Why College Towns Are Looking Smart

MARCH 24, 2009, 2:32 P.M. ET Why College Towns Are Looking Smart Article

By KELLY EVANS
Looking for a job? Try a college town.

Morgantown, W.Va., home to West Virginia University, has one of the lowest unemployment rates in the U.S. -- just 3.9% -- and the university itself has about 260 job openings, from nurses to professors to programmers.

"We're hurting for people, especially to fill our computer and technical positions," says Margaret Phillips, vice president for human relations at WVU.

Of the six metropolitan areas with unemployment below 4% as of January, three of them are considered college towns. One is Morgantown. The other two are Logan, Utah, home of Utah State University, and Ames, Iowa, home of Iowa State University. Both have just 3.8% unemployment, based on Labor Department figures that are not seasonally adjusted.

The pattern holds true for many other big college towns, such as Gainesville, Fla., Ann Arbor, Mich., Manhattan, Kan., and Boulder, Colo. In stark contrast, the unadjusted national unemployment rate is 8.5%.

While college towns have long been considered recession-resistant, their ability to avoid the depths of the financial crisis shaking the rest of the nation is noteworthy. The ones faring the best right now are not only major education centers; they also are regional health-care hubs that draw people into the city and benefit from a stable, educated, highly skilled work force.

The big question hanging over these communities is whether their formula for success can outlast the nation's nastiest recession in at least a quarter-century. Amid investment losses and state budget woes, many college cities are starting to see their unemployment rates rise, even though they're still lower than the national average. The longer the recession drags on, the more likely college towns are to catch up with their harder-hit peers.

They already have felt the impact of the recession. WVU saw its endowment fall by nearly a quarter in the second half of 2008, and its hospitals are reducing 401(k) matching contributions and delaying $20 million in capital spending, though its state funding has remained intact.

State Funding Cuts
Utah State University has seen nearly 10% of its state funding cut in the past six months, and in response has laid off about 20 employees and imposed a mandatory weeklong furlough for its employees during spring break to save costs. Iowa State, facing a 9% reduction in state appropriations, just received approval to begin an early-retirement program.

But for now, at least, job seekers who act quickly -- and are willing to relocate -- could well fare better in places like Morgantown, which is about 70 miles south of Pittsburgh near the Pennsylvania border. College towns like Morgantown have a distinct advantage over many other cities: They enjoy a constant stream of graduates, some who stay put and others who return years later -- and each year brings a new crop of students and potential residents to the area.

"I could go almost anywhere and get a job right now," says Shane Cruse, a senior in the WVU school of nursing who graduates in May, citing the shortage of nurses nationwide. But come June 1, he'll be starting as a registered nurse at WVU's Ruby Memorial Hospital.

"I love it here," Mr. Cruse says. "It's a large-enough city that there's plenty to do. But you still leave your house and feel like it's your hometown."

WVU has a current enrollment of nearly 29,000, about the same size as the city of Morgantown, though the metro population is now about 115,000 and draws thousands more daily from the surrounding region for health care, shopping and WVU athletic events.

Today, the university and its hospital system together employ nearly 12,500 people -- the largest employer in the whole state. Job growth in the Morgantown metropolitan area averaged 3.2% a year from 2002-07, according to the university's Bureau of Business and Economic Research, compared to growth of just 1.1% nationally and 0.7% in West Virginia. The university system in total has an estimated annual economic impact of about $3.9 billion statewide.

Highly Skilled Work Force
Economists credit a highly skilled work force for the resilience of college towns. Edward Glaeser, an economics professor at Harvard University, has demonstrated that as the share of the adult population with college degrees in a city increases by 10%, wages correspondingly rise by about 7.8%.

"Apart from weather, human capital has been the best long-run predictor of urban success in the last century," Mr. Glaeser says.

Nikki Bowman, a 1992 graduate of WVU, is the kind of person economists have in mind when they speak of "human capital." She spent years in the magazine industry in places like Chicago and Washington, D.C., before returning last year to start her own magazine, WV Living, which was launched in November.

"It was my dream to come back, and I knew I could make it work," says Ms. Bowman, 37. "Part of why I wanted to be here was to pull from the journalism school and I have a lot of great interns as a result," which helps keep her payroll costs down.

