Education decisions are among the most important choices people ever make. So we were surprised and disappointed to see an article so loosely reasoned and reckless in its conclusions as “Five Reasons to Skip College” published in Blank Slate at Forbes.com on April 18, 2006. The article never provides a numerical assessment of the costs and benefits of going to college, uses statistics inappropriately and in a way that biases the conclusions against college, contains conceptual errors on how to evaluate the return on a college education, and greatly exaggerates the only substantive criticism of typical evaluations of the financial worth of a college degree.

Arizona is one of the states in which the high-wage end of the employment distribution provides a more favorable impression of its job quality than that based on all employment. Thus, Arizona’s subpar job quality is not due to a scarcity of high-wage jobs, but instead results from lesser job quality in the remainder of the employment distribution. In particular, Arizona has an above-average share of very low-paying jobs that serve tourists and seasonal residents. In turn, the low overall average wage in Arizona — 7 percent less than the U.S. average — primarily results from factors other than job quality. The average wage in Arizona is less than the U.S. average in the vast majority of industries and occupations, both high- and low-paying.

This Additional Site Characterization Work Plan presents a strategy for collecting site characterization information at the closed Maricopa County Cave Creek Landfill to support ongoing remedial action planning for trichloroethene-impacted groundwater underlying the site. The Work Plan supplements previous remedial investigation work plans prepared to characterize the nature and extent of site contamination.

To evaluate whether VOCs are migrating out of the landfills into the vadose zone, a soil vapor survey of the soil beneath the landfill bases was performed. Permanent vapor monitoring probes were installed and then sampled twice for VOCs. Groundwater beneath the landfills has been impactd by VOCs, namely TCE, DCE, and toluene.