What did Walker know and when did he know it?

Walker representative: MATC is a tremendous asset

In October of 2011, Reggie Newson, Wisconsin Governor Walker's Secretary of the Department of Workforce Development, sang the praises of the Milwaukee Area Technical College in an interview on Milwaukee Public Television calling it s tremendous asset.

Now that his boss is in a tight recall election and his own job is on the line, Newsom had a radically different take on MATC. To justify his politically motivated annoucement that the state was investing $100 million in a new central city training center, Newsom claimed that MATC is not placing students in jobs or meeting employers needs.

Not only is this news to MATC - that had an 83% graduate placement rate even during the depths of the Great Recession - but one has to wonder why Reggie has had such a change of heart?

Instead of using scarce state dollars to establish a new training center within a stones throw of MATC, why not use the $100 million to restore the $70 million Walker cut from Wisconsin Technical College's state funding in the last budget?

Subsidize Students, Not tax cuts

New York Times Editorial, April 25, 2012

In 2007, President George W. Bush signed a bill that cut in half interest rates on subsidized student loans until 2012. Those low rates will expire on July 1 — going back to 6.8 percent from 3.4 percent — and, to prevent college from becoming even more unaffordable for millions of students, the obvious move is to renew them.

But nothing is that easy or sensible anymore in Washington, where House Republicans are far more interested in cutting taxes, largely for the rich, than they are in helping low- and middle-income students get a college education.

House Republicans say the country cannot afford the $6 billion a year that it costs to pay for the lower rates. The Ryan budget, recently approved by the House, would allow the rates to double, and, at the same time, would cut taxes by $10 trillion over a decade. Representative John Kline Jr., the chairman of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, said keeping the rates low would mean “piling billions of dollars on the backs of taxpayers.”

Instead, Republicans would rather pile that burden on the backs of taxpayers-to-be, specifically the 7.4 million students who now have federally subsidized Stafford loans and the millions more who will need them. At a time when many graduates are desperate for jobs, the interest rate increase would add an average of $1,000 a year to their debt. Already, many Republican lawmakers around the country have made it clear that they don’t even want students to vote, imposing identification requirements that would keep students away from polling places.

In the first of several speeches about the cost of higher education, President Obama urged students on Tuesday to demand that Congress renew the rates. “At this make-or-break moment for the middle class,” he said at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, “we’ve got to make sure that you’re not saddled with debt before you even get started in life.”

Nothing is more important to this country’s future than ensuring a good education for coming generations. The issue also plays directly into Mr. Obama’s own need to re-energize younger voters, who turned out in overwhelming numbers for him in 2008 but seem far less enthusiastic these days.

Once the White House began its effort, Mitt Romney broke with House Republicans and said Monday that he supports renewing the loan subsidies. As usual, though, that also meant breaking with himself, since he had fully embraced the House budget and never expressed any reservations about the student loan provisions. Indeed, only a few months ago, he argued repeatedly in interviews that student subsidies were a bad idea that encouraged colleges to raise their tuition.

Mr. Romney, along with the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, said that the $6 billion cost of the subsidy should be offset with cuts to other programs, but predictably neither man said where those cuts should come from. The White House and Democrats have proposed raising the money by ending a loophole used by high-paid employees of S-corporations to avoid paying full payroll taxes.

The Republican response to that idea is also predictable. This is a party that shows time and again that it wants to protect only those who have made it, not help those struggling to get started.

Walker's policies make Wisconsin Number 1 in job loss

Wisconsin is the only state in the nation to lose jobs over the last year.

We lost 23,900 jobs from March 2011 through March 2012 because of Scott Walker's policies of:

• slashing public employee salaries.
• rejecting over a billion in federal investments.
• cutting shared revenue and investments in education.
• killing job creating wind farm investments through developer friendly regulations.

 So much for Walker's empty promise of 250,000 private sector jobs.

Wisconsin dead last in jobs

Wisconsin is the only state that had "statistically significant" job losses over the most recent 12-month period, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

From March 2011 to March 2012, Wisconsin lost 23,900 jobs. That was the largest decrease in percentage terms in the country. Those job losses came from both the public and private sector, but the public sector job losses (17,800) were larger than the private-sector job losses (6,100).

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker promised to create 250,000 private sector jobs when he campaigned for office. Once elected, he slashed corporate and investor taxes. The result-Wisconsin has lost jobs in seven of the last nine months, 4,300 in March, and is facing a deficit next year.

Republican Whipping boy Illinois creates jobs while Wisconsin continues to lose them

Earlier this week Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker traveled over the Illinois line to argue that the tax increase backed by his Democratic counterpart Pat Quinn is killing jobs even as the Midwest rebounds from recession.

“Is it any wonder because of choices that were made right here in the state’s capital?” Walker said in an April 17 speech to the Illinois Chamber of Commerce in Springfield. “When you raise taxes on businesses, that wealth and opportunity and those jobs more often than not go somewhere else.”

A broader snapshot tells a much different tale.

