Graduates who received a bachelor’s degree in 2008 borrowed 50% more than their counterparts who graduated in 1996, while graduates who earned an associate’s degree or undergraduate certificate in 2008 borrowed more than twice what their counterparts in 1996 had borrowed.
The public wants increased trade with Canada, Japan and several other countries (China and South Korea being notable exceptions), but support for free trade agreements is at a 13-year low, and more say trade agreements have negative rather than positive impact on jobs, wages and economic growth.
In the year following the official end of the recent recession, the unemployment rate for immigrant workers fell 0.6 percentage points, while for native-born workers it rose 0.5 percentage points.
In the year following the end of the Great Recession in June 2009, foreign-born workers gained 656,000 jobs while native-born workers lost 1.2 million. As a result, the unemployment rate fell for immigrants while it rose for the native born.
The national political backlash against illegal immigration has created new divisions among Latinos and heightened their concerns about discrimination against members of their ethnic group-including those who were born in the United States or who immigrated legally.
There is wide interest by researchers and journalists in finding data from the Census Bureau and other sources that could illustrate the impacts of the Great Recession on American life.
When researchers look at possible links among social, economic and demographic trends -- such as the current recession and declining marriage rates -- they face a challenge. Two trends may be heading in the same direction, but are they related? Correlation, the statisticians frequently warn, is no guarantee of causation.
Union members are one voting bloc that continues to strongly back their party's candidates -- the downside of that support is that labor unions have fallen out of favor with the broader public, including independents who will cast the decisive votes in this year's elections.
On Nov. 3, 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in a pair of related cases involving a constitutional challenge to an Arizona tax policy aimed at providing scholarships for children to attend private – often religious – schools.