🌤️Mostly sunny and warmer, with highs in the 40s. Sunset is at 7:01 p.m.
Thanks to everyone who checked out “Stepping into the Ring,” the series from New England Public Media on what candidates who ran for office and lost learned about their communities and the political process. The last part in the series is about Nicole Coakley, who has run for Springfield city council three times. You can check it out here. “We can’t say we want change when we keep putting the same people back in place,” she told NEPM’s Karen Brown. “Change looks like putting new voices at the table.”
We also heard from GBH Daily readers about their experience with the political process — like Loren Foxx, a member of the New Hampshire House of Representatives. “I ran and won twice as a Democratic state rep in NH,” Foxx said. “There was no substitute for knocking doors, but it also helped that I had coached everyone’s kid in sports over the years. Listening to people also still matters.”
Four Things to Know
1. The legislative leader for Republicans in the Massachusetts House, Minority Leader Brad Jones of North Reading, announced he won’t seek reelection. He’s been in the House since 1994 and has led its Republican caucus since 2002. Republicans hold 25 of the House’s 160 seats and have not had a majority since the 1950s.
“Representing the community where I was born and raised has made this even more of a privilege,” Jones said in a statement. He said he has participated in more than 8,180 roll-call votes during his time in the House. “I believe this is a reflection of my commitment to my constituents,” he said.
2. The state’s Department of Public Health will start tracking cases of alpha-gal syndrome, a condition people can get after a tick bite that can cause allergic reactions to red meat and dairy. Alpha-gal is a carbohydrate molecule found in cows and pigs and also in the saliva of lone star ticks, a brown tick with one white dot on its back. If alpha-gal gets into someone’s blood through a tick bite, that person’s immune system can flag it as a threat and unleash allergic reactions every time it comes across the molecule again in meals with red meat or dairy — even if the person wasn’t previously allergic.
Lone star ticks are relatively new to the commonwealth, Massachusetts Public Health Commissioner Dr. Robbie Goldstein said. “Warmer temperatures, shorter winters [and] shifting ecosystems all have allowed the lone star tick to crawl — literally crawl — northward,” he said. “We’re seeing that expansion now on Cape Cod, on Martha’s Vineyard and on Nantucket. And increasingly, we’re seeing it on the mainland.”
3. When was the last time you visited Faneuil Hall or Quincy Market? If it’s been a while, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu said she’d like to change that. “For too many locals, Faneuil Hall Marketplace has become nothing more than a place they occasionally take out-of-town visitors. It’s not yet a place that captures all of Boston. You can’t find fresh apples or cranberries here, chimi or mofongo, banh mi or cachupa,” she said.
The Faneuil Hall building has stood since 1742, a gift from merchant and slave trader Peter Faneuil. Quincy Market was added in 1826. The marketplace was renovated into what it is today in 1976. “We need to tap into the same spirit of the 1970s and recognize that what we’re building from is, of course, light-years and decades of improvement — no longer a vacant and decrepit and crumbling location here, but one that still has so much potential.”
4. Iranians in Massachusetts this weekend marked Nowruz, the Persian New Year. “Persian New Year is the first day of spring,” said Saeid Gholami. “Which, culturally, and if you think about it in nature, is like a new life in nature. After winter, everything is cold and dead, the trees are, like, dead. Then, spring starts and they start blossoming. That’s the beginning of the new year.”
Gholami, like others in the local Iranian community, said he hopes Iran can become a democracy. Since the U.S. and Israel started attacking the country at the end of February, contact with people back home has been limited. “We don’t know what’s going on in Iran unless someone can call us over [the] phone from Iran. They have one- or two-minute limits. And it costs them, like, so much money. We can’t call them; there’s no internet,” Gholami said. “So it’s a bittersweet situation. It’s Nowruz, it is New Year of Iran, but also the situation in Iran is nothing to be happy about.”
How many college grads actually use their degrees? It’s complicated
Let’s start with a simple question: how many recent college graduates are underemployed, working jobs that don’t require their degrees?
“It’s an easy question, [but] a hard answer,” economist Jeff Strohl of Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce told GBH’s Kirk Carapezza. “Nobody has a consistent methodology to address the question.”
Some places track whether graduates have a job — any job. About 86% of 2024 graduates had a job or were enrolled in more education within six months of graduation, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers. Another survey from Gallup and Lumina found that 71% of graduates in the last decade — since 2015 — found a job in the first six months after college.
Economists at Georgetown University tried to measure how many students had a job that didn’t use their degree and estimated it at about 22%. And the nonprofit The Burning Glass Institute estimated the number at 45%.
All of that means that when high school students are looking at colleges and trying to figure out which path will best prepare them for the workforce, there’s not a lot of reliable data they can turn to.
“We don’t track it,” Strohl told Carapezza. “The only thing we have is Professor Joe or Sally saying, 'I attest that my course produces X, Y, or Z, and you’ve just got to believe me.’ And that doesn’t seem very rational.”
Locally, the Wentworth Institute of Technology is trying to keep closer tabs on its graduates. The school has information on the career paths of about 80% of its graduates, said Susan Duffy, associate provost for transformational learning. About 87% of those graduates either have a job or are in graduate school within six months of graduation. “And the overwhelming majority of those are employed in their major of study,” Duffy said.
Read the full story from Kirk Carapezza here.
Dig deeper:
-Colleges are reconnecting with students who left before earning their degrees
-MIT requires every student to know how to swim. But why?
-Brandeis bets big on rebuilding the liberal arts around real-world skills
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