October 20, 2020

Expect More Moms to Sacrifice Careers

Working mothers scrambled when the schools shut their doors last spring, but they found ways to cope. The 2020-21 school year may push many of them over the edge.

Last spring, one in four women nationwide who’d either quit their jobs or were laid off blamed the difficulties of working after the schools closed or they lost child care to COVID-19, a Northeastern survey found.

Alicia Sasser Modestino is in the midst of repeating the survey but believes that the situation has only gotten harder for working mothers this fall.

“When you look down the barrel of a full school year of hybrid or remote learning,” the stopgap measures mothers deployed last spring “are not sustainable,” said Modestino, a mother of four and research director for Northeastern’s Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy.

“If it’s not going to be Congress giving money for schools to reopen safely or the state opening child care centers, a parent is going to have to give up their job, and we know from history that it’s more likely to be women,” she said.

The impact of school closings on Millennials and Generation X can’t be overstated. In 75 of the 100 largest U.S. school districts, returning to school has meant students connecting to Zoom from their bedrooms or kitchen tables.

In the COVID-19 pandemic, a disproportionate share of women have been laid off, because they dominate face-to-face industries – nursing, retail, customer service – that are more vulnerable to closing. But something new is happening to mothers in this downturn. …Learn More

September 29, 2020

How High School Finance Courses Fail

In more than 30 states, completing a personal finance course is required for a high school degree.

The requirement started gaining traction around the country in 2005, despite the long-running debate about whether the courses even work.

A new study gets at whether high school instruction is effective by asking a fresh question: do the finance classes make people feel better about their situation – and feeling better about one’s finances is an indication things are, in fact, improving.

This departs from past studies focused on objective measures like credit scores and past-due loans.

The researchers find that high school courses have generally been a positive development: adults who grew up in states that require the courses do, in fact, feel better about their finances compared to people from states lacking a requirement.

But what’s interesting in this study is that a group of disadvantaged Americans feel worse off for having taken the courses: high school graduates who didn’t go on to college. Rather than helping them manage their financial challenges, the classes are only making things worse.

Before examining the reason for this, consider how the researchers measured the feeling of well-being. They used recent data from a series of questions asked by the FINRA Investor Education Foundation: Do you feel you have control over your money? Could you afford an unexpected expense? Do you have a sense of achieving your financial goals?

Most important, FINRA asked, do you have the financial “freedom to make choices that allow a person to enjoy life”? FINRA’s survey was conducted in 2018, but this question is relevant in the COVID-19 recession. Enjoying life is essentially the flip side of having financial stress, which is currently very high among low-income workers without college degrees.

The researchers argue that adults with no more than a high school diploma who’d taken the personal finance classes feel worse, because the classes delivered a “harsh dose of reality” that can “make economically vulnerable people more aware of their precarious financial situation.” …Learn More

August 11, 2020

Same Arthritis. But Some Feel More Pain

The X-rays look very similar for two 60-year-old women with arthritic knees.

But the less-educated woman has more severe pain than the person who graduated college.

A new study of men and women finds that the degree of knee-joint deterioration visible in an X-ray isn’t the primary reason one person experiences more knee pain than someone else. Instead, the overwhelming reason is knee strain caused by obesity and the toll taken by physically demanding jobs – both of which are more common among less-educated workers.

The researchers focused on knee arthritis, because musculoskeletal pain is one of the leading causes of Social Security benefit payments to people who develop a disability and can no longer work.

Understanding what’s behind the pain differences is important, because the need for workers in certain jobs requiring physical strength – home health aides, janitors, and construction workers are examples – is expected to increase in the future.

Given this growing demand and predictions of a continued rise in obesity, the researchers conclude that “pain is expected to contribute to an increase” over time in the percentage of the population who will be impaired by their pain.

The people in the study fell into three educational groups: a high school degree or less; some college; or a four-year college degree. The researchers also had information about their occupations, as well as several data sources that gauge the severity of their knee pain, including the ability to do things like walking a quarter of a mile.

Knee arthritis worsens with age. However, a surge in reports of severe knee pain came about a decade earlier for people with no more than a high school degree than the surge for college graduates. …Learn More