WVU graduate Lindsay Williams, 29, started work as a real-estate broker with Howard Hanna's Morgantown office shortly after leaving WVU while waiting for her then-boyfriend -- now her husband -- to finish his degree. She now serves as president of the Morgantown Board of Realtors.

Another factor helping college towns: "communiversity," the current term for partnerships between universities and their home cities, such as joint economic development projects. The trend also reflects a shift in education to increasingly emphasize out-of-classroom learning, such as internships and volunteer work, that by definition engages the community, according to Sal Rinella, president of the Society for College and University Planning in Los Angeles.

"We could actually call these town-gown partnerships a kind of new movement in American higher education," he says. "In the last 20 years or so, the boundaries between the cities and the universities have really begun to crumble."

Planning experts point to the successful relationships between the University of Pennsylvania and downtown Philadelphia, and Johns Hopkins University's multimillion-dollar partnership with the East Baltimore Development Corp. But the college-town effect has its greatest impact in places like Morgantown.

The close relationship between Morgantown and WVU was partly borne out of desperation. In 1991, a young, reform-minded group including Ron Justice, who is now the mayor, was elected to the city council at a pivotal moment; the decades-long decline of railroad and heavy industry in Morgantown meant the city urgently needed to find a new engine of growth.

The council hired a city manager to oversee municipal finances, and began working more closely with the WVU administration in a joint effort to turn the town around. They started out small, with road-paving projects and public safety. In 2001, the university relocated a major new administration building in the city's blighted Wharf District instead of its downtown campus.

Catalyst for Redevelopment
The new building became a catalyst for redevelopment of the whole waterfront. A new hotel, restaurants and a $28 million event center have since been built, and the old railroad tracks are now miles of jogging and biking trails.

The university has continued to upgrade its downtown campus and added new facilities like a $34 million student recreation center with two pools, a climbing wall and a café to its campus a few miles north of town. Construction is now under way on an 88-acre research park near the hospital and a $50 million commercial development featuring a Hilton Garden Inn.

At the same time, WVU president David Hardesty's aggressive expansion of the university's student body -- which has grown 50% since 1995 -- and program offerings in the 1990s, including a world-renowned forensics and biometrics program, helped raise the caliber of the city's work force.

Jason Donahue graduated from WVU in 1993 and followed a career in commercial real-estate development to a job with ECDC Realty in Charleston, S.C., whose primary business is site selection and development for Wal-Mart Stores Inc. He moved back to Morgantown in 2007 to handle development in the Pennsylvania region. "My wife would tell you I picked our house so we could be within walking distance to the football games," he said with a chuckle. They are now season-ticket holders.

His wife, a registered nurse, quickly found work at one of the city's senior centers. Their 7-year-old daughter was in a community play last weekend sponsored by WVU -- a production of "Alice in Wonderland." "She was Gardener No. 7 with two speaking lines, and she did great," Mr. Donahue says.

Holi Celebrations! (2009)

Priya and her bunch of Holi revellers in full form. A festival tailormade for kids!!

As Indian Growth Soars, Child Hunger Persists (New York Times)

