Posts Tagged University
Employment Futures: Reorganization, Dislocation, and Public Policy.
The reviewer, Alfred Diamant, is a professor of political science and West European studies at Indiana University, Bloomington.
This work will not attract a wide readership. It should, however, for it deals with one of the more intractable problems of the U.S. political economy. Moreover, Osterman examines crucial issues of the American educational system by stressing links among that system, its outputs, and the labor market. He does so in good part by a careful comparative study of labor-market functioning in Sweden and the Federal Republic of Germany.
The reason this book will not get the readership it deserves is twofold. It is a book for specialists, so that even social scientists fluent in other branches of these disciplines, such as this reviewer, find the going tough. Readability is further reduced by an uncompromisingly tight focus on the issues, with little effort to lighten the nonspecialist reader’s task. At the same time, the author works hard at summarizing preceding arguments and taking the reader over terrain that had previously been covered in the book. These might seem to be contradictory complaints, but they are not; the summarizing of earlier arguments is just as difficult to manage as their original presentation.
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Endowment Tax is Unsound Public Policy
I just read in the May 19 Christian Science Monitor that a Massachusetts legislator proposes a 2.5 percent tax on college endowments over $1 billion. The Commonwealth State has nine such institutions including Harvard, MIT, Williams, Boston College, Amherst, Wellesley, Tufts, Smith and Boston University; all of them are among the most selective schools in the United States.
State representative Paul Kujowski, sponsor of the endowment tax legislation believes these institutions have accumulated an exorbitant amount of wealth while retaining their non-profit status. I can believe that Representative Kujowski did the math, and found that Harvard alone would pay $850 million on $34 billion of their endowment and MIT $250 million on their $10 billion; a smart politician knows a cash cow when he sees one.
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