighed by the urgent need for protection. In nineteen-sixties Harlem, heroin addiction was increasing steeply, and street crime had become so common that some churches cancelled evening services, to protect parishioners from being set upon as they returned home. Drug crime strained the relationship between black leaders and white liberal allies, who wanted to combat the drug trade with medical treatment, not criminal penalties. In 1962, Oberia Dempsey led a coalition of civic leaders who asked President Kennedy to "mobilize all law-enforcement agencies to unleash their collective fangs on dope pushers and smugglers." A group convened by the civil-rights leader A. Philip Randolph urged that "a life time sentence without parole be made the punishment to meet the crime of pushing narcotics." Testifying at a state hearing in 1969, Hulan Jack-a black state assemblyman representing Harlem, and the former Manhattan borough president-called for life imprisonment for the crime of mugging, and argued that the system of incarceration was not nearly mass enough. (The prison population had been declining despite a sharp increase in arrests.) A 1973 Times poll found that "about three-quarters of New York's blacks and Puerto Ricans" thought that life without parole was the proper sentence for convicted drug dealers.

Rockefeller's drug laws sharply increased the penalties for various drug crimes; possession of four ounces of heroin, for instance, would result in a minimum sentence of fifteen years to life. (In the two decades that followed, the prison rolls in New York quintupled; other states followed, creating a nationwide prison boom.) But Reverend Dempsey, the militant Baptist standing behind Rockefeller on that January day, was not representing the black political establishment. Many of the leaders and groups in Fortner's book were careful to pair calls for more police with calls for police reform, mindful of the possibility that the "fangs" of law enforcement might sink into the wrong necks. The Rockefeller drug laws passed with hardly any help from black legislators, all but one of whom voted against them. When it counted most, black political support melted away. Fortner hastens to explain that many Democratic legislators had partisan concerns (the bill's passage was viewed as a Republican victory) and distinct cultural identities-black political elites, he writes, tended to be more optimistic about Harlem than their working- and middle-class constituents were. He points out that a number of community leaders stood with Dempsey to support the bill. And he establishes that black politicians and clergymen helped raise the alarm about drug crime in the first place. Even so, the vote makes it hard to conclude that black political support was decisive in the passage of the Rockefeller drug laws.

Fortner's narrative mainly reveals the bleakness of the choices facing black voters and their representatives in those tempestuous years. Statewide rehabilitation efforts had failed, owing in part to lack of funding, and so many civic leaders viewed a new punitive regime as an improvement: it wouldn't help reform the addicts or dealers, but it might help protect everyone else. A decade later, during the crack years, African-Americans in Congress faced a similarly difficult choice in considering the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986. The law established a minimum sentence of five years for trafficking five hundred grams of cocaine or five grams of crack cocaine. Years later, activists criticized this hundred-to-one disparity as unfair to African-Americans, who were more likely to be convicted of selling crack cocaine. But the bill passed with support from two-thirds of the African-Americans then in Congress, including Charles Rangel, from Harlem, whom President Reagan singled out for praise during the signing ceremony.

None of this directly refutes Alexander's argument that the modern carceral state is a new version of Jim Crow. Indeed, Fortner thinks that black leaders, though right to be concerned about crime, were wrong to think that exorbitant mandatory sentences rather than better-funded rehabilitation programs and structural antipoverty efforts-were the answer. (Rangel later worked to end the crack -versus- cocaine disparity.) When Alexander calls our criminal-justice system "the new Jim Crow," she is drawing an imperfect parallel that tells us more about what this system does than about why it exists. It is possible, as Fortner shows, to be skeptical of the drug war while also noting that no small number of its supporters believed, as fervently as any activist today, that black lives matter.

