By Andrew Lounder. At least a couple of decades ago, scholars began anticipating the retirement of baby boomers. It was to be a magnificent bursting of the bubble that was created when the U.S. population rapidly expanded in the years following World War II. Years went by, and we watched Dennis Hopper market Ameriprise retirement plans to boomers on TV, by greeting senior citizenship on his own rebellious terms (Mr. Easy Rider was not himself a boomer). We waited. We are still waiting. For those observing higher education faculty, we should go ahead and make ourselves comfortable. Fidelity Investments made headlines this week when it reported its findings from a recent survey on higher education faculty retirement planning, which included, “74 percent of these boomers plan to delay retirement past the age of 65, or never retire at all.” Read more...

By Robert E. Martin. Economists mislead families by framing college attendance as an issue of capital investment rather than one of affordability. Telling parents and students that they should choose the college with the highest net present value, or predicted return on their tuition investment, encourages them to choose the most expensive college they can. Since colleges work to convince the public that quality and cost are directly correlated, the investment framework is a good complement to marketing strategies. In fact, no objective data support the hypothesis that higher cost means higher quality in education. The data are lacking because colleges and universities provide few objective measures of quality, even though the market has called for that evidence for decades. Read more...

Debate follows U.S. court victory for Black Swan interns. The debate over unpaid internships is heating up in the U.S. following a recent court ruling that said Fox Searchlight Pictures violated federal minimum wage laws by not paying interns who worked on the 2010 film Black Swan. A similar case, filed by two former interns against the media giant Conde Nast, is also before a New York court. Read more...

By Ted Hewitt. A spate of analyses and commentaries have appeared recently, proclaiming the deleterious effects of actual and looming skills shortages on the Canadian economy. Yet in reality, the situation – and its solutions – is far more complex than such simple statistics would imply and a closer look at Canada’s “skilled labour shortage” reveals more than a few surprises. Labour shortages, in fact, do not just occur in the sciences, as is commonly presumed. They are just as prevalent – if not more so – in many social sciences and humanities fields. First, consider how the term “skills shortage”, meaning essentially fewer people available to fill critical shortages, is typically characterized. A report prepared by the CIBC World Markets indicates, for example, that in 2012, no less than 30 percent of Canadian businesses indicated that they faced a skilled labour shortage, double the number posted in 2010. Another survey of 100 senior executives published late last year by Workopolis similarly indicated that 32 percent believed that the shortage of skilled workers was the number one problem facing Canadian business in general. Read more...

By Jason Margolis. You don’t have to look hard to see signs of Brazil’s prosperity reaching the lower classes. When I visited some slums in Rio de Janiero, many of the modest houses and shacks had small satellite dishes on top, one tell-tale sign of people flirting with a middle class lifestyle. That measure is a bit simplistic though.
“First of all, you have to be very careful with this idea that there more people in the middle class,” said Eduardo Siqueira of the Transnational Brazilian Project at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. He said these small signs of prosperity don’t tell the whole story in Brazil.
“The number of people who are poor, who got a little bit more money, does not mean that they became all of a sudden middle class, unless you classify middle class only by what they can purchase.” Read more...