The Future of Millennial Jobs

The Future of Millennial Jobs explores the future of the labor force for Millennials and how higher education can better align with future job market demands. The report concludes that many young adults, ages 18 to 34 years-old, are uniquely prepared for jobs of the future with the knowledge and skills needed to effectively navigate workforce opportunities, yet points to reasons for concern, too: a growing number of Millennials, lacking access to technology and other resources, will be left behind

Expanding the Net: Building Mental Health Care Capacity for Veterans

In this brief, Senior Fellow Phillip Carter calls upon the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to expand its mental health care resources to meet the growing needs of veterans across the country. Although the VA will spend nearly $7 billion this year on mental health care for veterans, Mr. Carter argues that this is not likely to be enough. The report urges the VA to rely more on the private sector and work more closely with local community and private philanthropic organizations

Where Do Young Adults Work?

After a long recovery from the Great Recession, nearly 50 million Millennials are currently working across the nation, comprising a third of the workforce today. This report provides a snapshot of the present economic landscape for America's young working adults, illustrating where our generation works by sector and geography as well as how the most popular sectors have fared since the economic downturn

A Little Competition Never Hurt Anyone

Raise your hand if you\u27re taking this course because you want to become a nurse. Seventy hands shoot up. Seventy. This is only one Chem120 class. JJ Leary, my chemistry teacher, was merely trying to demonstrate how important the knowledge of basic chemistry concepts is in many common occupations. What Dr. Leary did not realize, however, is that he sparked a certain degree of fear and anger in those students aiming to get admitted into James Madison University\u27s nursing program. Immediately after the question was asked, eyes started darting around the room. You could feel other prospective nurses trying to discover your level of intelligence by the confidence, or lack thereof, plastered on your face. Yes, at eight in the morning on the second day of school, competitive sparks were already flying. Rachael Leffler is currently a freshman here at JMU. She is a declared nursing major and hopes to get into the program fall semester of her junior year. She decided to write about the competitiveness of the nursing program because it applies to so many students here at James Madison. She also wants to show the school just how competitive occupational fields such as nursing can be

Health Care Costs: A Primer 2012: Key Information on Health Care Costs and Their Impact

Examines changes in U.S. healthcare spending, compared with other countries and per capita; what it pays for; who pays; and how healthcare costs affect families and employers. Examines why healthcare costs outpace economic growth and how to slow growth

Trends In Primary Care Specialization Among Physicians And Non-Physician Clinicians, 1989-2009

An overwhelming body of health policy literature points to an impending shortage of health care providers in the United States, with special emphasis on a growing shortage of primary care providers. As such literature and similar claims made in the mass media influence political debate and government policy, it becomes necessary to determine whether the assumptions on which these predictions are based are, in fact, valid. The purpose of this study is to examine changes in primary care practice among allopathic (MD) and osteopathic physicians (DO), physician assistants (PA), and nurse practitioners (NP) over the past 20 years, specifically, how the proportion of professionals practicing in primary care specialties has changed over time. Data were obtained from previously published, publicly available reports of practice specialty among actively practicing clinicians from each of the provider types and longitudinal changes in practice specialty were characterized using descriptive statistics. The percentage of MDs practicing in primary care fields remained relatively stable over the past two decades thanks to a continuing influx of international medical graduates, while the percentage of DOs in primary care declined slightly. PAs experienced an 18-percent decrease in the percentage of total PAs in primary care practice. NPs were the only group to experience an increase in primary care with a 20-percent increase over the 20-year period. While IMGs and NPs form an increasing proportion of the US primary care workforce, PAs, USMGs, and DOs are less likely to practice in primary care than 20 years ago

The Role of Temporary Help Employment in Tight Labor Markets

This paper examines the reasons why employers used and even increased their use of temporary help agencies during the tight labor markets of the 1990s. Based on case study evidence from the hospital and auto supply industries, we evaluate various hypotheses for this phenomenon. In high-skilled occupations, our results are consistent with the view that employers paid substantially more to agency help to avoid raising wages for their regular workers and to fill vacancies while they recruited workers for permanent positions. In low-skilled occupations, our evidence suggests that temporary help agencies facilitated the use of more "risky" workers by lowering their wages and benefits and the costs of firing them. The use of agency temporaries in both high- and low-skilled occupations reduced the pressure on companies to raise wages for existing employees, and thereby may have contributed to the stagnant wage growth and low unemployment observed in the 1990s.temporary, labor, markets, part-time, contingent, Houseman, Kalleberg, Erickcek

Underpaid or Overpaid? Wage Analyses For Nurses Using Jobs versus Worker Attributes

Nursing shortages are common despite the fact that nurses earn far higher wages than other college-educated women. Our analysis addresses the puzzle of high nursing wages. Employee data from the Current Population Survey are matched with detailed job descriptors from the Occupational Information Network. Nursing requires high levels of compensable skills and demanding working conditions. Standard log wage regression estimates indicate nursing wage advantages of about 40%. Accounting for job attributes reduces estimates to roughly 20%. Rather than transforming ordinary least squares log gaps to percentages, alternative methods measuring Mincerian gaps produce estimates of 15% or less. We conclude that nurses receive compensation that is much closer to opportunity costs than that seen in standard analyses, narrowing the shortage puzzle. Supply constraints in nurse licensing can produce wages above long-run opportunity costs but that are too low to clear short-run labor markets during periods of growing demand. The analysis provides broader implications for the conduct of wage analyses

Nurse Workforce: Condition Critical

This issue brief provides an overview of the current nursing shortage. It discusses the multiple factors that make this shortage in the nurse workforce different from earlier ones. It also examines steps taken by nursing schools, the health care industry, the federal government, and states to address this issue