Chaotic lake getting fence and securityStudents affected by COVID-19 able to graduate for the first time
LEHIGH ACRES Chaotic lake getting fence and security Now, with all the negative attention it has gotten, some think putting up a fence is a great way to keep that bad activity out.
FORT MYERS Students affected by COVID-19 able to graduate for the first time For many young people, COVID stripped away one of their greatest rites of passage: graduation.
Deadly crash on State Road 29 in Hendry County Authorities are at the scene of a deadly crash on State Road 29 in Hendry County on Friday afternoon.
Celebrating Free Comic Book Day in SWFL JP Sports store manager Jonathan Powell said this is a generational event that brings families together to reminisce on comics and other hobby-related knickknacks.
FORT MYERS Group rescues dogs before getting put down in Lee County Our animal shelters are packed with amazing puppies who have the sole desire to be loved.
FORT MYERS FGCU student beats all odds and is able to graduate Nearly four years ago, Marisa Manning had her heart set on going to Florida Gulf Coast University but never thought she’d find her passion for studying parasites.
Victim in MLK Blvd. shooting identified as social media influencer The victim of the Martin Luther King Boulevard shooting has been identified as a local social media influencer.
FORT MYERS Could a Ferris wheel in downtown Fort Myers work? Right now, there are talks to bring a Ferris wheel to downtown Fort Myers, but several things are still up in the air.
LITTLE HICKORY BAY Improving ‘Hell’s Gate’ safety, a notoriously dangerous waterway for boaters A push to make an area known as “Hell’s Gate” safer since it’s a dangerous stretch of water with several blind corners within Little Hickory Bay.
Fixing failed back surgeries More than a million and a half people in the U.S. undergo back surgery each year. However, classic back surgery has one of the highest failure rates of any surgery.
WINK NEWS Getting an inside look at the FEMA discount controversy Picking up the pieces after Hurricane Ian has been difficult for many and moving on can impact our wallets.
FGCU FGCU pitcher Dylan Wolff playing for hometown team after labrum injury FGCU pitcher Dylan Wolff is living the dream playing for the hometown team after he overcame a labrum injury.
LEHIGH ACRES Frustrated Lehigh parents want action after violent school fights go viral online Violence at a Lehigh Acres Middle school was captured and posted online.
Turtle Club beachfront restaurant relaunches in Naples After a series of private friends and family events this week, The Turtle Club will reopen May 5 and begin taking reservations again May 6.
Jimmie The Beef Guy opens in Fort Myers Jimmie “The Beef Guy” Hart opened the first Jimmie The Beef Guy in 2021 on the southeast corner of Bonita Beach Road and U.S. 41.
LEHIGH ACRES Chaotic lake getting fence and security Now, with all the negative attention it has gotten, some think putting up a fence is a great way to keep that bad activity out.
FORT MYERS Students affected by COVID-19 able to graduate for the first time For many young people, COVID stripped away one of their greatest rites of passage: graduation.
Deadly crash on State Road 29 in Hendry County Authorities are at the scene of a deadly crash on State Road 29 in Hendry County on Friday afternoon.
Celebrating Free Comic Book Day in SWFL JP Sports store manager Jonathan Powell said this is a generational event that brings families together to reminisce on comics and other hobby-related knickknacks.
FORT MYERS Group rescues dogs before getting put down in Lee County Our animal shelters are packed with amazing puppies who have the sole desire to be loved.
FORT MYERS FGCU student beats all odds and is able to graduate Nearly four years ago, Marisa Manning had her heart set on going to Florida Gulf Coast University but never thought she’d find her passion for studying parasites.
Victim in MLK Blvd. shooting identified as social media influencer The victim of the Martin Luther King Boulevard shooting has been identified as a local social media influencer.
FORT MYERS Could a Ferris wheel in downtown Fort Myers work? Right now, there are talks to bring a Ferris wheel to downtown Fort Myers, but several things are still up in the air.
LITTLE HICKORY BAY Improving ‘Hell’s Gate’ safety, a notoriously dangerous waterway for boaters A push to make an area known as “Hell’s Gate” safer since it’s a dangerous stretch of water with several blind corners within Little Hickory Bay.
Fixing failed back surgeries More than a million and a half people in the U.S. undergo back surgery each year. However, classic back surgery has one of the highest failure rates of any surgery.
WINK NEWS Getting an inside look at the FEMA discount controversy Picking up the pieces after Hurricane Ian has been difficult for many and moving on can impact our wallets.
FGCU FGCU pitcher Dylan Wolff playing for hometown team after labrum injury FGCU pitcher Dylan Wolff is living the dream playing for the hometown team after he overcame a labrum injury.
LEHIGH ACRES Frustrated Lehigh parents want action after violent school fights go viral online Violence at a Lehigh Acres Middle school was captured and posted online.
Turtle Club beachfront restaurant relaunches in Naples After a series of private friends and family events this week, The Turtle Club will reopen May 5 and begin taking reservations again May 6.
Jimmie The Beef Guy opens in Fort Myers Jimmie “The Beef Guy” Hart opened the first Jimmie The Beef Guy in 2021 on the southeast corner of Bonita Beach Road and U.S. 41.