On April 12th, in Coates's native Baltimore, police officers on bicycles noticed an African-American man named Freddie Gray, who saw them watching him and fled. They caught him, found a small knife, arrested him, and put him in a police van to take him to the station. By the time the van arrived there, Gray was unconscious, with his spine nearly severed, and after a week he died from his injuries. The legal reaction came quickly: on May 1st, prosecutors brought charges against six officers, one of whom was charged with second-degree murder. But the first protest began even before Gray died. The uproar seemed to inspire police officers to work more cautiously and, perhaps, to disengage; arrests dropped, and the number of homicides rose. There were forty-two murders in Baltimore in May, compared with twenty-three the previous May; in June, there were twenty-nine, compared with eighteen the year before; in July, forty-five, compared with twenty-two; in August, thirty-three, compared with twenty-six. In four months, sixty more lives were lost than in the previous year, most of them black. · It is not hard to understand Coates's frustration with analysts who use grim facts like these in order to downplay police killings. But if what happened to Freddie Gray is symptomatic of a brutal and unjust social order, isn't everyday violence-the kind that returns again and again to some neighborhoods, while leaving others mostly unscarred-symptomatic of the same thing? The horror of Gray's death shouldn't blind us to the horror of the murders that have afflicted the city since then. One need not be a Giuliani supporter to acknowledge that reducing the homicide rate is one of the most valuable things a city government can do.

Near the beginning of "Between the World and Me, "Coates recalls the night the grand jury announced that it would not return an indictment against Darren Wilson for killing Michael Brown. His son retreated to his room to cry, and Coates tried to figure out what to tell him. This book is his response, but it is not until the end that Coates allows, "Michael Brown did not die as so many of his defenders supposed." A Justice Department report looked at the Ferguson Police Department and found a wide range of abusive practices, as well as "intentional discrimination on the basis of race." But another Justice Department inquiry debunked the widely reported story that Brown was cooperating, with his hands up-saying, "Don't shoot!" -when he was killed. And forensic details corroborate the claim that Brown was initially shot while trying to grab the officer's gun.

The ubiquity of video footage has increased the scrutiny of police killings, making it easier for citizens to contest official explanations that would otherwise go unchallenged. Until recently, however, no one kept a complete count of who was being shot by police officers, and why. The Washington Post examined reports of police shootings in 2015 and found that this year blacks were about three times as likely as whites to be killed by police. (Because of the difference in population sizes, non-Hispanic whites still form a plurality- about fifty per cent-of all people killed by police.) A Web site called killedbypolice.net has been tracking media reports of police killings since 2013; it finds that over the past three years blacks were about three and a half times as likely as whites to be killed by police.

These findings should disturb us, but so, too, should the fact that the racial disparity is actually wider for civilian violence. Overall, blacks are about eight times as likely as whites to be murdered. As far as we can tell, someone killed by police is less likely to be black than someone killed by a civilian. In "Ghettoside" (Spiegel & Grau), an absorbing new book about murder in an African-American community in Los Angeles, the reporter Jill Leovy writes about what she calls "the black homicide problem." She doesn't use this term to defend police departments; on the contrary, she uses it to indict them, writing about all the cruelty and misery that flourishes in a place where there is no "state monopoly on violence." If anything, the outrage over relatively rare police killings should remind us just how much everyday violence-and just how much everyday inequality we have learned to ignore.

Coates's two books show how twinned fears of crime and punishment can be mutually reinforcing: how the historic failure of the police to keep African-Americans safe from violence can make police excesses all the more appalling. The police killing of Prince Jones was, surely, that much more disturbing to a man who remembered that when he was a boy the police had failed to protect his friend Craig. For some reformers, the key is retraining police officers to minimize violence. But Coates and Alexander warn against this kind of meliorist thinking. "A reform that begins with the officer on the beat is not reform at all," Coates has written. To many Black Lives Matter activists, the phrase "state monopoly on violence" probably sounds more like a threat than like a reassurance.

Crime statistics in Baltimore are complicated: in the decades since Coates was a boy, murders declined, but so did the city's population. In general, though, American crime rates have fallen since the early nineteen nineties, and the nation's imprisoned population-while extraordinarily high, by global standards-seems to have stopped increasing. As for police killings, each one is tragic, and each unjustified one is outrageous; police departments in Europe, for instance, are vastly less likely to kill. But there is no evidence that we are living through a modern epidemic. Although there is little reliable national data, the New York Police Department keeps records. In 1973, the year Rockefeller signed his drug laws, the department shot and killed fifty-eight people; in 2013, the most recent year in the department database, the number was eight. The Black Lives Matter protests draw their urgency from the damage that violence has done to African-American communities. But they resonate so widely because, after decades of chaos, that violence seems to have subsided.