March 13, 2009

By SOMINI SENGUPTA
NEW DELHI — Small, sick, listless children have long been India’s scourge — “a national shame,” in the words of its prime minister, Manmohan Singh. But even after a decade of galloping economic growth, child malnutrition rates are worse here than in many sub-Saharan African countries, and they stand out as a paradox in a proud democracy.
China, that other Asian economic powerhouse, sharply reduced child malnutrition, and now just 7 percent of its children under 5 are underweight, a critical gauge of malnutrition. In India, by contrast, despite robust growth and good government intentions, the comparable number is 42.5 percent. Malnutrition makes children more prone to illness and stunts physical and intellectual growth for a lifetime.
There are no simple explanations. Economists and public health experts say stubborn malnutrition rates point to a central failing in this democracy of the poor. Amartya Sen, the Nobel prize-winning economist, lamented that hunger was not enough of a political priority here. India’s public expenditure on health remains low, and in some places, financing for child nutrition programs remains unspent.
Yet several democracies have all but eradicated hunger. And ignoring the needs of the poor altogether does spell political peril in India, helping to topple parties in the last elections.
Others point to the efficiency of an authoritarian state like China. India’s sluggish and sometimes corrupt bureaucracy has only haltingly put in place relatively simple solutions — iodizing salt, for instance, or making sure all children are immunized against preventable diseases — to say nothing of its progress on the harder tasks, like changing what and how parents feed their children.
But as China itself has grown more prosperous, it has had its own struggles with health care, as the government safety net has shredded with its adoption of a more market-driven economy.
While India runs the largest child feeding program in the world, experts agree it is inadequately designed, and has made barely a dent in the ranks of sick children in the past 10 years.
The $1.3 billion Integrated Child Development Services program, India’s primary effort to combat malnutrition, finances a network of soup kitchens in urban slums and villages.
But most experts agree that providing adequate nutrition to pregnant women and children under 2 years old is crucial — and the Indian program has not homed in on them adequately. Nor has it succeeded in sufficiently changing child feeding and hygiene practices. Many women here remain in ill health and are ill fed; they are prone to giving birth to low-weight babies and tend not to be aware of how best to feed them.
A tour of Jahangirpuri, a slum in this richest of Indian cities, put the challenge on stark display. Shortly after daybreak, in a rented room along a narrow alley, an all-female crew prepared giant vats of savory rice and lentil porridge.
Purnima Menon, a public health researcher with the International Food Policy Research Institute, was relieved to see it was not just starch; there were even flecks of carrots thrown in. The porridge was loaded onto bicycle carts and ferried to nurseries that vet and help at-risk children and their mothers throughout the neighborhood.
So far, so good. Except that at one nursery — known in Hindi as an anganwadi — the teacher was a no-show. At another, there were no children; instead, a few adults sauntered up with their lunch pails. At a third, the nursery worker, Brij Bala, said that 13 children and 13 lactating mothers had already come to claim their servings, and that now she would have to fill the bowls of whoever came along, neighborhood aunties and all. “They say, ‘Give us some more,’ so we have to,” Ms. Bala confessed. “Otherwise, they will curse us.”
None of the centers had a working scale to weigh children and to identify the vulnerable ones, a crucial part of the nutrition program.
Most important from Ms. Menon’s point of view, the nurseries were largely missing the needs of those most at risk: children under 2, for whom the feeding centers offered a dry ration of flour and ground lentils, containing none of the micronutrients a vulnerable infant needs.
In a memorandum prepared in February, the Ministry of Women and Child Development acknowledged that while the program had yielded some gains in the past 30 years, “its impact on physical growth and development has been rather slow.” The report recommended fortifying food with micronutrients and educating parents on how to better feed their babies.
A World Food Program report last month noted that India remained home to more than a fourth of the world’s hungry, 230 million people in all. It also found anemia to be on the rise among rural women of childbearing age in eight states across India. Indian women are often the last to eat in their homes and often unlikely to eat well or rest during pregnancy. Ms. Menon’s institute, based in Washington, recently ranked India below two dozen sub-Saharan countries on its Global Hunger Index.
Childhood anemia, a barometer of poor nutrition in a lactating mother’s breast milk, is three times higher in India than in China, according to a 2007 research paper from the institute.
The latest Global Hunger Index described hunger in Madhya Pradesh, a destitute state in central India, as “extremely alarming,” ranking the state somewhere between Chad and Ethiopia.
More surprising, though, it found that “serious” rates of hunger persisted across Indian states that had posted enviable rates of economic growth in recent years, including Maharashtra and Gujarat.
Here in the capital, which has the highest per-capita income in the country, 42.2 percent of children under 5 are stunted, or too short for their age, and 26 percent are underweight. A few blocks from the Indian Parliament, tiny, ill-fed children turn somersaults for spare change at traffic signals.
Back in Jahangirpuri, a dead rat lay in the courtyard in front of Ms. Bala’s nursery. The narrow lanes were lined with scum from the drains. Malaria and respiratory illness, which can be crippling for weak, undernourished children, were rampant. Neighborhood shops carried small bags of potato chips and soda, evidence that its residents were far from destitute.
In another alley, Ms. Menon met a young mother named Jannu, a migrant from the northern town of Lucknow. Jannu said she found it difficult to produce enough milk for the baby in her arms, around 6 months old. His green, watery waste dripped down his mother’s arms. He often has diarrhea, Jannu said, casually rinsing her arm with a tumbler of water.
Ms. Menon could not help but notice how small Jannu was, like so many of Jahangirpuri’s mothers. At 5 feet 2 inches tall, Ms. Menon towered over them. Children who were roughly the same age as her own daughter were easily a foot shorter. Stunted children are so prevalent here, she observed, it makes malnutrition invisible.
“I see a system failing,” Ms. Menon said. “It is doing something, but it is not solving the problem.”

