529 college-savings plans have a bright future.

Several years ago, many were high-cost messes. Since then, some have been spruced up and others have been shut down. The important thing is that more people using these vehicles to save for college are getting a good deal.

Morningstar has been particularly pleased to see some regulars on their worst-plans list cleaned up their acts. It still isn’t perfect, but North Dakota’s College SAVE Plan, a worst constituent in 2006, changed for the better when it dropped its growth-leaning Morgan Stanley lineup for an assortment of stellar Vanguard index funds. And although it still has a few pricier funds in the mix, one of 2007’s worst, Missouri’s MOST 529 Advisor Plan, made its way off the list by adding better funds and cutting its formerly excessive expenses to a more reasonable level.

Morningstar complied their best and worst lists byfocusing on diversification, fees, flexibility, and the underlying funds when deciding which 529 plans to highlight. We like to see plans that aren’t heavily reliant on any one area of the market, because that can mean a more volatile ride and lower returns than what investors face at better-diversified 529 programs. Costs are key because they come directly out of investors’ returns, meaning the higher the price tag, the lower the returns.

The Best

• Illinois Bright Start College Savings Program OppenheimerFunds Inc.
• Maryland College Inv Plan T. Rowe Price
• Virginia CollegeAmerica* Virginia (American Funds)
• Virginia Education Savings Trust Virginia
• Colorado Scholars Choice College Savings Program* Legg Mason, Inc

The Worst

• Ohio Putnam CollegeAdvantage* Putnam Investment Management
• Mississippi Affordable College Savings Program TIAA-CREF
• Mississippi Affordable College Savings Program* TIAA-CREF
• New York 529 College Savings Program Upromise
• Nebraska AIM College Savings Plan* Union Bank (AIM)

 Young people’s financial know-how has gone from bad to worse.

High school seniors, on average, answered correctly only 48.3% of questions about personal finance and economics, according to a nationwide survey released Wednesday by the Federal Reserve. That was even lower than the 52.4% in the previous survey in 2006 and marked the worst score out of the six surveys conducted so far.

Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke stressed in a speech that young people must sharpen their financial knowledge so they are in a better position to make sound investment decisions throughout their lives. College students’ financial literacy also was tested this year. They answered 62% of the questions correctly.

The larger problem is a country where knowledge—especially the kind that may be acquired through schooling—is not valued. That’s why the most popular kids in school are never the top students. That’s why the smart kids get picked on.

Europe, Here They Come 

European MBA programs may have traditionally lacked the brand recognition of their U.S. counterparts, but that’s changing fast. The continent’s increasingly dynamic business environment, improvements to curricula, and growing corporate demand for employees with international experience are attracting top-notch candidates from all over the world. In addition, most Europe management programs are cheaper, shorter, smaller, and more diverse than their U.S. rivals, which is drawing a growing number of American students to studies in the Old World.

Applications from the U.S. to INSEAD, an elite French business school with campuses in Fontainebleau and Singapore, grew 20% in the past year and the school’s 2008 enrollment of Americans grew nearly 24% since 2007, to 73 students.

Young people are recognizing the value of an MBA but don’t want to spend two years earning one—the length of most U.S. programs. Others credit the U.S. recession. The average tuition at the top 10 European schools is less than $73,000, vs. $86,600 at Harvard Business School, and about $95,000 at Wharton. Furthermore, MBA students are increasingly looking to pursue social justice through business, and many European schools have responded with a wealth of new courses on corporate social responsibility, social entrepreneurship, and doing business in developing countries.

A potential threat to the growth of European MBA programs is 46 European countries have pledged to adopt an Anglo-American system of higher education by 2010 and to recognize each other’s degrees more than in the past. Rather than spending as many as six years at one school to earn one degree, students will complete a bachelor’s degree in three to four years and have the option to do a master’s elsewhere.

To build on their growing reputations, many European institutions are now opening satellite campuses in other parts of the world, particularly the Middle East and Asia. While the repercussions for Europe’s MBA programs remain to be seen, the current outlook is bright: Applications are up, admissions are increasingly selective, and ever more companies are demanding multilingual recruits with global polish.

Are people having four or five children just because they can? Because they feel that it shows their wealth and status?

Raising kids today costs a fortune. Last month, the Department of Agriculture estimated that each American child costs an average of $204,060 to house, clothe, educate and entertain until the age of 18. What’s worse, the desire to have another child opens one up to charges of elitism and status consciousness. In many major U.S. cities and their suburbs having three or more children has now come to seem like an ostentatious display of good fortune. The family of five has become “deluxe.”