Experts disagree about how much of this change can be attributed to policing or to mass incarceration; in many ways, crime rates are mysterious. But the decades-long decrease in crime has made it much easier for politicians to heed the activists demanding that we reform our criminal-justice system. There is some indication that this year many cities besides Baltimore are suffering from an uptick in homicides; if this trend were to continue, talk of ending mass incarceration might become politically toxic, even for African-American politicians. As Fortner's book makes clear, no political movement can afford to ignore the kind of cruel disorder that we euphemistically call common crime. A police force that kills black citizens is adding to America's history of racial violence; so is a police force that fails to keep them safe. Alexander may be right that our criminal-justice regime is a new incarnation of the monstrous old Jim Crow system. But this should tell us something about the desperation of the many African-Americans who supported it anyway-convinced, not wholly unreasonably, that the alternative was even worse.

The New Yorker magazine, Sept 14, 2015

SAT gets an overhaul

by Andrea Downing Peck

                Do you have a college-bound student who is planning to take the infamous SAT in spring 2016? If so, he or she will encounter a redesigned exam that has undergone sweeping changed. It may cause students to rethink how they prepare for the all-important admissions exam.

                The College Board is overhauling the exam that is taken by more than 1.6 million students each year, to make it more closely align with what is being taught in high school classrooms, and to better assess the skills needed for college and career success.

                The redesigned SAT will be administered for the first time in March 2016. The test will include two required sections – math and evidence-based reading and writing – plus an optional essay. The new test will take three hours (without optional essay) instead of the current three hours and 45 minutes. Calculators will be allowed during only a portion of the math section.

                A “perfect” score will return to the familiar 1,600-point scale, with the reading and math sections scored from 200 to 800. Students also will receive “cross-test scores” showing how they preformed in science and history/social studies.

                College Board chief of assessment Cynthia Schmesier says the goal was to create a test “focused on the knowledge and skills [that] research tells us are absolutely essential for college readiness and college success.”

                The Costco member explains, “We want it to be useful, so when students encounter this exam they see the applicability not only to their schoolwork in high school but also to what they are interested in pursuing in college and a career.”

TESTING OVERVIEW -  Among the highlights of the redesign:

•     The reading and writing sections will include questions that require students to cite evidence for their answer choices. Contents of prose passages may include careers, history/social studies, humanities or science and may be paired with informational graphics.
•     Students no longer will be asked to complete sentences after memorizing SAT vocabulary words, but will have to understand more common words in extended contexts.
•     The math section will focus in depth on algebra and problem-solving and data analysis, with some advanced math questions. Students will be required to solve problems in science, social studies and career-related contexts.
•     A passage from United States founding documents (the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, the Federalist Papers) or a text from the global conversation will be included on every exam.
•     The quarter-point penalty for wrong answers has been eliminated.
•     An optional essay will focus on analyzing a source text. The essay prompt will remain constant; only the passage analyzed will change on subsequent exams.

TEST PREP

                The College Board is offering options beyond the test-prep industry through free online Khan Academy test-prep videos, practice tests and other tools at collegereadiness.collegeboard.org and publishing a new study guide for the redesigned SAT.

                “We’re trying to give kids all the information they need before they go into the test so they know what to expect, but we also want to help them strengthen their college readiness skills if their PSAT (preliminary SAT) test scores show them things they need to work on,” Schmesie says.

                Despite the College Board’s new transparency, veteran tutor Akil Bello, director of strategic initiatives at The Princeton Review, expects test preparation to remain an important ingredient in student success.

                “Preparing for the STA is much like joining a baseball team and asking if you should get a coach,” says Bello, a Costco member. “A coach may not turn the New York Mets into a championship team, but having a coach is better than not having a coach.  Practicing is better than not practicing.”

THE OLD AND THE NEW

                While incoming high school sophomores will take the revised PSAT in October, rising juniors have a choice between taking the “old” SAT this fall and winter or the redesigned exam in March.