Illinois ranked third while Wisconsin placed 42nd in the most recent Bloomberg Economic Evaluation of States index, which includes personal income, tax revenue and employment.

Illinois gained 32,000 jobs in the 12 months ending in February, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics found. Wisconsin, where Walker promised to create 250,000 jobs with the help of corporate and investor tax breaks, lost 16,900.

Quinn was ready for the cross-border critique from Wisconsin, which led the nation in job loss in 2011. Quinn scheduled a news conference less than hour after Walker spoke to announce that LaFarge SA (LG), the Paris-based building materials maker, would move its North American headquarters to Illinois.

“They have the worst job record in the whole country, dead last,” Governor Pat Quinn, said of Wisconsin. “We certainly don’t want to follow his prescriptions when it comes to economic growth.”

Two days after Walker's trip to the land of Lincoln. the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development announced that Wisconsin had lost another 4,300 private sector jobs in March. 

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Senators Take on For-Profit Marketing Budgets

Submitted by Paul Fain on April 19, 2012 - 3:00am

WASHINGTON -- Two Senate Democrats have found a new way to try to hit for-profit colleges where it hurts, by proposing a ban on the use of revenue from federal financial aid for advertising, marketing and recruitment.

The proposed legislation is unlikely to go anywhere this year, and will draw little support from Republicans. But the approach is novel, and could be part of the longer-term debate on Capitol Hill about the regulation of for-profit institutions.

The bill is also notable because it is the first legislative salvo against for-profits from Sen. Tom Harkin, the Iowa Democrat who has led a lengthy pursuit of the industry. And the legislation applies to both nonprofits and for-profits, a development applauded by for-profits, which otherwise criticized the bill.

Sen. Kay Hagan of North Carolina joined Harkin in sponsoring the legislation, which would apply to all colleges that receive federal aid under Title IV of the Higher Education Act. However, the senators clearly took aim at for-profits, which generally spend much more on marketing to prospective students. Nonprofit colleges, particularly two-year institutions, often complain that for-profits use advertising to lure students who would otherwise attend community colleges.

“We need to make sure that federal education dollars are spent on just that: education,” Harkin said.
Among a group of 15 of the largest publicly traded for-profits, the average company in 2009 spent 23 percent of its budget on advertising, marketing and recruitment, according to research from the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. By comparison, nonprofit institutions on average spend less than 1 percent of their budgets on marketing, according to the committee.
Some for-profits spend big on “deceptive marketing and recruitment efforts,” Hagan said, noting in a written statement that she is “especially troubled by the tactics some for-profits have employed in targeting active-duty service members and veterans.”

The legislation would include in its ban on marketing expenditures the use of revenue from the Post-9/11 G.I. Bill and tuition benefits for service members. Currently, those military aid programs do not count as federal dollars under the 90/10 rule, which prohibits for-profits from drawing more than 90 percent of their revenue from federal aid such as Pell Grants and federal student loans.

Protecting veterans and members of the military from aggressive student recruiting is a popular cause that some Republican lawmakers support. But this bill did not include a Republican co-sponsor.
The legislation would not lead to changes in spending by most nonprofit institutions, observers said, because few are both heavily dependent on revenue from federal financial aid while also toting proportionally large marketing budgets.

Terry W. Hartle, senior vice president for government and public affairs at the American Council on Education, said the bill’s “goals are laudable.” The council fully supports efforts to crack down on “deceptive or high-pressure recruiting tactics.”

Even so, putting the legislation into action would be “extraordinarily difficult," Hartle said, because there is no easy way to determine what, exactly, constitutes marketing at nonprofit colleges. And while details were vague for how colleges would comply with the rules, Hartle said that added administrative burdens could also be problematic.

“Implementation is never as easy or simple as the legislative branch would assume,” he said.
Banned under the bill’s language would be the use of federal aid revenue for all “advertising and promotion activities” as well as “efforts to identify and attract prospective students, either directly or through a contractor or third party.”

Sen. Hagan said “there would be a certification process that would have to be signed” for colleges to continue accepting federal financial aid from their students.

Steve Gunderson, CEO of the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities, the primary for-profit trade group, said in a written statement that the legislation was burdensome and “another attempt by some policy makers to try and put private sector colleges and universities out of business.”

The bill also “reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the students we serve and the public service we provide,” because of the large numbers of adult and nontraditional students who attend for-profits and “can’t be reached through a high school guidance counselor.”

A spokesman for the Apollo Group criticized “misleading rhetoric” from the two senators, who singled out Apollo for employing more than 8,000 student recruiters in 2010. But he said it was “encouraging to see that this legislation is focused on all schools.”

Senator Harkin, however, focused his comments squarely on for-profits, which he said have “dismal graduation rates” and spend “staggering” amounts of money on advertising and recruiting. However, he stressed that the legislation would not prohibit college ad buys.

“There’s nothing wrong with advertising and marketing,” he said. “You just won’t be allowed to use taxpayers’ dollars to do so.”