More than 19.9 million students are taking classes at colleges and universities across the United States this semester, up from 14.9 million two decades ago, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
“Free college” has become a key talking point among Democratic presidential hopefuls who believe eliminating tuition at public colleges and universities will help curb student debt and encourage more Americans to earn degrees.
Employment increases after taxes are cut for most income earners — but not when tax cuts target the top 10% of earners — according to a recent paper in the Journal of Political Economy looking at data from the 1980s through the 2000s.
As the U.S. prepares for the 2020 census, news outlets nationwide will be working to help the public understand the importance and impact of the once-every-10-years population count.
To help journalists bolster their coverage, we reached out to two experts — a research professor at George Washington University and a former director of the U.S. Census Bureau — to ask them to point out weaknesses in and ways newsrooms can improve their census coverage. They offered great feedback.
Sex education has been a controversial subject for decades as public school officials and parents have debated the best ways to help teenagers avoid unplanned pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases. Not all states require schools to teach sex ed. But many states require sex education instructors to discuss or stress abstinence from sexual activity, with some schools offering abstinence-only programming, which urges kids to wait until marriage and often excludes information about contraceptives.
As American lawmakers argue over whether to fund a wall along the United States’ southwestern border, the federal government has moved ahead with plans to replace some of the fencing it built there years ago with a 30-foot-tall steel bollard wall. Meanwhile, a growing number of countries worldwide have built border walls and other barriers to try to control the flow of people and goods.
Over the past year, public school teachers in different parts of the country have held strikes to increase salaries and push for other changes. Such protests often mark a breakdown in negotiations between the school district and local teachers union.
Journalists often make mistakes when reporting on data such as opinion poll results, federal jobs reports and census surveys because they don’t quite understand — or they ignore — the data’s margin of error.