                “Whether junior prepare for the [old] version of the SAT or the new-as-of-2016 version, it is still the first time they’re preparing for an SAT,” Bello says. “Prepare for it and do the best you can, get the help you can, and you will improve your performance and maximize your score.”

The Costco Connection, July 2015.

LA Summer jobs - application deadline June 30th

High School junior and senior students!  There is a wonderful opportunity for you to get a six-week "paid" summer internship, "SITES",  with the City of Los Angeles Public Works Bureau of Sanitation!  "SITES" is the Summer Introduction to Engineering and Science Program. If you are interested in becoming an engineer, then this program is for you. Introduction to engineering and science program will be available for those that qualify.

Program Description

·  Paid $9/hr. and will work four (4) hours per day

·  Program will start either July 6, 2015 or July 13, 2015

·  Six-week PAID summer internship (July-August)

·  Participate in training sessions, workshops, and educational field trips

·  Gain work experience and explore careers in:

o Civil Engineering

o ​Environmental Engineering

o Chemical Engineering

o Environmental Science

Program Requirements

·  Must be an incoming high school junior, senior or recent graduate

·  You must either:

o Live within the City of Los Angeles

o Attend a high school within the Los Angeles Unified High School District, or

o Attend a high school in the City of Los Angeles

·  Must be able to provide verification of your legal right to work

·  Must submit an online resume and recommendation

·  Must be able to work during the hours of 8:00 A.M. - 5:00 P.M. for the duration of the program.

·  Emergency release form for active interns are required to be on file.

·  Students must be taking the advance Math and Science classes and completed Algebra II with B or better. 

Applicants who are interested, please submit your resume and recommendation letter to RHONDA.DOWDY@LACITY.ORG. Telephone number 213 485-2656.  The deadline for all applications will be June 30, 2015.  The earlier the application is submitted the better the chances are to be admitted into the program.

 

10 Natural Ways to Lower Blood Sugar

High blood sugar, or hyperglycemia, is something that many people living with diabetes face regularly. You may feel nauseous, lethargic, and irritable, and find yourself extremely thirsty and having to go to the bathroom nearly constantly.  There are a lot of natural ways to lower your blood sugar levels, and many lifestyle behaviors that can make them consistently lower.

1. Exercise can be a fast and natural way to lower your blood sugar, instead of using insulin or other glucose-lowering medications. Engaging in physical activity increases your body’s sensitivity to insulin and makes your muscles take in more glucose so less is left circulating in the bloodstream.

2. When you relax, your body releases chemicals that lower your blood sugar. Conversely, when you’re stressed, your body releases hormones that make your blood sugar spike. A body under stress releases glucose-raising hormones like adrenaline and cortisol because it activates the fight-or-flight mode we use for survival.

3. The more you drink when you are experiencing high blood sugar, the better. Drink at least two glasses of water, with one right after the other. Water helps your body flush glucose out of your system and stabilize sugars in the bloodstream. 

4. Negative emotions such as anxiety, fear and sorrow can raise blood glucose levels. On the other hand, positive emotions like gratitude and wholesome behaviors like laughter may positively affect blood sugar. So laugh a little more, and stop taking life so seriously.

5. Protein can be a good blood stabilizer because it slows the absorption rate of glucose. Examples of healthy proteins to reduce high blood sugar include turkey lunchmeat, yogurt without added sugar, or an ounce of cheese. Ask your diabetes healthcare professional, such as your CDE or dietitian, for small protein snacks they recommend to lower blood sugar.

6. If you have diabetes you may experience a low blood sugar reaction called hypoglycemia every now and then. You need to treat these lows effectively without over-treating them. Over-treating can lead to high blood sugar, putting you on the blood sugar rollercoaster. Plan ahead for hypoglycemia with a set amount of carbohydrates to raise your blood sugar levels, like glucose tablets, hard candies, 1 tablespoon of honey, 2 tablespoons of raisins, or ½ cup of juice or non-diet soda.

7. The amount of sleep you get affects the release of glucagon and insulin, hormones that regulate your blood sugar levels. Blood glucose increases with the secretion of glucagon and decreases with the secretion of insulin. Getting enough sleep allows your body to keep your blood sugar levels within healthy parameters during your waking hours.

