Today on AirTalk we analyze how much perks matter to American workers and employers compared to money. We also discuss the suit the University of California is facing that seeks access to data that would show whether the university considers race during the admissions process; and more.
As a federal judge stalls Trump’s asylum ban, we check in on migrant crossings at the border
A federal judge has barred the Trump administration from refusing asylum to immigrants who cross the southern border illegally.
President Donald Trump issued a proclamation on Nov. 9 circumventing immigration law, saying anyone who crossed the southern border between official ports of entry would be ineligible for asylum.
But in his ruling Monday, U.S. District Judge Jon Tigar agreed with legal groups that immediately sued, arguing that U.S. immigration law clearly allows someone to seek asylum even if they enter the country between official ports of entry and temporarily barred the ruling from going into place while the case is heard.
Monday’s ruling remains in effect for one month, barring an appeal.
With files from the Associated Press
Guests:
Robbie Whelan, reporter for the Wall Street Journal based in Mexico City, who’s been reporting on the migrant caravan and illegal crossings; he tweets
Nativo Lopez, an immigrant-rights advocate and senior political advisor for Hermandad Mexicana, a Santa Ana-based non-profit organization defending immigrants’ rights in California; he tweets
Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which supports tighter controls on immigration; he tweets
On the heels of Harvard investigation, UCLA law professor sues the University of California system for admissions data
On the heels of the federal trial which investigated whether Harvard discriminates against prospective Asian-American students, the University of California is facing a suit that seeks access to data that would show whether the university considers race during the admissions process.
The suit was filed by UCLA law professor and affirmative action scholar Richard Sander. The suit was also joined by George Shen, recent GOP candidate for CA Senate and leader of Asian American Community Services Center, a new non-profit.
Shen and Sander say they want to see whether the UC system is in violation of Prop 209, a CA measure passed in 1996, which bans considerations such as race, gender and ethnicity in public education. He says the UC hasn’t complied with his Public Records Act request for data that he needs to update his research.
The University of California has said it does not use the factors of gender, race or ethnicity in its admissions process. A university spokesperson has also said that the data Sander seeks is public, and that the university is not required to format it in the specific way he is requesting.
We discuss the suit and what it portends.
We reached out to the University of California. They declined our request for interview, but provided the following statement:
The University is committed to fairness and transparency in its admissions practices and compliance with all applicable laws. The petitioners’ lawsuit alleges a single cause of action – violation of the California Public Records Act (CPRA) for declining their request to create and release a customized set of data about individual freshman applicants.
As we have explained to the petitioners, creating a responsive report that would adequately protect the privacy of the individual applicants involved would impose an extensive burden on University resources (and is not required by state law). UC personnel estimate that it would take us weeks of full-time work to create a specialized data set for Prof. Sander, in the effort to convert data into a format that protects the privacy of students – while being forced to set aside other work that is critical to the University. UC generally denies requests for custom-record creation, given the recent increase in such demands on limited staff and resources.
In November 2016, a San Francisco trial court confirmed that state law does not require public agencies to create new records in order to respond to a public records request. In August of this year, the California Court of Appeal affirmed the trial court’s decision in a unanimous published decision. (This was Prof. Sander’s lawsuit against the California State Bar.)
The University has made available to the petitioners – and to the general public – extensive data regarding student demographics and outcomes by race/ethnicity on its websites, including the following:
Undergraduate Admissions Summary
https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/infocenter/admissions-residency-and-ethnicity
Admissions by Source School
https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/infocenter/admissions-source-school
Degrees Awarded data
https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/infocenter/degrees-awarded-data
Undergraduate Graduation Rates
https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/infocenter/ug-outcomes
Freshman fall admissions summary
https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/infocenter/freshman-admissions-summary
CA’s freshman diversity pipeline to UC
https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/infocenter/ca-hs-pipeline
Guests:
Scott Jaschik, editor of Inside HigherEd; he tweets
Richard Sander, an economist and professor of law at UCLA, who filed the lawsuit; his recent book is “Moving Toward Integration: The Past and Future of Fair Housing” (Harvard University Press, 2018)
Higher pay or shorter commute: Balancing money and other, non-monetary job perks
Financial compensation is probably a big factor for most of us when choosing where we work.
But especially in the modern workplace, on-the-job amenities and benefits are often a close second, if not an equal, consideration. And a new working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research shows that American workers are willing to take a pay cut if it means access to on-the-job perks like a flexible schedule or the ability to telecommute, paid vacation and even how much autonomy we have to prioritize tasks every day.
