Land O Links
"A man's errors are his portals of discovery" -- Irish author James Joyce.
* You will be hearing a great deal in coming weeks and months about "Mip-sers" -- the Michigan Public School Employees Retirement System. The Citizens Research Council of Michigan, at its blog, gives a good run-down of how school districts are being squeezed by the costs of funding pensions and health care for school retirees:
http://www.crcmich.org/column/?p=233
* This may have some bearing on the debate over higher education funding at the State Capitol: "Respondents were asked to think about the importance of college to financial success. While similar numbers of liberals and conservatives indicated that college is 'somewhat important', liberals were 20 percentage points more likely than conservatives to say that college is 'very important.' In fact, only a little more than one quarter of self-identified conservatives and a similar proportion of self-identified Republicans agree that college is 'very important' to financial success.":
http://today.yougov.com/news/2012/03/15/politicized-value-college/
*Iowa has a higher ed funding debate going as well. "The governor (Republican Terry Branstad) is calling for a $23 million increase to the budget for the state’s three public universities, while House Republicans have called for a $31 million decrease from the previous year.":
http://www.stateline.org/live/details/story?contentId=639299
* The charts in this blog post are rather depressing. To the untrained eye, it would appear that the strongest correlation isn't between test scores and college completion, but between family income and college completion. Are we returning to the pre-World War II society where college was pretty much a rich man's game?:
http://www.epi.org/blog/college-graduation-scores-income-levels/
* The Archives of Michigan -- the people's filing cabinet, if you will -- does a neat feature by highlighting an image of the month. Check out the photo of then-President Theodore Roosevelt visiting Lansing in 1907:
http://www.michigan.gov/dnr/0,1607,7-153-54463_19313_20652_19271_19357---,00.html
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