Source: The Daily Cardinal

As tuition prices increase and job outlooks waver, UW System students have begun favoring two-year degree programs more than four-year universities.

At Madison Area Technical College, there is a focus on teaching skills that are necessary to succeed in the modern workforce.

“[The curriculum is focused] not so much on theory and philosophy, but what you need to know to get to work,” said Brian Landers, the chair of the Criminal Justice Department at MATC.

Landers noted the ability of a technical college to aid students in following their desired career path, while also being a stepping stone to pursuing further schooling.

In 2017, students who have a vocational associate’s degree made an average of $18.65. Earning a bachelor’s degree is nearly an $8 increase per hour. However, there is a strenuous fight for technical schools guaranteeing that money should not be the primary concern.

Appeals of two-year degrees for students are shorter programs, centralized focus on a specific program and a lower tuition.

“Limited increases in state financial aid does not help to address students’ and parents’ perceptions of college costs,” said Noel Radomski, director and associate researcher at the Wisconsin Center for the Advancement of Postsecondary Education. “It is becoming more likely that the focus on affordability may be at the expense of academic quality.”

This may also serve as a consequence of the 2015 Walker administration budget cuts, which took $300 million in state funds from academic programs, according to Radomski.

“Six years of budget cuts to the UW System campuses, especially regional universities, such as UW-Stevens Point, UW-Parkside and especially the formerly-called UW Colleges may have encouraged prospective students and their parents to pursue other post-secondary education options,” Radomski said.

After concerns for the value of higher education began gaining traction, the UW System continued to push forward to avoid cutting programs. This played a significant role in the UW System restructuring, which consolidated 13 two-year colleges into the seven universities.

The goal of the merger was to provide students with an opportunity to remain at the campus of their choosing with the option of more learning resources and course options.

“The UW System is committed to helping improve student success by expanding the use of predictive analytics, intensive advising and other practices that provide timely support to students,” UW System Spokesperson Heather LaRoi said. “[It is] working to improve and simplify the transfer process, which will help more students to complete their degrees.”

Radomski said retaining and encouraging students to enroll at UW-Madison can be done through increasing state and campus financial aid services, advisory boards for academic departments and increasing the amount of online courses and degrees.

Gene Dalhoff, vice president of Talent and Education of the Madison Regional Economic Partnership, noted the knowledge of college programs that students receive prior to college is detrimental to deciding whether they would rather join the workforce or further their education.

“I do believe that within many of our school districts there is an increasing effort to expose individual students to post-secondary education and career opportunities that may be a better fit for them,” Dalhoff said.

He stated the concern is not on whether students are going to college, but picking the program that suits their career interests best.

“I believe an increasing number of students, and in many cases their parents as well, are beginning to realize that a four-year institution is not a good fit for everyone and that many jobs with family-supporting wages can be acquired with a two-year degree,” Dalhoff said.

Source: BizTimes

Amazon Prime members in Milwaukee and Madison can now have groceries from Whole Foods delivered to their homes.

The e-commerce giant announced expanded grocery delivery and pick up services for the two cities as well as several others across the country on Wednesday.

The expansion of delivery and pick-up services by Amazon is another sign that the Seattle-based company is continuing to find ways to be a player in the highly-competitive grocery store market.

“With our goal to cover as many Prime customers as possible with this new service in Milwaukee, our coverage is expansive,” Tanvi Patel, head of business development for Prime Now said in a written statement. “We’re excited to reach customers from Germantown in the north, to Caledonia in the south, and from Brookfield in the west to Lake Michigan in the east.”

Amazon launched home delivery for grocery earlier this year and has continued to expand the service, which is now in 48 cities.

Pickup and delivery from Whole Foods Market are available daily from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m.

Delivery was also expanded to Ann Arbor, Michigan; Detroit; Jacksonville, Florida; Omaha, Nebraska; Orlando; St. Louis; Tampa and Tulsa, Oklahoma as well as additional areas of New York City and Seattle.