We not only wonder, we marvel, we get jealous, we gawk. “Having three kids in the city is a way of showing off, absolutely,” says Elisabeth Egan, who, like many families she knows, moved out of New York to the suburbs of Montclair, N.J., to manage the feat. “A third child in the city is definitely a luxury good.”

A February analysis of Current Population Survey data by the Council on Contemporary Families found that in the past 10 years, the top-earning 1.3% of the population has seen an uptick in families with three or more children. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, 12% of upper-income women had three children or more in 2002, compared with only 3% in 1995.

For a couple’s every conceivable wish or worry, the parenting industry knows the precise formula of guilt, fear, hope, love and desire that will empty the parental wallet. Rather than fret about spending too much money, most parents these days are consumed by the anxiety of underspending on their children.

So parents quickly adjust to the demanding realities of the child-rearing industry. Today’s American children, by contrast, get an average of 70 new toys a year.  Baby showers have replaced bridal showers as the blowout du jour; American women today have an average of three. The accompanying baby registries have mushroomed into a $240 million business. In upscale urban areas and tony suburban enclaves, where luxury families are flourishing, that can translate to $800 a week for child care alone. So-called high-end nannies (those who hail from licensed agencies and come equipped with working papers and even driver’s licenses) can cost more than $50,000 a year on the books.

Most families simply can’t afford all this. And surely it can’t all be necessary.

Workers in certain industries can have more comfort in knowing that, even if they are fired, there is so much demand they should be able to find another job very quickly.

Talk of a recession and creeping unemployment rates are enough to make you wonder: Where can you find stability in unstable times? Kiplinger consulted career experts and combed through job trend data to come up with five industries that should provide safer havens to workers, no matter what the economy is doing. No matter what field you work in, you have the possibility of losing your job. But there are things you can do to protect yourself and increase your odds of getting another job, just in case.

Healthcare  
Many of the nation’s fastest-growing careers are in the health care industry, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. An increasingly aging population fuels demand in this field. Some specific jobs with stable prospects include doctor, nurse, pharmacist, physical therapist and physician assistant.

Education
Teachers for any grade level who specialize in high-demand fields such as math, science or bilingual education should have an easier time finding and keeping a job. And the outlook for college instructors looks stable, too. College enrollment is rising as the number of 18- to 24-year-olds increases. Some areas of the country are more stable than others for teachers because education jobs follow population trends. So teachers in fast-growing states in the South and West, such as Nevada, Arizona, Texas and Georgia, will have more opportunity than in slower-growth areas in the Midwest and Northeast.

Security
Crime doesn’t stop in a recession. That makes security jobs, such as police officers, detectives, private security guards and international security experts, a good bet. Layoffs in this industry are rare. In the off-chance law enforcement officers lose their jobs to budget cuts, they have little difficulty finding jobs with other agencies because demand is so high.

Environmental Sciences
The current “green” movement reaches far beyond changing your light bulbs to fluorescents. It’s also translating into a solid career choice. The BLS expects environmental careers, including ecologists, hydrologists, environmental chemists and others, to grow 25% over the next decade.

Government
Some of the most stable jobs around are within the federal government, where firings and lay-offs happen at just one-quarter the rate in the private sector. One reason: Even in hard economic times when big businesses are forced to downsize, the government must carry on. And only one in every 5,000 non-defense workers is ever fired for poor performance each year. Crazy odds! Due to an increasingly aging workforce, the government is doing a lot of hiring lately, especially among the 20-something crowd.

With No Summer Job, What Are Teenagers Going To Get Themselves Into

Nearly half of hiring managers say they have no plans to hire any seasonal workers this year, according to a study of 1,100 companies released today.  When asked why they wouldn’t be hiring, 31% of those polled said they didn’t have the budget. During the recession of 2001, the teen employment rate plummeted maintaining that teens are typically the hardest hit group during tough economic times. 

Adding to the problems is the growing number of older workers going after traditional teen jobs in retail and food services, and also the increase in illegal and legal immigrants vying for those jobs.

Overall, the numbers of teens working in the United States has been on the decline, as parents from all socioeconomic groups have wanted their children to focus on academics and extracurricular activities instead of paying work. This summer, enrollment in enrichment camps and travel plans may decline because of the economy, and that means more teens potentially looking for work.

Gone are the days when U.S. companies hired locally

The head of the top U.S. phone company AT&T Inc said on Wednesday it was having trouble finding enough skilled workers to fill all the 5,000 customer service jobs it promised to return to the United States from India. “We’re having trouble finding the numbers that we need with the skills that are required to do these jobs,” says AT&T Chief Executive Randall Stephenson.

