Meanderings, 10 June 2023

It’s graduation day at Northern Seminary. Please pray for us. Today will be the first community gathering and I expect there to be lots of grief and sorrow and compassion and empathy.

Photo by MD Duran on Unsplash

Wayne State charts a new path for many students:

(NewsNation) — More than a million college students drop out every year. One estimate finds almost a quarter of first-time undergraduate freshmen drop out within 12 months.

This means many Americans are accruing the debt that comes with attending college but aren’t receiving the benefit of a full education and a degree.

That’s a problem that Wayne State University in Michigan is working to tackle with its Warrior Way Back initiative. Founded in 2018, the program provides both some amount of debt forgiveness and counseling to students who attended the school but dropped out so that they can return and finish their degrees.

When the program began, the amount forgiven was $1,500. Earlier this year, the university upped it to $4,000. To put that into perspective, current tuition and fees for a school year at the school is estimated to be just north of $14,000 for in-state students. Out of state students pay more than $30,000.

It started after Wright State realized how many students dropped out because of their debt, said Ahmad Ezzedine, the vice president for Academic Student Affairs and Global Engagement at the school who helped implement the program. 

“When we started looking at the numbers, it was very obvious that there was an opportunity there,” for debt forgiveness, Ezzedine said.

Wayne State is expanding its program as the fate of federal student loan forgiveness remains up in the air. Congress recently passed legislation that will bring an end to the pause on student loan payments. The Supreme Court is expected to rule on President Biden’s loan forgiveness executive order sometime in the next few weeks.

Our MDs need help:

CHICAGO (NewsNation) — In the world of medicine, part-time work was usually reserved for doctors transitioning into retirement, but amid an uptick in physician burnout rates, many are opting to make full-time careers out of temporary jobs. But it doesn’t come without challenges, especially for hospitals and physicians who rely on them.

Medical professionals have been overwhelmed with work since the start of the pandemic; it’s led to overloaded patient rosters and burnt-out nurses and doctors.

According to the American Medical Association, burnout rates exploded over the last several years, with a 25% spike in the number of physicians who reported at least one burnout symptom. That combined with shrinking pay has many health care professionals looking to make a change.

Nearly a quarter of all physicians in the U.S. said they planned to quit in the next two years, according to a recent study in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, However, for those still looking to practice medicine there may be another way: gig work.

So, like traveling nurses, many doctors are transitioning into temporary physicians-for-hire, tapping into a demand for their services, especially as hospitals face staffing shortages across the nation.

Nearly 50,000 doctors in the U.S. are taking locum tenens assignments in 2022, according to CHG Healthcare, a medical staffing company. That’s nearly 7% of all U.S. physicians, excluding foreign medical school graduates, and a nearly 90% spike from 2015.

U.S. primary care doctors are the most sought-after, according to CHG Healthcare data.

Guns, guns, guns:

Gun deaths in the United States reached an all-time high in 2021 for the second year in a row, with firearms violence the single leading cause of death for children and young adults, according to a new study released by Johns Hopkins University.

The annual study, which relies on data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, reported a total of 48,830 Americans lost their lives to gun violence in 2021. The latest data works out to one gun death every 11 minutes, according U.S. Gun Violence in 2021: An Accounting of a Public Health Crisis.

The report found 26,328 suicides involving a firearm took place in 2021 and 20,958 homicides. The gun suicide rate represented an 8.3% increase from 2020 — the largest one-year increase in more than four decades. The gun homicide rate was up 7.6%.

Further, the gun homicide rate rose 45% from 2019 to 2021, while the rate for homicides not involving a gun rose just 7% in the same period. Likewise, while the rate of suicides by firearm increased 10% over the same period, it was down 8% when looking at suicides by other means.

"Guns are driving this increase," says Ari Davis, a lead author on the study.

As the SBC votes about women pastors, Beth Barr has some thoughts:

History doesn’t give me much hope for the SBC to change its trajectory on female ordination, but history doesn’t allow me to give up all hope either.

I haven’t told the you whole story—only given you a few pieces (you are going to have to wait for my next book). But my point here is simple—the SBC has been voting on women (both for and against) for decades. While the momentum has been building toward banning women from all pastoral roles (which is what is on the docket for the 2023 convention in New Orleans), the counter voices have always been there too. The Home Mission Board may have officially categorized Sarah Lee as “church and family,” but that didn’t change Sarah Lee’s calling by God, commission by a church to the gospel ministry, and her own determination to “be a minister.” One of the lessons I learned from teaching suffrage this past year was never to discount the tenacity of women….

Honestly, I don’t know what is going to happen next week. Will the SBC reject or support the autonomy of local churches to ordain women? What I do know is that Baptist women will continue to do the work of God no matter how the SBC categorizes them. I also know that Baptist voices, including some in the SBC, will continue to support those who, like Sarah Lee, “choose to be a minister.”

Air conditioned football helmets, yah!

Ask any football player and they’ll tell you the toughest part of the season is training camp. Putting on the pads multiple times a day in the August heat simply wears you down. It was tough enough in New England, so I can only imagine what that’s like down in the heat and humidity of Baton Rouge.

That might be slightly easier for the LSU Tigers this season.

The team unveiled new air-conditioned helmets for the 2023 season, and shared a video on social media of various players giving the helmets a try. The company behind the helmets is Tigeraire, a Louisiana-based company that “delivers revolutionary airflow acceleration technology for hard hats and football helmets.”

The Tigeraire website also features this quote from Ja’Marr Chase: “Tigeraire keeps me cool and helps me get my wind back quicker.”