Source: Scott Gordon | WisContext

The state of Wisconsin’s efforts to attract and retain a younger workforce — in some cases spending millions of dollars advertising to people in other states — are coinciding with a growing public reckoning in Madison and surrounding Dane County with the fact that many of its minority residents don’t necessarily experience the city as welcoming or inclusive.

What’s more, people of color or other marginalized backgrounds get burned out on having to drive conversation about the city’s shortcomings.

“It ends up meaning that I’m explaining a lot, defending a lot, doing a lot of work that I don’t necessarily want to be doing,” Yusra Murad told Wisconsin Public Television’s Here & Now in an Aug. 31, 2018 report about Madison’s younger workforce.

Murad, a recent University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate and Muslim of Pakistani descent, is leaving the Midwest for Washington, D.C., in part to escape those interactions and, she said, the feeling of being “the only anything in the room.”

A 2016 UW-Madison campus climate survey released in November 2017 underscored the experiences Murad shared. It found that 65 percent of students of color reported feeling welcome on campus, with one-half feeling that they “belong” there. Additionally, respondents also noted their feeling responsible to speak for a broader group of people.

“One-quarter of students reported that they felt expected to represent their identity in class at some point in the semester, an experience that was described as negative by most students of color, trans/non-binary students, LGBTQ students and students with a disability,” reported the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

The diversity that’s already there

A May 2018 report by the Madison Region Economic Partnership found that corporate leadership in the area is not diverse: “Boards of Directors tend to be White (93 percent) and male (64 percent).” But those figures aren’t representative of the area’s population.

While it’s easy to stereotype Madison (and Wisconsin as a whole) as an overwhelmingly white place, it is still one of the state’s most racially and ethnically diverse areas, and has especially grown more diverse since the turn of the century. Between 2000 and 2010, Dane County’s Hispanic and Latino population doubled, and the area’s population of people of color overall grew by 64 percent, as the Capital Area Regional Planning Commission detailed in a 2014 report. At the same time, Wisconsin’s non-white residents face some of the worst racial disparities in the nation, and Madison is no exception.

Recruiting a more diverse group of residents and employees from beyond the borders of the state might be part of the solution, but by no means the only solution.

“Sometimes I receive this question related to how do you create more diversity, how are you going to bring more diversity to Madison, and one of the things, the little heartburn that I get with that question is that it assumes the diversity doesn’t already exist,” said Angela Russell, who is the director of diversity and inclusion at financial-services company CUNA Mutual Group.

“We do have diversity across our state,” Russell told Here & Now. “When we’re thinking about diverse communities, how do we really highlight the diversity that exists while welcoming more diversity into our state as well?”

Looking beyond the workplace

Americans increasingly encounter “diversity” as a watchword around the workplace. Corporations have embraced diversity as a goal, especially in a public relations sense, and tout the economic benefits of having a diverse staff.

Madison Common Council President Samba Baldeh, who works for American Family Insurance, told Here & Now in an interview that diversity also has to mean everything people experience outside of work, and can’t just serve a business function.

“It’s not enough to bring the talent here,” Baldeh said. “We have to go further and make sure that those people are able to identify with the community and are able to make friends and are able to get spaces where they can socialize.”

For Baldeh, that means making adjustments to a range of municipal services, including parks and the city of Madison’s own human resources practices, where seniority in civil service might reinforce inequities in hiring and promotions.

Changing the pipeline

While the above figures about corporate boards and executives are striking, Tania Ibarra, chair of the Latino Professionals Association, told Here & Now that building more representative workplaces has to start way down the leadership ladder.

“We focus on what’s at the top, but the reality is we have to look at the entire pipeline,” Ibarra said. “One of the first, hardest things to do for anybody is to get their first supervisor/manage role. The discrepancy starts that early in a career … we can’t expect to have the right representation at the top if we’re not looking at what we’re doing with that first promotion.”