So far, only around 1,400 jobs have been returned to the United States of 5,000. Stephenson said he is especially distressed that in some U.S. communities and among certain groups, the high school dropout rate is as high as 50%.

“If I had a business that half the product we turned out was defective or you couldn’t put into the marketplace, I would shut that business down,” he said. Stephenson said neither he nor most Americans liked the situation, and the solution was a stronger U.S. focus on education and keeping jobs.

The Department of Education (DOE) announced Thursday that the Commonwealth’s dropout rate is at an all-time high. The annual dropout rate rose from 3.3% in 2006-2007 to 3.8% this year. Among all students,

9.1% of Hispanic students, 6.4% of African American students, 2.7% of white students and 2.6% of Asian students drop out each year. While Hispanics have the highest population of dropouts within their demographic, white students actually had the most dropouts last year, 51.2% of the total number.

Can Growth In Education and Health Save The Day?

640,000 new jobs from education and healthcare were created last year. Propelled by aging baby boomers and rising student enrollments, hospitals and schools are still hiring while almost everyone else is cutting back.

Could adding more nurses, teachers, and hospital orderlies really hold off a recession? The answer is yes. What people don’t realize is that health and education combined make up the single largest source of jobs in the U.S., employing 28 million people, or about 20% of the total workforce. What’s more, government funds support many of these jobs, either directly or indirectly, making them less subject to the business cycle. The hidden danger now is that fading tax revenues may cause state and local governments to cut back on their funding for schools and medical care.
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Doctors and Lawyers, Make Way For The Hedge Funds and Private Equity Firms

As of 2006, nearly 60% of doctors polled by the American College of Physician Executives said they had considered getting out of medicine because of low morale, and nearly 70% knew someone who already had. Make no mistake, law and medicine (the most elite of the traditional professions) have always been demanding. But they were also unquestionably prestigious. Sure, bankers made big money and professors held impressive degrees. But in the days when a successful career was built on a number of tacitly recognized pillars (outsize pay, long-term security, impressive schooling and authority over grave matters) doctors and lawyers were perched atop them all. Now, those pillars have started to wobble.

“The older professions are great, they’re wonderful,” says author Richard Florida.  “But they’ve lost their allure, their status. And it isn’t about money.” The pay is still good and the in-laws aren’t exactly complaining. Still, something is missing, say many doctors, lawyers and career experts: the old sense of purpose, of respect, of living at the center of American society and embodying its definition of “success.”

In a culture that prizes risk and outsize reward (where professional heroes are college dropouts with billion-dollar Web sites) some doctors and lawyers feel they have slipped a notch in social status, drifting toward the safe-and-staid realm of dentists and accountants. It’s not just because the professions have changed, but also because the standards of what makes a prestigious career have changed.

This decline is rooted in a broader shift in definitions of success, essentially, a realignment of the pillars. Especially among young people, professional status is now inextricably linked to ideas of flexibility and creativity, concepts alien to seemingly everyone but art students even a generation ago. Indeed, applications to law schools and medical schools have declined from recent highs. Nationally, the number of law school applicants dropped a 6.7% between 2006 and 2005.  44% of lawyers recently surveyed by the American Bar Association said they would not recommend the profession to a young person.)

Unquestionably, many doctors and lawyers still find the higher calling of their profession — helping people — as well as the prestige and money, worth the hard work. And the stars in either field are still that: commanding the handsome compensation and social cachet. But to others, the daily trudge serves as a constant reminder that the entrepreneur’s autonomy simply can’t be found in law or medicine.

Life for attornies is less like “Ally McBeal” and more like “The Practice,” where lawyers work like dogs in a thoroughly unglamorous setting. Doctors face similar pressure. Complaints about managed care crimping doctors’ income and authority over medical decisions are nothing new, but the problems are only getting worse, several doctors said. Increasing workloads and paperwork might be tolerable if the old feeling of authority were still the same, doctors said. But patients who once might have revered them for their knowledge and skill often arrive at the office armed with a sense of personal expertise, gleaned from a few hours on the internet, doctors said, not to mention a disdain for the medical system in general. And then there’s the money issue. Or rather, money envy. Associates at major New York firms often start at $150,000 to $180,000. Partners at the country’s biggest 100 firms took home an average of $1.2 million in 2006. Hardly small sums, but for many senior investment bankers, bonuses and salaries this year will average $2.25 million to $2.75 million. Doctors rarely approach such heights. While income varies widely, a typical physician might earn $150,00 to $300,000. A surgeon might make $250,000 to $400,000; hot-shot surgeons can earn $750,000 a year, and superstars over a million dollars.