Credit: WINK News A college degree, the thinking goes, is worth the cost, given a lifetime of higher earnings. But a recent phenomenon may add a more pessimistic nuance to those assumptions, with economists finding the college wealth premium — or the assets owned by college grads compared with high school grads — is vanishing for younger Americans. White college graduates who were born in the 1930s and 1940s, for example, enjoyed wealth that was about triple that of non-college grads — but for successive generations, that wealth advantage has been shrinking. For White college grads born in the 1980s, or members of the millennial generation, the wealth premium has decreased to 42%, according to the analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. It’s even worse for people of color, with Black college grads born in the 1980s experiencing no wealth premium at all compared with their counterparts without college degrees, the research found. To be sure, the income premium — or the difference in earnings between college grads and those without bachelors degrees — remains, although that is showing signs of stagnation. But the mechanism that traditionally helped college grads translate those higher incomes into a greater share of wealth has grown increasingly shaky for younger generations. And that has implications for the financial resilience of younger households, as well as the decisions that current high school students are now making about whether to enroll in college. “We’ve been focusing on wealth because we always say it does something different from income: It provides a buffer,” said William Emmons, an economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis and a co-author of the research. “It’s buffering yourself against shocks, and we are getting this huge shock right now” with the economic crisis caused by the coronavirus pandemic. In effect, many millennials with college degrees entered the pandemic with fewer monetary resources to weather the pandemic’s economic shock than older generations had at the same age. That could explain why a larger share of millennials are racking up credit card debt in the pandemic when compared with Gen X or Baby Boomers, while more than half of millennials say their savings have declined since the start of the pandemic. “I often say this — I think it scares people — people really need to understand this is really a high-stakes decision,” Emmons said of enrolling in college. “Unfortunately it’s even more of a high-stakes decision for a first-generation student, for someone whose family doesn’t have a lot of money.” To be be sure, adults with only high school degrees are faring worse than those with college diplomas, a trend that started before the pandemic but has been exacerbated by the current K-shaped recovery that’s benefitting white-collar, educated workers while less educated workers suffer higher rates of joblessness. Workers over 25 with high school degrees had a jobless rate of 7.9% in January — almost double the jobless rate for people with a college education, according to Labor Department data. Before the pandemic, wage growth for college graduates had been lackluster, growing at about 15% between 1979 and 2019 for the typical college grad, a 2020 study from the Congressional Research Service found. But those with only a high school degree were worse off, with the median income falling 11% over the same period. “Luck of when you are born” There are several factors that could be to blame for the shrinking college wealth premium, Emmons said. But at the heart of the issue is what Emmons calls “the luck of when you are born.” People born in the 1950s and earlier came of age when assets like houses were relatively cheap compared with today’s standards. College was also relatively affordable for the Silent and Boomer generations, Eammons pointed out. But younger generations who attend college are saddled with debt before they even enter the workforce — eating into their ability to build wealth. “You could work a part-time job and pay your way through college,” Emmons said of people born in the 1940s and 1950s. “How realistic is that today? It’s not.” It’s not only private colleges like Harvard that are more expensive. State colleges have also cut funding, pushing more of the cost onto students and their families. Before the pandemic, state funding for higher education remained below its pre-Great Recession levels, according to a new study from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Between 2008 to 2019, per-student spending at public four-year colleges decreased by more than $1,000, or almost 12%, while tuition jumped 35%, the study found. “I would argue in an intergenerational sense it doesn’t look as fair,” Emmons said. Much of that is driven by voter preferences, with older generations who benefited from government support of public colleges now effectively saying, “I’m not going to pay for it for younger people,” he added. College choice? Adding to the stress of the high-stakes decision of whether to enroll in college is the ongoing pandemic. Applications for the 2021-2022 academic year rose 10% through January 18, according to the Common Application. But that’s due to a surge of applications to selective colleges, which dropped their SAT and ACT score requirements this year — opening the door to students who might not otherwise have applied. It’s a different situation at less selective schools. “There is a sharp decline in community college enrollment — an over 18% decline for first-time, first-year students for community college,” noted Victoria Jackson, a senior policy analyst at the CBPP and the co-author of the study on state college costs. “I think it speaks to who is being hit by the pandemic, and who is more likely to not being able to attend for a financial shock.” The expense of college combined with a faltering economic recovery is playing into the decisions of some students, especially those from lower-income households, about whether to apply, said Charlie Javice, the CEO of Frank, a service that helps students with financial aid forms. “There is a huge amount of uncertainty,” she said. “People are weighing the opportunity costs of not working — they are picking not getting paid for four years” by enrolling in college. Student loan relief Student loan relief could significantly boost the ability of younger college grads to build wealth, said Emmons of the St. Louis Fed. But President Biden on February 17 signaled that he’s unlikely to support some Democrats’ plan to cancel $50,000 in per-person student debt, saying that he’s instead prepared to support a less ambitious plan to erase $10,000 in debt. Wiping away student debt could come with a host of problems, experts say. First, people who saved for college and worked to pay off their loans would likely be resistant to supporting such a plan. And given that the majority of Americans don’t have college degrees, the plan would mean those taxpayers are supporting the minority of adults who built up debt to attend college. But there’s another issue that doesn’t get as much attention: the fact that fewer than half of college students earn a degree within four years. That should raise questions about the effectiveness of some colleges, as well as signal that some students aren’t perceiving the value of college when they’re enrolled, Javice added. That could be due to everything from the quality of instruction to the cost and concerns about debt, among other issues. “Forty percent of student debt is currently for those who have dropped out,” Javice said. “Therefore, if they dropped out, it likely means they weren’t seeing value or they couldn’t afford to stay in.” The shrinking college wealth premium could impact the nation’s economy for years to come, impacting household wealth as well as generational mobility. With less wealth than older generations, young college grads may be less likely to start a business or to be able to help their own kids afford college, Emmons added. “Wealth has very very significant intergenerational links,” he said, “so one generation not being able to accumulate wealth likely has implications for the next generation.”