Links for 2/24/10

Kevin Carey

The Obama administration is encountering a lot of resistance to its efforts to help states build robust education and employment data systems. The anti-information forces are mainly comprised of a three-part coalition of hard-left privacy advocates, hard-right anti-government and privacy advocates, and the Washington, DC higher education lobby, which pretends to be a privacy advocate but is actually opposed to the creation of information that might make it easier for policymakers to hold them accountable for how they spend the hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars they receive every year…

JANE J. KIM

Across the nation, college prepaid plans are operating in the red, putting their promises to investors like Ms. Lambert in jeopardy. For now, the states still are paying tuition as they agreed. But the fine print in some state contracts gives them some wiggle room to pay out less than the promised amounts…

Edububble

Rothenberg was paid $371,387 in fiscal year 2007, but somehow that wasn’t enough for her and so the university goosed her salary an extra $350,000.Why? She says it’s because she didn’t take a “sabbatical”…

I don’t have enough time to split hairs and make some distinction between good sabbaticals and bad ones, but I think that it doesn’t really matter in this case. $350k is a big pile of cash and it comes on top of an insanely large $371k regular salary…

CATHERINE RAMPELL with a graph of labor force status by education.