Careers in more entrepreneurial industries like hedge funds and private equity firms follow the ’sky is the limit’ model of the entertainment industry, the Web or professional sports. Kevin J. Delaney, a sociology professor who has studied the culture of hedge funds and private equity firms, said executives there “love the idea of being responsible for their own fate.” They’re going to make a million or lose a million based on the trades they make.

This star-system mentality is particularly attractive to college students, many of whom were reared with the ’80s philosophy that every child was a potential superstar. And they want immediate rewards — not exactly the mentality that will fuel a student through years of medical school, a residency and additional training for a specialty.

Grudgingly, Japan is starting to respect its neighbors in terms of education methods.

Japan is suffering a crisis of confidence these days about its ability to compete with its emerging Asian rivals, China and India. But even in this fad-obsessed nation, one result was never expected: a growing craze for Indian education. Many Japanese are feeling a sense of insecurity about the nation’s schools, which once turned out students who consistently ranked at the top of international tests. That is no longer true, which is why many people here are looking for lessons from India, the country the Japanese see as the world’s ascendant education superpower.

Newspapers carry reports of Indian children memorizing multiplication tables far beyond nine times nine, the standard for young elementary students in Japan. Viewing another Asian country as a model in education, or almost anything else, would have been unheard-of just a few years ago, say education experts and historians. Much of Japan has long looked down on the rest of Asia, priding itself on being the region’s most advanced nation.

Last month, a national cry of alarm greeted the announcement by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that in a survey of math skills, Japan had fallen from first place in 2000 to 10th place, behind Taiwan, Hong Kong and South Korea.  Most annoying for many Japanese is that the aspects of Indian education they now praise: learning more at an earlier age, an emphasis on memorization and cramming, and a focus on the basics, particularly in math and science.

Japanese parents have expressed very, very high interest in Indian schools. Eager parents try to send their children to Japan’s roughly half dozen Indian schools. The boom has had the side effect of making many Japanese a little more tolerant toward other Asians.

Dyslexia Forces People To Master Verbal Communication 

It has long been known that dyslexics are drawn to running their own businesses, where they can get around their weaknesses in reading and writing and play on their strengths. A new study of entrepreneurs in the United States suggests that dyslexia is much more common among small-business owners than even the experts had thought. Julie Logan, a professor of entrepreneurship at the Cass Business School in London, found that more than a third of the entrepreneurs she had surveyed — 35%— identified themselves as dyslexic. The study also concluded that dyslexics were more likely than nondyslexics to delegate authority, to excel in oral communication and problem solving and were twice as likely to own two or more businesses.

“We found that dyslexics who succeed had overcome an awful lot in their lives by developing compensatory skills,” Professor Logan said. One reason that dyslexics are drawn to entrepreneurship, Professor Logan said, is that strategies they have used since childhood to offset their weaknesses in written communication and organizational ability — identifying trustworthy people and handing over major responsibilities to them — can be applied to businesses. Entrepreneurs are hands-on people who push a minimum of paper, do lots of stuff orally instead of reading and writing, and delegate authority, all of which suggests a high verbal facility. Compare that with corporate managers who read, read, read. Only 1% of corporate managers in the United States have dyslexia.

Individuals who have difficulty reading and writing tend to deploy other strengths. They rely on mentors, and as a result, become very good at reading other people and delegating duties to them. They become adept at using visual strengths to solve problems.

“Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need.” ~From the movie Fight Club

Researchers have found that low self-esteem and materialism are not just a correlation, but also a causal relationship where low self esteem increases materialism, and materialism can also create low self-esteem. They also found that as self esteem increases, materialism decreases. The study primarily focused on how this relationship affects children and adolescents. Researchers found that even a simple gesture to raise self-esteem dramatically decreased materialism, which provides a way to cope with insecurity.  By the time children reach early adolescence, and experience a decline in self-esteem, the stage is set for the use of material possessions as a coping strategy for feelings of low self-worth.

Most of us want more income so we can consume more. Yet as societies become richer, they do not become happier. In fact, the First World has more depression, more alcoholism and more crime than fifty years ago. This paradox is true of Britain, the United States, continental Europe and Japan. Statistically people have more things than they did 50 years ago, but they are actually less happy in several key areas. There is also the considerable cost of what materialism does to the environment. We don’t yet know what final toll that could take in terms of quality of life and overall happiness. What many people don’t understand is that if we want to save the environment then at some level we have to buy and consume less.

