Investments in human capital, such as a college degree, are giving women greater freedom and stability in the home and workplace. ** DON'T MISS JUNE CARBONE SUNDAY AT 4PM EST ON NPR'S ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.

It is big news that women who go to college, join the workforce, and delay having children don't lose money when later on they do combine work and family. A recent study by researchers from the University of Maryland and UCLA looked at the economics of women who didn't have children until they were over the age of 26, and found that their earnings were comparable to women who had never had children. Earlier studies add that women with a college education are much less likely to opt out of the workforce when they have a baby than are women with less education.

This is great news, unless of course you worry that all these older, ambitious working mothers are shortchanging their children, but this turns out not to be true either. As we show in our book, Red Families v. Blue Families, the college educated, who postpone childrearing until the parents achieve a measure of financial self-sufficiency and emotional maturity, have become more likely to marry and less likely to divorce than the rest of the population, with two-parent families that remain intact, replicating the statistics that existed before no-fault divorce, the pill and legalized abortion.

Perhaps more surprisingly, these mothers spend no less time on childcare than similar mothers of earlier generations -- it's housecare, not childcare that's changed. Indeed, Princeton University sociologist Sara McLanahan observes that "Children who were born to mothers from the most advantaged backgrounds are making substantial gains in resources. Relative to their counterparts 40 years ago, their mothers are more mature and more likely to be working at well-paying jobs. These children were born into stable unions and are spending more time with their fathers."  By contrast, the rest of the country has seen skyrocketing rates of non-marital births, divorce, and single-parent families, magnifying the effects of income inequality on children. And these poorer mothers are the ones more likely to cycle in and out of the workforce, limiting their earnings potential while feeling pressed to adequately care for their children.

How do dual career families manage the juggling act so much better than more traditional families? The well-kept secret is that investments in human capital, in college degrees, specialized training and experience, and workforce stability pay off for employers as well as employees. Employment studies show that the greater a woman's education and experience the more likely she is to work in a flexible labor environment and to live in a state that mandates greater parental leave and other family benefits. Younger, less educated, and less skilled women find that they bring less to the bargaining table in negotiating with their bosses. When they cannot get sufficient maternity leave to manage the second child, they quit. When their children require more after school time, they may find it easier to switch employers than to switch schedules. They are more likely to return to school after their children complete elementary school than before they are born. As a result, they find work-family balance harder to manage than their better off peers - and their children fall farther behind in the share of society's resources they enjoy.

Where are the men in all this? The wage gap that exists between men and women is also true for mothers and fathers. According to Congressional testimony from last month, "women with children earn about 2.5 percent less than women without children, while men with children enjoy an earnings boost of 2.1 percent, compared with men without children." Fathers, however, are spending more time with their children than they once did, and married college educated men have increased that time the most. Well off working women are also getting the most assistance at home.

Third, as we discuss in Red Families v. Blue Families, the essential next step for all families is reconsideration of the relationship between work and family. For blue families, where human capital acquisition precedes family formation, the challenge is to structure the work place to fit in family. For red families, where family formation may come first, the challenge is to restructure the relationship to the workplace to fit in continued human capital acquisition. We must provide better support and policies for family stability and for work. Moreover, one critical area where genuine convergence between the two models might ultimately transform the debate: can we persuade our prototypical red family to delay family formation to the mid-twenties to maximize their children's well-being?

June Carbone is the Edward A. Smith/Missouri Chair of Law, the Constitution and Society at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

Naomi Cahn is the John Theodore Fey Research Professor of Law at George Washington University Law School. She is the author of numerous books and law review articles on gender and family law. She and Professor June Carbone are the co-authors of Red Families v. Blue Families (Oxford University Press, 2010).

Could the increasing obsolescence of print lay the foundation for a new era of digital investigative reporting? Justin Lutz, a senior at Sarah Lawrence College, takes a look.

**This topic will be discussed today as part of Facing the Fracture: Media and Economic Understanding, a conference sponsored by the Roosevelt Institute at Columbia University.  Participants will explore the pressures of the Great Recession on quality reporting. The role of blogging and online reporting will be the topic of a panel moderated by Roosevelt Fellow and ND20 editor Lynn Parramore.

