Unless Massachusetts wants to be a third world style backwater, it MUST stop the bleed.
What is “the bleed”? Well, for starters, “the bleed” is loss of jobs, loss of the 22-35 age group because they move away in search of jobs and affordable housing, loss of manufacturing, loss of small business, loss of jobs because we don’t educate enough of our own citizens to fill them.
PROPOSED SOLUTIONS
#1: Repair and maintain a first class infrastructure including state wide broadband internet access by using the bonding already allocated to ensure safe roads and bridges, internet access, telecommunications,as well as safe, sufficient, affordable public higher education. Private higher education will take care of itself. Public higher education students on the whole remain and work in Massachusetts. Private higher education students do NOT stay. They can take care of themselves.
#2. Clean government. Transparency in government and avoiding bribes, corruption, influence peddling and back room deals. Hint: clean government leads to a better and less expensive business environment. That means actually announcing committee hearings in advance where people can find out about them, bringing back cable coverage for all legislative sessions, formal and informal, and ensuring that anyone can run for office without being a retired millionaire or funded by special interests. Today, to become a full time public servant and hold elected office requires either independent wealth, retirement with a defined benefit pension, or being young enough not to have a mortgage. Otherwise, no state representative or state senator can afford to buy a house in Massachusetts.
#3 Long term proactive planning rather than lurching from crisis to crisis with short term fixes.
#4 Whether it takes a “Work Products Administration” approach or another approach, bring back and encourage light and heavy manufacturing. If nothing is made here, decline is inevitable. We cannot just flip the same burger back and forth to one another. Not everyone is able or equipped to do all their work on computers and in their minds; humans come in more than one model AND value added is more than pixels. Create fast permitting zones, utilize closed bases and closed factories to do this – whatever it takes.
#5 Set up the equivalent of microlending, whether in a public/private partnership or directly – Treasurer Cahill could manage it – so credit does not dry up forcing small businesses that provide the majority of jobs to keep folding in record numbers. Whenever a viable business with a cash flow which exceeds debt fails because credit is not available, this is actually a failure of governance and totally avoidable.
Interesting post, but I’m not entirely sure how some of these fit into “stopping the bleed” for Massachusetts.
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p>”Clean government”? Unless you’re Howie Carr, you don’t think people are leaving MA because of (real or apparent) political corruption. I’m not sure about broadband access being any sort of panacea either. Light manufacturing I can see, but let’s face it — heavy manufacturing is (in the US) a dying industry. I’d rather our state be forward-looking than backward-looking. Finally, the real reason young people are leaving this area is because of housing costs, which (even now) are inflated compared to those in competitors like North Carolina. I’d say we’re not doing enough to deal with this issue.
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p>Ultimately, though, I agree that education is critically important, and our built-in advantages are in fact why Massachusetts can take the lead in developing the “new” economy. I’d agree that we can and should do more to make sure we maintain our competitive edge here. Private higher education will take care of itself, but we can invest more in making sure that all high school graduates have financial access to at least two-year public programs.
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p>Also, I’m interested in the “micro-lending” idea — can you (or anyone else as well) expand on that?
In my experience, a growing new economy will create on the job education rather than waiting for kids to go to four years of college to learn the latest software.
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p>The problem in Mass is slow business growth and slow job growth. When the state takes over job training rather than general arts and sciences education, the state is paying for things the businesses should be doing and will do better given the chance.
Two other large groups of young skilled workers who are rapidly leaving Massachusetts are the Irish and Brazilian immigrants who came here legally several years ago, but overstayed their visas. The Irish are going to Australia; the Brazilians back to Brazil. This started when Massacusetts stopped renewing their drivers’ licences so they could no longer drive legally here. What other group of young workers would even consider moving here with our cold climate and high cost of housing? To stop this bleed, we would need to change the drivers’ licence law.
changing it would require losing millions upon millions in federal funds. This has to be taken up on the federal level.
Maine refused to change their drivers’ licence policies and didn’t lose any federal money.
There could be a second tier licence (or class B) that couldn’t be used as ID on planes, but could be used to drive.
I’ll add that there’s a lot of things we can do to save money, infusing more cash into the local economy, like universal broadband/wifi public access, or at least alternative. Verizon and Comcast have had enough time to be innovative and inclusive; if they’re not going to do it because the profit’s just not there, fine, we will. And we’ll open it up to everyone, offering people true competition. Who wants to bet that we’ll see those $100-115 bundles go for $40-50 if that were to happen in a matter of months? That’s $60-110 more for the local economy…
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p>Same thing with health care, only on an infinitely larger scale (no reason to wait for the feds).