While small, locally owned businesses form a key part of Madison’s identity, Ibarra, who works for Spectrum Brands, said larger companies are sometimes better equipped to make progress on diversity.|

“The difficult part with addressing workforce matters in Madison from a diversity and inclusion perspective is that more than 50 percent of the workforce works in small- or medium-sized companies, which do not have the resources to address these issues, the budget behind the trainings, and the effort that it takes to make a cultural change,” Ibarra said.

The Madison Region Economic Partnership report illustrated another aspect of these difficulties: Three-fourths of the organizations it surveyed had between 10 and 49 employees, and it found that non-profits, educational organizations and government employers (all of which have a large presence in the area) were more likely to have substantial diversity efforts than private companies.

“Majorities of respondents said their organizations do not have a formal, written diversity and inclusion statement nor do they have staff dedicated to diversity efforts,” the report stated.

On Friday, September 14, the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation (WEDC), unveiled a $2 million Disaster Recovery Microloan Program aimed at small businesses that will provide an immediate source of funds for necessary restoration work and related expenses.

While the loan program will be available to businesses in all 72 counties, WEDC is initially working with regional entities in the areas of the state that were hit hardest by the flooding: The Mississippi River Regional Planning Commission, the Southwestern Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission; and the Madison Region Economic Partnership (MadREP).

“The severe weather has subsided but our Region’s affected businesses are still struggling to rebuild,” said MadREP President Paul Jadin. “The goal of this new program is to give business owners an immediate source of funds to make needed repairs without having to cut through a lot of red tape.”

The program was announced in the wake of a series of weather events in which businesses and homes in 21 counties were damaged last month. Heavy rains in the region caused widespread flooding. More than 4,300 homes and 140 businesses have sustained more than $150 million in damage, according to preliminary estimates from Wisconsin Emergency Management.

Under the program, WEDC will award grants to regional entities that will provide the microloans of up to $15,000 to assist businesses with a short-term source of funds for repair work and operating expenses until more long-term recovery funding can be secured. The no-interest loans have a two-year repayment period, with payments deferred for at least six months.

“A natural disaster like the recent floods can have a devastating economic effect on small business owners as they struggle with having to repair damage to their business and other related expenses,” said Mark R. Hogan, secretary and CEO of WEDC, who also attended Friday’s announcement. “This new program provides an immediate source of funds to help impacted businesses quickly recover from this disaster.”

The loans can be used for procurement of cleanup and restoration services, operating expenses, temporary space, and repair and reconstruction work.

To be eligible for a loan, a business must be located in or directly adjacent to a region where the authorized regional entity has received an allocation; must have suffered measurable physical damage because of the disaster; and must intend to resume business operations in the community as quickly as possible.

For more information about the microloan program, contact Paul Jadin at pjadin@madisonregion.org or 608.571.0401.

As you are undoubtedly aware, the Madison Region has experienced a series of weather events comprised of torrential rain, flash flooding, high winds and tornadoes. They caused damage to our infrastructure, businesses, homes and, most tragically, resulted in loss of life. The Region, as well as the State of Wisconsin, continues to be in a state of emergency and under flood watches/warnings.

As the Region’s economic development organization, we are coordinating with county and municipal partners to assess and quantify the damage to our Region and are asking you for your help. MadREP has launched a survey to ascertain how these events have impacted the business community and we are deploying that survey to expand our database throughout the region.

Create your own user feedback survey

This information is vital to understanding the scope of the damage at a regional level and give the state and federal government a better handle on need, which may lead to some recovery grant dollars being requested.

In fact, we may be in a position to deploy hundreds of thousands of dollars in the form of microloans. The first step, however, is to collect this information.

In addition, please let us know if you are currently involved in any business recovery operations. If you are outside Dane County, can you please also confirm if you are actively collaborating with your county and the name of your key contact? Should you decide that you do not wish to participate please let us know that as well.

Rebuilding our communities will take time and documenting the damage is our first step. Should you have any questions or require assistance, please reach out to me directly via phone or email. Thank you very much.