stop complaining

• MARCH 4, 2009

From Attitude to Gratitude: This Is No Time for Complaining

By JEFFREY ZASLOW

David Hirsch hasn't forgotten the unhappy phone calls he used to get from clients back in 1998 and 1999. A director at Credit Suisse Private Banking USA in Chicago, he was carefully investing clients' money in blue-chip stocks, earning them 15% to 20% in annual returns.

But that was a time when some investors were earning 50% or even 100% returns in tech portfolios. Some of Mr. Hirsch's clients pulled their money, grousing that he wasn't serving them well.

John Segal

Today, though his clients' portfolios are down 35% or more, "I'm not getting complaints," Mr. Hirsch says. "People aren't asking, 'What did you do to my portfolio?' They're asking, 'What do we do from here?' "

There may be a positive byproduct of our troubled times: a decrease in the urge to complain. People who still have jobs are finding reasons to be appreciative. (It feels unseemly to complain about not getting a raise when your neighbor is unemployed.) Homeowners are unhappy that home values have fallen, but it's a relief to avoid foreclosure. And yes, our portfolios have plummeted, but most of us can say that at least we didn't invest with Bernie Madoff.

Even if grumbling is only on hiatus, it's clear that in many quarters, we're seeing a return to Depression-era stoicism and an appreciation of simpler things.

Job satisfaction is actually up, according to a December 2008 survey by Yahoo! HotJobs. Almost 38% of respondents said they were "very satisfied" with their jobs, compared with 28% in 2007, a likely sign that people are grateful they're still employed. And every week now, we hear reports of workers accepting pay cuts or furloughs without complaint -- some of them acts of solidarity to protect jobs elsewhere in their companies.

There is also a growing "noncomplaining" movement that touts the belief that whining doesn't work as a strategy, and that happiness can be found through rituals such as writing in "gratitude journals."

Will Bowen, a minister in Kansas City, Mo., is on a mission. His nonprofit organization, A Complaint Free World Inc., has distributed almost six million purple bracelets emblazoned with the group's name. When wearers find themselves complaining, they're asked to switch bracelets to their other wrists. The goal is to go 21 days without having to switch.

Granted, it's not easy for many of us to fully shake the all-American inclination to complain. Stereotypes are rooted in truth. A lot of young people grumble due to a sense of entitlement. A lot of older people are crotchety because they've been complaining all their lives. (Down in Florida, my mother describes condo-association bickering as "nitpicking in paradise.")

But Rev. Bowen believes the bad economy may be the antidote we need to re-evaluate our lives. "In good times, people often take for granted what they have, and whine about what they don't have," he says. "Bad times make people more grateful."

Rev. Bowen is sponsoring a complaint-free cruise in April, and is also taking 30 congregants to Tanzania this summer to help rebuild a birthing center. "We'll be meeting people who are so happy with so little," he says. "It can't help but reframe our perspective."

Jon Gordon, a leadership trainer and author of "The No Complaining Rule," has collected research showing that gratitude reduces stress and improves health. Every morning, he takes a gratitude walk and thinks positive thoughts. He offers seminars to help people "change a complaining voice to an appreciative heart."

Some people today may be smartly cutting back on complaining because they recognize it can be detrimental to their careers, says Sherene McHenry, a professor of counseling at Central Michigan University. "It isn't safe or wise to complain at work these days. When determining who to let go, nonunionized companies first get rid of complainers and those who are difficult to be around."

Ultimately, you can't control the economy or whether you're laid off. And it's easy for the experts to rhapsodize about gratitude. But there are merits to tempering your complaints.

Dr. McHenry encourages us to write down three things we're grateful for every day -- no matter how simple they might seem. "Some days," she says, "the list might be as basic as oxygen, food and shelter."