“Public higher education students on the whole remain and work in Massachusetts. Private higher education students do NOT stay. They can take care of themselves.”
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p>This may be true in an overall sense, that a larger percentage of UMass students stay here than those from private colleges and universities, but it’d be a fallacy to assume that “they can take care of themselves” or that they do not stay in Massachusetts.
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p>There are many great arguments to be made about the need for a great public education system in the commonwealth. It’s silly to make them at the expense of those educated by the scores of private institutions around our state. If we’re playing the solutions game, lets not throw around blanket assumptions grouping all private university students together, ok?
but in terms of who stays at public versus private, people who go to public school in mass stay at a rate that blows private out of the water – along the lines of 80% versus 15%.
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p>I will also note that the private schools do need a good punch in the mouth, though, because they continually work against a stronger public education system in Massachusetts – competition, you know. The best example is their work against a UMASS Dartmouth Law School, that would have been funded completely by UMASS Dartmouth using no state dollars, and would have created a $19k/year law school focusing on public law for Massachusetts. The private schools absolutely couldn’t have that and they used all their influence to block it.
Who is going to UMass? By and large, it’s people from Massachusetts. People who live here already are of course much more likely to stay after they graduate.
Bottom line is students are going to go where the opportunities are. Because we don’t have a strong public higher ed tradition in this state, many students who would normally go to public schools in other states choose to go to private schools. Many of those students attend private schools in other states, because they’ll just go to the best school they got into or the school they fell in love with. When they graduate, a huge proportion of them will either stay in that state or have no loyalty to going back to Massachusetts. Indeed, I’ve seen this happen with enough people that I attended high school with that I can safely say it’s more than anecdotal.
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p>If we had a stronger state university system (with Ivy-caliber institutions like UNC, UCLA or Berkley), we’d retain most of these students who currently leave for other states. Why? Because they’d get a better education, that’s also much cheaper, at a UMASS school than at a big, expensive private school.
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p>So while you’re right, of course students going to state schools are usually going to stay in that state, the statistic ceases to become meaningless when you look at opportunity cost. We’re losing the students because they’re choosing to go to BU and Northeastern over UMASS. If Massachusetts students stayed at Massachusetts schools, they wouldn’t be tempted to stay at other states. Furthermore, since we have many of the best private schools in the world, we’d not only be retaining our own students with a strong UMASS system, we’d be leaching students from other states via our many private institutions.
“We’re losing the students because they’re choosing to go to BU and Northeastern over UMASS.”
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p>I meant to say (fixes/additions in bold):
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p>We’re not losing the students because they’re choosing to go to BU and Northeastern over UMASS. We’re losing them because they’re choosing to go to NYU and Cornell over UMASS and Salem State.
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p>etc.
Wasn’t that students going to a state school will stay in that state – but rather that students going to a state school are FROM that state – which makes them more likely to stay.
I didn’t make that clear? (“So while you’re right, of course students going to state schools are usually going to stay in that state…”)
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p>My point was that Sco was missing the big picture. The statistic is significant because we currently don’t invest in our public higher ed enough to make it comparable to other superior public systems throughout the country. Thus, more of our best students in Massachusetts are likely to attend private schools than in other states (in many/most states, pretty much everyone that goes to college go to public colleges – often because they’re not only the cheapest, but the best academic options in those states).
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p>When more students in Massachusetts attend private schools, it’s inevitable that more of them will attend private schools in other states, making the state versus public rates suddenly very important. You can nudge students to stay in state using the public system, but if it’s not seen as prestigious enough and students choose to go the private route instead, it’s open game as to what college they’ll pick.
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p>Once a student attends college out of Massachusetts, they’re more likely to stay out of Massachusetts – since so many students find jobs in or around their colleges, and they’re four years removed from thinking of themselves as Massachusetts citizens. Plus, many students really do form a bond of loyalty to whatever school and area they attend. A perk of having that loyalty extended to a state school is that loyalty is extended toward that state, at least in some small part.
…is shameful….and sure doesn’t look like it is changing any time soon.
9/10 UMass students (and I’d bet the number is higher for state and community colleges) are MA residents – of course they’re going to stay!!!
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p>Compare that to a BU or a BC, where at most 25% of the students come from MA. The numbers are probably even lower for Harvard, MIT, etc.
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p>Yet, while around 80% of UMass graduates stay in MA, more than 30% of private school graduates stay … i.e. more than come from our state to begin with!