The paper analyzes data from the RAND Corporation’s 2015 American Working Conditions Survey to determine how much compensation workers are willing to give up for non-monetary benefits. To do this, they looked at “willingness to pay,” a way to measure the wage increase equivalent to moving from a job where you have no perks to one where you have access to the best mix of non-monetary benefits. The results showed that for the average American worker, making that transition would be the equivalent of a 56 percent wage increase, which they say suggests “that non-wage characteristics play a central role in job choice and compensation.”
Going from a higher-wage job with no paid time off to a lower-wage job with 20 days paid time off would equal a 23 percent 40 percent of respondents said that they would prefer a lower-wage job where your schedule is flexible and you can choose to telecommute over one where you’d make more but didn’t have those perks. They also examined how this data breaks out further when accounting for factors like age, education and race.
How much does/did pay versus non-monetary benefits factor in to your decision to work where you do? And what can we learn from this data about how much money employers are willing to spend and do spend on making benefits like flexible schedules, option to telecommute or how much team-based work you have to do?
Larry Mantle talks to one of the co-authors of the paper about what her team found in its analysis and what it tells us about how much perks matter to American workers and employers compared to money. Join the conversation at 866-893-5722.
Guest:
Kathleen Mullen¸ senior economist at the RAND Corporation and co-author of the working paper “The Value of Working Conditions in the United States and Implications for the Structure of Wages”; she is also associate director of RAND’s Economics, Sociology and Statistics Department as well as the editor-in-chief of The RAND Journal of Economics
As Malibu repopulation begins, we hear your stories
As of yesterday morning, the areas affected by the Woolsey Fire opened for repopulation.
As of this morning, the Woolsey Fire is 96,949 acres, 96 percent contained. And Malibu residents are heading home, some with little to return to.
If you’re a Malibu resident, we want to hear from you about the repopulation process. When and how did you return? What did you find? How has the process been for you, both logistically and emotionally?
Call us at 866-893-5722.
Guest:
Lou La Monte, Malibu City Council Member
Can VR simulations help increase medical workers’ empathy for end-of-life patients?
Virtual reality has broken into e-commerce, news and, of course, entertainment – and now it’s being used in end-of-life care.
Some hospice care workers and medical students in Maine are being trained with virtual reality experiences from the eyes of their patients.
One simulation follows a patient named Clay, who just found out his last round of chemotherapy hasn’t slowed down his lung cancer. There’s also Alfred, a 74-year-old man dealing with hearing loss and vision loss from macular degeneration. Another is Beatriz, a middle-aged woman progressing through the stages of Alzheimer’s disease. The hope is medical students and workers will have more empathy for what their patients are going through after stepping into their shoes.
AirTalk looks at how VR is being used in the context of medicine.
Guests:
Marilyn R. Gugliucci, professor and the director for geriatrics education and research at University of New England College of Osteopathic Medicine Division of Geriatrics; she’s also on the advisory board of Embodied Labs, the L.A.-based firm which creates these VR videos
Jeremy Bailenson, founding director of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab and co-founder of STRIVR, a company using virtual reality for corporate training; he co-authored the recent study “Building long-term empathy: A large-scale comparison of traditional and virtual reality perspective-taking”; he’s also author of “Experience on Demand: What Virtual Reality Is, How It Works, and What It Can Do” (W. W. Norton & Company, 2018)
It ain’t your granddaddy’s ‘perfect’: How the idea of perfectionism has changed generationally
Most of us probably know of at least one person in our lives who we’d classify as a “perfectionist.”
Maybe it’s the traditional type of person who holds him or herself to impossibly high standards, maybe it’s someone who has to live up to the expectations they perceive society has for them, or maybe it’s someone who holds others to an unattainable level. Whatever the category, one thing is clear: perfectionism, especially among millennials and college students, is on the rise over the last couple of decades.
How do we know this? Well, part of it is a logical extension of the ever-increasing competitiveness of college admissions, but we also have data to back it up. A meta-analysis published last year in the journal Psychological Bulletin showed higher levels of perfectionism among American, Canadian and British college students now than during the 2000s or 1990s.
Are we more perfectionist as individuals today than we were 10 or 20 years ago? If so, what are the factors driving the increase? How has the competitive college admissions environment increased perfectionism among millennials and young people? How do you manage your own perfectionist tendencies on a day-to-day basis? Has your ethnic background or cultural upbringing played a part in how much of a “perfectionist” you are or aren’t? How have those tendencies changed with your age?
Guest:
Thomas Curran, social psychologist and lecturer in the Center for Motivation and Health Behavior Change at University of Bath in England; he co-authored the meta-analysis “Perfectionism Is Increasing Over Time: A Meta-Analysis of Birth Cohort Differences From 1989 to 2016” (Psychological Bulletin, December 2017)