Minimum wage laws do harm in the short run and in the long run. People acquire lots of valuable human capital in their first jobs. The longer those first jobs are pushed out of reach, the longer it takes low-skill workers to develop crucial capacities that can put them on a promising career path.

Absent high-quality retraining, it's easy for workers in dying industries to get stuck, for their skills to atrophy, and for their networks and work habits to erode. All of this shrinks the supply of skilled workers, discouraging employers and leading many big firms to look overseas.

In January of this year, the number of manufacturing jobs increased by 50,000. Yet this vibrant sector is being held back—and not by imports.

80% of women at the top (in business, I presume) have husbands who don’t work.

The chief obstacle to ROTC's expansion today is not antimilitary sentiment but a Pentagon that prefers to allocate its resources to surer recruiting prospects, primarily in the South and the Midwest.

Twenty-five top college students will travel to the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) in Washington, D.C. this June to participate in the 2012 American Enterprise Summer Institute. 

Once little more than a blip on the radar of American higher education, for-profit colleges now enroll about 1 in 10 of the nation’s postsecondary students. And this fast growth has not gone unremarked. The past year has brought unprecedented scrutiny and often harsh criticism of proprietary education from policy makers, regulators, and the news media.

The recession has pinned education policy in a tough spot: Our schools must both produce more skilled workers and do so as efficiently as possible. Innovative models of career and technical education could go a long way toward threading this needle.