‘Two seasons’

“Flaming June” (1895), by Lord Leighton

There is a June when Corn is cut
And Roses in the Seed—
A Summer briefer than the first
But tenderer indeed

As should a Face supposed the Grave's
Emerge a single Noon
In the Vermilion that it wore
Affect us, and return—

Two Seasons, it is said, exist—
The Summer of the Just,
And this of Ours, diversified
With Prospect, and with Frost—

May not our Second with its First
So infinite compare
That We but recollect the one
The other to prefer?

By Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), who watched the seasons with great acuity from her home, in Amherst, Mass.

Sam Pizzigati: Amazon’s business model can kill

From OtherWords.org

BOSTON

Old-school home-improvement contractors have a piece of folk wisdom they love to share with prospective clients. “Listen,” they like to say. “I can do this job fast, I can do it cheap, or I can do it well. But I can’t do all three.”

This wisdom has been around forever. But not everyone gets it — take billionaire Jeff Bezos. His Amazon empire prides itself on delivering good results fast and cheap.

That works well enough for Bezos, now worth around $200 billion. And Amazon consumers, the company PR maintains, can get almost whatever they want quickly and cheaply. But for Amazon workers — and our broader society — Amazon’s empire building has been anything but good.

That became disastrously apparent this month, when a tornado swept through Edwardsville, Ill., leaving six Amazon warehouse workers dead. Debris from their workplace turned up “tens of miles” away, the National Weather Service reported.

Unfortunately, this tragedy should not have taken anyone by surprise.

Why did Amazon locate its Edwardsville operations right in Tornado Alley? No mystery there. Edwardsville’s plentiful acreage and easy access to interstate highways, airports, and other transport offered Amazon the promise of speedy delivery times and lower delivery costs.

Check fast. Check cheap. But the warehouse went up with no special attention to tornado safety. That would have raised the cost.

OSHA — the federal occupational health and safety agency — has now begun an investigation. Since the deaths in Edwardsville, Amazon workers throughout the southern Illinois area have been ripping the company for failing to conduct tornado drills and expecting workers to keep working even after alarms ring out.

Amazon’s “storm shelter” spaces for Edwardsville workers turned out to have another name: bathrooms. Moments before the tornado’s arrival, Edwardsville worker Craig Yost told local news, Amazon supervisors were directing people into their worksite’s bathroom “shelters.”

“The walls caved in, and I got pinned to the ground by a giant block of concrete,” Yost said. “On top of my left knee was a door from the bathroom stall, and my head was on that with my left arm wrapped around my head. I could just move my right hand and foot.”

Meanwhile, the company has been actively exercising its considerable power to prevent the one turn of events that could reliably keep Amazon on its safety toes: a union. Earlier this year, Amazon quashed a union drive at its Bessemer, Ala., warehouse so egregiously that the National Labor Relations board has ordered a do-over on the election.

But the problem goes beyond Amazon. Our nation’s corporate giants have been on a ferocious 50-year offensive against collective bargaining.

In the mid-20th Century, over a third of America’s private-sector workers belonged to unions. Now only 6.3 percent of private-sector workers carry union cards, despite polling data showing that the share of nonunion workers who want a union at their worksite has increased markedly.

Corporate America’s squeeze on unions has kept wages low, share prices high and compensation for top executives at stratospheric levels. Earlier this year, Institute for Policy Studies research revealed that CEOs at America’s 100 largest low-wage employers saw their personal compensation jump by $1,862,270 in 2020.

Over the past year, Jeff Bezos has seen his wealth soar by over $4 billion — seven times the annual budget of OSHA, the agency investigating the disaster at his Edwardsville warehouse. So here’s an idea for lawmakers in Washington: A 5 percent annual federal wealth tax on those Bezos billions could quadruple the annual OSHA budget — and then quadruple it again.

Amazon’s relentless quest to sell goods fast and cheap has rewarded Bezos tremendously, but it’s come at a huge cost for the rest of us. If the company rebuilds its Edwardsville warehouse, Bezos should listen to his handyma\

Sam Pizzigati, who is based in Boston, co-edits Inequality.org at the Institute for Policy Studies. His latest books include The Case for a Maximum Wage and The Rich Don’t Always Win.

Alex Parnia: A survival kit for small colleges

Nichols College, in Dudley, Mass., with about 1,500 students. The author served as provost there.

