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NOAA has a whole section of its web site devoted to this storm (http://www.nws.noaa.gov/om/marine/perfect.htm .), with details such as, “ NOAA buoy 44011 located at 41.1 degrees N, 66.6 degrees W reported maximum sustained winds of 49 kt with gusts to 65 kt and a significant wave height of 39 feet .” The most gripping part on the story, however, is the sinking of the fishing ship Andrea Gail, which set out from Gloucester just before the storm and never returned. The ship is presumed to have sunk sometime after midnight on October 28th 1991.
Over the entire income distribution in the United States, average family incomes in 2009 were equal to or lower than they had been a decade earlier after adjusting for inflation. The largest declines were for the lowest income families.See http://trends.collegeboard.org/downloads/College_Pricing_2010.pdf
Paul Krugman “Degrees and Dollars” the New York Times March 6th 2011: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/07/opinion/07krugman.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=hollowing%20out&st=cse). Krugman was citing the work of David Autor, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane
In theory the elimination and exporting of routine jobs should results in innovation and a net increase in jobs elsewhere in the U.S. economy. At this moment it is not clear that this is happening.
One example: the pharmaceutical form GlaxoSmithKline now has 470 research and development workers in China.
“For college educated workers over age 25, unemployment is indeed lower than for other groups. But for college graduates under age b25, unemployment over the last year has averaged 9.7 percent and shows no sign of improvement.” “The Economy Slows” editorial, The New York Times, May 2, 2011.
For the argument to be valid in a strict sense one would need to compare the earnings of college graduates with the earnings of high school classmates with comparable GPAs and SATs who chose not to enter college but to go into the military, community service, other parts of the work force, etc.
Students may be more aware of these considerations than some spokespersons for higher education. That may explain why enrollments in the humanities and other liberal arts fields have, so far at least, held up surprisingly well in economically difficult times. See Cheryl Ching and W. Robert Connor “Liberal Arts I: They Keep Chugging Along” Inside Higher Ed October 1, 2010
See Tamar Lewin , “College Loans Weigh Heavily on Graduates” The New York Times April 12, 2011 p. 1. “Two- thirds of bachelor’s degree recipients graduated with debt in 2008, compared with less than half in 1993. Last year, graduates who took out loans left college with an average of $24,000 in debt.”
I dropped out … after the first 6 months …. So why did I drop out? … all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made.