The reason people want whatever is currently “hot” is because they believe it will contribute towards their satisfaction and happiness in life. The word “believe” is the key here. People believe that buying more and more things will make them happy, when in fact research has shown time and time again that this simply isn’t the case.

Once I’ve read a book I keep it. It becomes a part of me.

Serious leaders who are serious readers build personal libraries dedicated to how to think, not how to compete. It is impossible to put together a serious library on almost any subject for less than several hundred thousand dollars. Perhaps that is why — more than their sex lives or bank accounts — chief executives keep their libraries private.

Few Nike colleagues, for example, ever saw the personal library of the founder, Phil Knight, a room behind his formal office. To enter, one had to remove one’s shoes and bow: the ceilings were low, the space intimate, the degree of reverence demanded for these volumes on Asian history, art and poetry greater than any the self-effacing Mr. Knight, who is no longer chief executive, demanded for himself. “I’m always learning.”

Forget finding the business best-seller list in these libraries. Students of power should take note that C.E.O.’s are starting to collect books on climate change and global warming, not Al Gore’s tomes but books from the 15th century about the weather, Egyptian droughts, even replicas of Sumerian tablets recording extraordinary changes in climate.

Personal libraries have always been a biopsy of power. The empire-loving Elizabeth I surrounded herself with the Roman historians, many of whom she translated, and kept one book under lock and key in her bedroom, in a French translation she alone of her court could read: Machiavelli’s treatise on how to overthrow republics, “The Prince.” Churchill retreated to his library to heal his wounds after being voted out of power in 1945 — and after reading for six years came back to power.

It took Dee Hock, father of the credit card and founder of Visa, a thousand books to find The One. Mr. Hock walked away from business life in 1984 and looked back only from his library’s walls. He built a dream 2,000-square-foot wing for his books in a pink stucco mansion atop a hill in Pescadero, Calif. In his library, Mr. Hock found the book that contained the thoughts of all of them. Visitors can see opened on his library table for daily consulting, Omar Khayyam’s “Rubáiyát,” the Persian poem that warns of the dangers of greatness and the instability of fortune.

Thanks To Healthcare and Energy Costs. College costs are rising faster then the amount of financial aid available.

State university tuition has leaped 40% in the past five years, hitting the three out of four American college students who attend public universities. Tuition has risen 126%(after inflation) since 1984. In 1984, the tuition and fees at a public, four-year college was just 4.8% of the median family income; today it’s 9.5%. The heart of the problem is that states must juggle the cost of funding their education system alongside two other major funding obligations: state-funded Medicaid and the state criminal justice system. When states are forced to make cuts in education, they typically spare K-12 education programs because they’re politically sensitive. State universities, however, have a mechanism for making up their shortfalls - tuition hikes. There you go, send those kids to community college first.

Universities are disadvantaged by the fact that students and teachers must both be present in full numbers in order for education to take place. The quickest way to reduce costs is to put more students in the classroom. Today college costs are increasing and federal student aid hasn’t kept pace. At the same time, grant aid has consistently fallen back as a form of aid. No matter what the cost of college, the impact of the price on students, graduates and their families has grown deeper.

What does this ultimately do the students? Outstripping increases in financial aid and pushes students into more borrowing. While borrowing from the government is still far bigger, students are footing more and more of the bill with private loans from banks and student loan companies. Undergraduate private borrowing grew 12% to $14.5 billion in 2006-2007. Borrowing has increased tenfold over the last decade.

It’s difficult to imagine a trader taking advantage if he or she did not truly experience themselves as worthy and efficacious.

A fascinating study tracked 7000 young people over a 25 year period to examine their success during the middle of their careers. The researchers found that young people who exhibited positive core self-evaluations earned significantly more than their lower self esteem counterparts. Family socioeconomic status and academic achievement were also positively correlated with career success decades later.

Perhaps the most striking finding was that self-evaluations facilitated success by enabling young people to take advantage of their socioeconomic and educational advantages. In this study, self-esteem was one element of core self-evaluations. Also included were self-efficacy (belief that one can achieve one’s goals); emotional stability; and locus of control (the degree to which one perceives an ability to control life outcomes).

The authors stress that we need certain advantages to achieve success (socioeconomic advantages, educational attainment), but that we also need to view ourselves in ways that enable us to make use of these advantages. Those with low core self-evaluations may avoid opportunities, simply because these could be threatening to their self-views. Perhaps this is why research finds that the four dimensions of core self-evaluations are highly correlated with job satisfaction and job performance. When we think we can make a difference, we are most likely to pour ourselves into our work and find it fulfilling.