Storm Clouds Ahead for 401(k) Plans?

Presents a preliminary assessment of whether the automatic 401(k) plan features approved in 2006 are encouraging employers to offer plans and employees to save. Discusses the potential impact of a lawsuit over an employer's management of a 401(k) account

FAQs about Employees and Employee Benefits

This primer is an introduction to the basic laws of employee benefits. It is often assumed that there are legal impediments to employers providing benefits to phased retirees, part-time workers and the contingent workforce. From a benefits law perspective, this is really not true. By statute, self-employed workers are sometimes excluded from plans required to be employee-only but employers face few other prohibitions when designing their plans. From an employer’s perspective, there are far more impediments to excluding these workers from their benefit plans than including them. Tax law provides incentives to employers who sponsor plans and to workers who participate in them. But tax law also insists that this special treatment should not be available only to high-paid workers. So today’s regulatory structure is intended to compel employers to include a substantial number of rank-and-file and lower-paid workers in their plans in exchange for favorable tax treatment for high-paid workers. This primer illustrates this regulatory structure by focusing on the basic rules for eligibility and participation in the most common plans. It is in part an exercise in mapping the employee benefits universe. It is written from the perspective of an employer and highlights questions that an employer must answer when designing a particular plan. Those questions range from “who is an employee” to “how many low-paid workers must I include” to “what benefits may I offer and to whom?

Why Not a "Super Simple" Saving Plan for the United States?

Describes a basic, low-cost plan to help workers build savings, with minimum employer contributions for low- and moderate-income employees, automatic employee contributions, a significant government match, streamlined retirement plans, and fairer rules

“What the Hell is Revise?”: Student Approaches to Coursework in Developmental English at one Urban-Serving Community College

The primary objective of this dissertation was to help illuminate why most students who enroll in developmental English at community colleges never make it to a college-level course. The extant literature suggests that students’ learning experiences in a course largely account for success or failure, yet few studies have uncovered how students experience content and pedagogy in developmental English at community colleges, and how these experiences shape students’ success or failure in their course. To remedy this gap, I conducted a semester-long, classroom level, qualitative study of three sections of developmental English at one community college. I primarily relied upon participant observations and interviews to uncover details about the pedagogy enacted in the classrooms, how students responded to the pedagogy, and how their responses shaped success or failure. During the course of the semester, I observed 58 classroom sessions, interviewed the three instructors and a sample of 23 students from the three classes. Additionally, I collected over 100 pages of course documents handed out to students (i.e. syllabi, assignment sheets, quizzes, tests, rubrics, etc.). I coded the field notes from the classroom observations, the interview transcripts, and the documents. Analysis focused upon three main analytic themes: High School Comparisons (students’ understanding of their developmental English coursework compared to their high school coursework), Students’ Strategies (students’ approaches to passing the course), and Teaching/Learning Literacy Practices (explicit how-to direction from professors about college-level reading and/or writing). Using an analytic induction process I entered the coded observational, interview, and memo data into a matrix display to understand the similarities and differences in how students’ approached their coursework, how these approaches changed during the semester, and to what extent their approaches shaped success or failure. To understand how these approaches interacted with or were shaped by pedagogy, I compared the summary finding and individual students’ experiences from the data display to the corresponding observational, professor interview, and course documents data. The findings suggest that students’ initial approaches to their developmental English assignments were developed through their urban K-12 school experiences where passing grades were given for simply submitting assignments by the end of a marking period. The sample of 23 who participated in interviews described how they initially used a similar approach for the writing assignments in their developmental English course; they quickly essayed their thoughts and submitted their assignments without revision. When this approach resulted in failure, students were surprised to fail and disoriented by their professor requirement to “revise.” For the 18 students who reported passing at least the composition portion of their course, success was essentially a matter of developing the capacity to revise an unacceptable draft of an essay assignment into a satisfactory one using their professor’s feedback. Five students reported that they were never able to revise their essays in ways that met with their professor’s expectations. Their difficulties seemed to stem, at least in part, from continuing to approach their writing assignments as they did their high school coursework

“What the Hell is Revise?”: Student Approaches to Coursework in Developmental English at one Urban-Serving Community College

The primary objective of this dissertation was to help illuminate why most students who enroll in developmental English at community colleges never make it to a college-level course. The extant literature suggests that students’ learning experiences in a course largely account for success or failure, yet few studies have uncovered how students experience content and pedagogy in developmental English at community colleges, and how these experiences shape students’ success or failure in their course. To remedy this gap, I conducted a semester-long, classroom level, qualitative study of three sections of developmental English at one community college. I primarily relied upon participant observations and interviews to uncover details about the pedagogy enacted in the classrooms, how students responded to the pedagogy, and how their responses shaped success or failure. During the course of the semester, I observed 58 classroom sessions, interviewed the three instructors and a sample of 23 students from the three classes. Additionally, I collected over 100 pages of course documents handed out to students (i.e. syllabi, assignment sheets, quizzes, tests, rubrics, etc.). I coded the field notes from the classroom observations, the interview transcripts, and the documents. Analysis focused upon three main analytic themes: High School Comparisons (students’ understanding of their developmental English coursework compared to their high school coursework), Students’ Strategies (students’ approaches to passing the course), and Teaching/Learning Literacy Practices (explicit how-to direction from professors about college-level reading and/or writing). Using an analytic induction process I entered the coded observational, interview, and memo data into a matrix display to understand the similarities and differences in how students’ approached their coursework, how these approaches changed during the semester, and to what extent their approaches shaped success or failure. To understand how these approaches interacted with or were shaped by pedagogy, I compared the summary finding and individual students’ experiences from the data display to the corresponding observational, professor interview, and course documents data. The findings suggest that students’ initial approaches to their developmental English assignments were developed through their urban K-12 school experiences where passing grades were given for simply submitting assignments by the end of a marking period. The sample of 23 who participated in interviews described how they initially used a similar approach for the writing assignments in their developmental English course; they quickly essayed their thoughts and submitted their assignments without revision. When this approach resulted in failure, students were surprised to fail and disoriented by their professor requirement to “revise.” For the 18 students who reported passing at least the composition portion of their course, success was essentially a matter of developing the capacity to revise an unacceptable draft of an essay assignment into a satisfactory one using their professor’s feedback. Five students reported that they were never able to revise their essays in ways that met with their professor’s expectations. Their difficulties seemed to stem, at least in part, from continuing to approach their writing assignments as they did their high school coursework

Palliative care

Scientific supervisor: I. Terletsk

Palliative care

Scientific supervisor: I. Terletsk

Reality Testing for Pension Reform

The US private pension system is at a crossroads. Its future direction is now under intense scrutiny by Congress, which has recently considered two very different proposals for change, each containing elements likely to be on the national agenda for some time. One approach embodies a traditional approach to pension reform, with an omnibus statute that tinkers with almost every aspect of the private pension system to make incremental changes. A second seeks to bring radical change and simplification, with sweeping consolidation of the number and types of defined contribution plans. This chapter evaluates these two approaches, one for incremental change, the other for structural reform, and then considers an alternative. Our analysis focuses on the nuts-and-bolts of the private pension system, the plans that comprise it, and the rules that govern them that have accumulated over the past 60 years. Our thesis is that an analysis of the architecture and machinery of the private pension system can teach us a great deal about how to redesign the private pension system to meet retirement income challenges to come