8. Recent research suggests that 20 to 30 minutes of exercise before a meal can help prevent post-dinner blood sugars from rising. A study published in the July 2014 issue of Diabetologia found that “exercise snacks” before main meals may help improve glycemic control in people with insulin resistance.

9. Your body breaks down white grain and sugar products very fast. You need foods that digest slower and are full of nutritious components your body needs. When your blood sugars are high, stay away from processed foods.

10. Supplements can be an excellent, natural way to provide your body with the extra nutrients it needs to successfully balance blood glucose levels. There are several supplements that are suggested to help regulate blood sugars, and you should discuss them with your healthcare provider before implementing any into your diabetes treatment plan. Research around diabetes supplements is somewhat limited and/or of questionable quality, so you should proceed with the advice of your doctor and with your own caution.

Source: Diabetic Connect

Legal Financial Obligations and Inequality

by Marc Meredith, Claire Greenberg and Michael Morse

The recent focus on Ferguson, Missouri has generated a welcome national dialogue about criminal justice policy in the United States and the rampant use of legal financial obligations, such as fines and court fees, to fund government services. In a report analyzing all that went wrong in Ferguson, the Department of Justice highlighted costly penalties for municipal violations, which saddle the poor with a sizable amount of debt to the courts. Ferguson assessed these penalties regardless of an individual's ability to pay, and then put individuals who could not afford to pay their debt on payment plans that carry high fees. Every missed or partial payment was treated as a "failure to appear" offense, which may then result in an arrest warrant. While in some ways the case of Ferguson is an outlier, less extreme versions of this same story could be documented across the United States.

We have spent the past year researching the role of criminal debt in Alabama. One of the major issues we have identified in carrying out this research is that while individual fines and fees might not seem overly burdensome, they accumulate to form a substantial amount of debt. When considered in isolation, it seems quite reasonable to charge someone convicted of a crime $30 for the investigation of their criminal history and $21 to help fund the Alabama Solicitor General's Office. Yet it isn't unusual to find that all of the fines and fees associated with a single conviction, felony, or misdemeanor add up to $2,000 or more.

If a conviction involves restitution, the total cost can be substantially more. Another reason fines and fees accumulate is that different levels of government all want their share of the revenue. Consider docket fees, which are the price of a case being placed on a court's calendar and are present in every case the court hears. Docket fees, like every other type of fee, are not part of the punishment, but rather reflect the cost of using the courts. In Alabama, the statewide felony docket fee is $247, but counties can tack on their own fees too. So Coosa County, for example, adds an additional $58 to the docket fee. Surprisingly, municipal violations can be even worse. A municipal ordinance violation docket fee can range from $144 to $374· The docket fee for a traffic infraction can be $111 to $199.

Our research shows that the median amount of fines, fees, and restitution associated with a felony conviction in Alabama in 2005 was about $2,000. The median annual income reported in a 2014 survey of Alabama ex-felons by Foster Cook was less than $10,000. Cook's study found that 60 percent of individuals in Alabama paying court costs had to choose between paying off their debt and buying essentials. In the same study, 17 percent of individuals admitted to committing crimes to pay court costs. Given this, we were not surprised to find that the median balance owed today on a 2005 felony conviction is about $1,000.

Despite this, our research documents a general increase in court costs over time, leaving more and more individuals with outstanding criminal debt. Not only is it common for courts to charge fees for payment plans as in Ferguson, but courts may also charge fees for debt collection. Alabama imposes a fee of 30% after 90 days. Failure to pay this criminal justice debt may result in an individual having his or her driver's license suspended or even spending time in jail. In some states, including Alabama but also Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Iowa, Kentucky, and Tennessee, restoration of voting rights are conditioned on the payment of these legal financial obligations.

More work on this topic is needed. The extent of criminal justice debt- and the broad inability to pay it off-suggests that legal financial obligations themselves could play an important, though under-theorized, role in structuring inequality and mediating citizens' relationship with the state.

Marc Meredith is an associate professor of political science at Penn, and Claire Greenberg, C'17, is a Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE) major. Michael Morse, C'13, is a graduate student in government at Harvard University.

Penn Arts & Sciences magazine, Spring/Summer 2015.