Via the New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

The future looks very bleak for many small and medium-sized colleges and universities in the U.S. According to a report published in Inside Higher Education, the high school graduation rate is expected to drop over the next seven years, and the numbers are aggravated by up to 4.5 million fewer babies being born since the financial crisis of 2008.

U.S. colleges and universities can no longer meet their operational budgets and can finance expansion only by continuing to increase tuition, which is not sustainable. Furthermore, colleges and universities have poured millions of dollars into marketing and advertising in the past 15 years, which has fueled massive competition to attract domestic students; these initiatives have resulted in stiff competition for market share in different regions of the country. Adding insult to injury, Clayton Christensen, the Harvard guru on disruptive innovation, predicts that 50 percent of American colleges and universities will close within the next 10 years. Amid all the gloom and doom, though, there is one strategic opportunity for small to medium-sized universities: incorporating carefully designed international student recruitment into the overall recruitment plan for the next five to seven years.

The landscape of international recruitment has been changing rapidly. Up until 15 years ago, there was a steady stream of international students to the U.S., meaning that some small and medium-sized universities and colleges were able to attract international students to their campuses

In the 1990s and early 2000s, the United Kingdom and Australia made strategic forays into international recruitment. In 2000, the percentage of international students in these countries stood at 5 percent of total higher education students. Today, both nations have reached a 20 percent figure and are probably at their limits. In August 2018, the United Kingdom government decided to include international students in overall immigration numbers to slow down the intake of international students.

In the meantime, Canada has emerged as the next favorable destination for international students, and recent comments from the Trump administration have accelerated the rate of international students heading to Canada by scaring students away from the U.S. Most colleges and universities in Canada are bursting at the seams with international students; therefore, sooner rather than later, the pace of international students choosing to study in Canada will slow.

As a result, the U.S. remains an attractive destination for international students, and the ratio of international students in higher education remains at about 5 percent. However, there is one new hurdle for U.S. colleges and universities: the emergence of multinational companies that have entered into the international student recruitment market in the U.S.

These multinationals, such as Kaplan, Navitas, Shorelight and INTO, and a few other smaller firms are now guiding many students toward attending large public, private, and nonprofit universities. These companies are not interested in working with small to medium-sized liberal arts universities, but they have certainly become a major force in recruiting students on a large scale. This new environment has reached a tipping point in market share, which makes it more difficult for small and medium-sized universities and colleges to recruit directly on their own given their limited resources.

A series of articles in Inside Higher Education revealed a massive infusion of commissions by these corporate recruitment companies, which makes it almost impossible for any small to medium-sized university to mount and sustain long-term international recruitment efforts and compete effectively.

In addition, international recruitment remains a treacherous road. Stories abound of university presidents traveling overseas and coming back empty-handed. There are plenty of land mines, with many fly-by-night agents and bad apples in the mix of overseas recruiting agencies. Consequently, international recruitment requires seasoned staff, who come with expensive price tags.

That’s why it is realistically almost impossible for any small to medium-sized college or university to put together an international recruitment team. In addition, international recruitment requires a substantial upfront investment in marketing, which is impossible to stage. Several colleges coming together to form a recruitment partnership is an idea that faces the same obstacles as the individual universities, such as a lack of expertise, limited resources and the massive upfront marketing and other investments that are required to recruit in more than 100 attractive international markets.

Therefore, the solution lies in forming partnerships with reputable private-sector companies with strong track records that specialize in recruiting for small to medium-sized colleges. There are only a handful of these companies, and they must be vetted and selected carefully to make sure they are the right fit for a specific institution. It is very important that colleges and universities consider forming quality recruitment partnerships with private international companies, given that such partnerships can generate new revenue streams and contribute to campus diversity.

Forming a partnership is the first of many steps that must be taken to internationalize a campus. It is a strategy that requires careful planning; institutions must work closely with the partnering entity to outline successful strategies for bringing international students to campus and orienting them to campus life. The partnership development is the foundation for determining how to serve the international students while also benefiting the host higher education institution. Though not a panacea for the ills of higher education, small to medium-sized American colleges and universities must consider international recruitment as part of their overall strategy for a sustainable future.

Alex Parnia is the executive chairman of Global Education Access, LLC. He previously served as president of EC Higher Education from 2016 to 2018. He was president at Pacific Oaks College & Children’s School from 2012-2015. He also served as provost of Nichols College, in Dudley, Mass,, and executive vice president at Cambridge College, which is now in Boston.