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p>What does that mean? Our PRIVATE schools are net importers of people from other states – but our PUBLIC schools are net exporters of their alumni!!!
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p>Also, please don’t compare Suffolk Law and New England Law teaming up to lobby against a public law school at UMass to the entire industry colluding to hurt public education. Those two schools were worried about their bottom line – but they’re only a small part of the whole picture.
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p>Private schools are a huge part of our economy, and many of our state’s citizens came here for school, from other places, and stayed.
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p>BTW, these numbers come from a UMass presentation; http://www.authorstream.com/Pr…
When our best and brightest choose to go to private schools over public schools, it’s a roll of the dice whether they decide to stay in state or out of state. In most other states, the best schools in the states – the schools with the most research and best campuses – are often the big, public universities. Schools like UNC, UCLA and Berkley are seen as prestigious as Ivy league colleges in many cases.
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p>In Massachusetts? Public colleges aren’t seen anywhere near as prestigious and many students decide to go to private colleges because of that. We have a culture in this state that the private schools are better than the public schools. Even under our current, woefully inadequately funded system, a UMASS Dartmouth is just as good as a North Eastern and a UMASS Amherst is leaps and bounds ahead of it (or BU for that matter). Yet, I don’t think public perception’s caught up with that.
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p>To call private schools “importers” really is misleading, at best, when you’re talking retaining those who grew up here – or even aggregate numbers when comparing those who grew up here versus the number of people who stay/came here. It’s in indisputable fact that more young people are leaving Massachusetts than staying here, so really, you need to take a dose of reality on that front. Yes, the schools bring in plenty of new people, but so many of our high school graduates go to private schools out of state and then stay in those states. That’s where we lose many who we wouldn’t lose if UMASS Amherst were in the same league as UCLA.
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p>Also, whether intentional or not, our private schools do bare some of the responsibility for the way Beacon Hill treats our public colleges. The UMASS law school that Suffolk shot down was only the best example (poor Suffolk! Can’t let them have to compete with, you know, an affordable college education!) It’s in great part Beacon Hill that views public schools as the schools of last resort, not schools that should attract the absolute best and brightest of Massachusetts, otherwise we’d seeing far more money be invested into public higher ed. Beacon Hill actually contributes to the perception problem, especially given the fact that so many of them went to the state’s private schools.
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p>Look, I’m not trying to be anti-private schools here. They’re obviously here to stay – and I’m glad to have them. Many people in Massachusetts will still choose to go to them. I’m mainly worried about keeping the kids who go to other states seeking out private colleges. If some of the kids from Mass who would attend private schools choose to attend our hypothetically revamped public colleges, it would only open up the door for more out of staters to come here (and for many of them to stay here).
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p>I’m just looking for this state to finally treat the UMASS system with the respect that it deserves. Within 5 or 10 years, this state needs to fund the system at least on par with most other states – instead of 2nd to last, where we currently stand. How can you say there’s no problem with how Beacon Hill treats public colleges – and that it’s not in great part because of the private schools – when our public higher ed funding is so pathetic? Public universities in Massachusetts are living in a vacuum, all the attention and funds sucked up by the private institutions. That would be fine if not for the fact that Massachusetts is continually losing our young professionals to other states… and this is issue numero uno or dos (housing costs being the other big problem).
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p>There is absolutely no excuse for the fact that we don’t offer our state’s middle and working class a public college or two that rival Harvard and MIT, as so many other states do. In the grand scheme of things, not only would that be fantastic for Massachusetts and all its citizens, but it would be good for Harvard and MIT and all our private schools, by instituting some real competition into the system. Meanwhile, our already strong higher ed industry would become even more stronger, attracting even more industries and research to add to our economy. If you want to talk about economic impact, fund our UMASS system like California funds its UC system and we’ll have suddenly Ivy-caliber institutions that will retain our state’s best and brightest coming out of high school, and probably double the amount of research done in this state – along with all the other economic perks (jobs, economic growth) that come with that.
….the private schools suck up all the oxygen.
It’s time has passed. Massachusetts is one of the few places that presists in keeping it. Despite its appearance of being a form of pure democracy, in actual practice it is not. It had its place in history, but with people’s lifestyles now, it is sorely outdated.
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p>At the very least, get rid of representative town meeting. A large body of representatives only makes is hard for the citizens in a town to figure out what their representatives are doing on their behalf. It was created to appease those people who could not let go of the idea of town meeting whil at the same time appearing as if some Massachusetts towns were entering the modern era…