Academic Incentives And Research Impact

The road to tenure can be viewed as paved with measures of peer-reviewed publications, first authorships, citations, journal impact, grant funding, and national or international reputation. According to the author of a paper that was prepared for the organization AcademyHealth, a proposition is offered that for the most part, measures of research impact on societal problems are missing in action from performance evaluation criteria within academic disciplines. So, the paper aims to encourage creative thinking around academic incentives and research impact by challenging existing orthodoxies, generating new insights, and stimulating a productive debate within the discipline. As a means of accomplishing these objectives, cases are presented to explore efforts challenging the status quo of academic research incentives and realigning them to focus more on societal impact. The cases are organized around a system-, institutional-, and individual-level framework. Examples are furnished that highlight the range of efforts explored more fully in the paper to align academic incentives with societal impact. The paper can be obtained here.

Student Debt And Its Impact On Black Americans

As more students take out more loans at higher amounts, the issue of student debt and proposals to mitigate it has taken greater prominence in national policy debates. According to a report from the Brookings Institution, the problem especially is pertinent for Black households, for whom a lack of generational wealth risks making student debt a long-term financial burden. After graduation, loans quickly balloon, delaying or even preventing Black Americans from building wealth. Based on the 2018 Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), the authors indicate that because student debt disproportionately harms the wealth-poor, and the Black wealth-poor in particular, student debt cancellation could be a powerful tool in dismantling institutional discrimination and shrinking racial wealth disparities if implemented correctly. They center the Black experience in their consideration of student loan debt and draw from their own analysis to argue for debt cancellation that is not means-tested (predicated upon household income) as an important mechanism for closing the racial wealth gap. They compare the effects of cancelling debt against the status quo, and at three different levels of intervention: 1) $10,000 cancelled for all (as President Joe Biden has proposed); 2) up to $50,000 cancelled based on means-testing for households earning under $100,000 and a sliding scale cancellation for households earning up to $250,000 (as Senator Elizabeth Warren [D-MA] has proposed); and 3) total debt cancellation (as Senator Bernie Sanders [I-Vt.] has proposed). They find that the more student debt that is cancelled, the greater the effect increasing Black wealth, particularly for households below the wealth median. The report can be obtained here.

Adult Family Care As An Alternative To Nursing Homes

A report from AARP that was written for consumers, advocates, and state policy staff, summarizes some key features of Adult Family Care (AFC), along with ideas for expanding its availability. Individuals who need long-term services and supports want alternatives to nursing homes as living options. AFC, which is not as well known among consumers as home care and assisted living, gives older adults and persons with disabilities a viable alternative. In AFC, sometimes called adult foster care or adult family homes, residents live full-time in a house or other small residential setting where they receive assistance with activities of daily living, personal care, and help with medications and other health care tasks, in collaboration with health care professionals. More than 40 years ago, Oregon and Washington were the first states to establish AFCs as an option for both private pay residents and those receiving public funds. Many jurisdictions have had difficulty recruiting providers and consumers since then. The report can be obtained here.

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