The rise of digital technology and the Internet has opened up channels of journalistic discourse around the world; the Internet, particularly, has been a definitive tool of free speech in the twenty-first century as networking technologies become more accessible. Not all consequences of the digital revolution are positive, however.

Take the current state of newspapers. The Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism puts together an annual report on the state of the news media, and although their findings paint a less-than-rosy picture for the future of newspapers, they do not succumb to the fatalism that hangs like a cloud over the print industry. Instead, Pew assures us that, "newspapers, contrary to what is frequently alleged, are not dying in droves."

But new technology has had a profound impact on the way that Americans get their news. The Pew Project echoes this, maintaining that "the state of online news heading into 2010 may best be described as a moving target. Digital delivery is now well established as a part of most Americans daily news consumption. Six in ten Americans get some news online in a typical day--and most of these also get news from other media platforms as well."

Newspapers, for the most part, have accommodated the shift from analogue to digital, establishing themselves as credible online publications. But the conventional profit model employed by newspapers is as archaic as the form itself, and cannot simply be transmuted to the online sphere. This has lead many to speculate about new profit models for online publications, including a non-profit model.

Economic survival is the reality for media organizations, and often the drive to meet the bottom line surpasses the drive to provide quality reporting. Deadlines and insubstantial funding often render quality journalism impossible.

The role of the media in a participatory democracy is paramount, and relies on thorough, investigative reporting to maintain an informed electorate. The Center for Investigative Reporting warns that "the only 'business' protected by the Constitution, the business of informing the public, has been eviscerated in recent years. The role that journalism plays in a functioning democracy -- informing the public and holding the powerful accountable -- is at serious risk."  The economic constraints of the media industry have left little room for investigative journalism, but what does the emergence of digital technology and the Internet mean for this crucial genre? Could thorough investigative reporting find a new home on the Internet?

That is the plan for a number of online publications, including the Huffington Post, which has launched an investigative reporting initiative, with impressive work done on a number of economic issues including predatory lending and the mortgage crisis, among others. On the pages of New Deal 2.0, you have seen Eliot Spitzer and William Black have call for a congressional investigation of Lehman's recently-revealed accounting deception, only to be left asking Where's the Follow Up? Sadly, there has been little follow up in the mainstream print publications, and it has been left to bloggers like Naked Capitalism's Yves Smith to pour over the contents of reports and sound the alarm.

With shrinking budgets at top media organizations and a far-from-cohesive blogsophere, meaningful investigative journalism might be elusive, but it is not impossible.  The Internet is opening up investigative initiatives to a wider audience, using its massive reach to ensure its survival. We must utilize emerging technologies as a powerful tool for investigative journalism--if we fail to do so, we might lose our best hope for a more informed twenty-first century.

Justin Lutz is a senior at Sarah Lawrence and a Roosevelt Institute junior fellow.

Joe Costello looks at how American workers are being left stranded...literally.

The American economy has undergone tremendous changes over the past several decades. Presently, we are in an acute phase of a chronic condition that has been festering for years. In the past 18 months, trillions of dollars have gone to Wall Street and the mega-banks, while state and local governments continue to slash their budgets, and millions have lost their jobs. The LAT has a must read piece regarding devastating cuts to public transit and their impact, not in LA, but in Georgia. Clayton County is majority black abutting Atlanta. The bus service is going to be canceled, according to the article:

A large number of suburban working poor may now be stranded: A survey of riders in April 2008 found that 65% of them do not have access to a car. In a survey last month, 3 out of 4 said they may lose their jobs when the buses stopped rolling.

Can you imagine people in the US not having a car, and not having a car living in a suburban area? Why don't they have a car? They can't afford it. Why, isn't a car an essential aspect of the last half of the 20th century American Dream? The article further states:

Since 1995, public transportation use is up 31%, more than twice the U.S. population growth rate, according to the American Public Transportation Assn., the nonprofit that represents the nation's commuter systems. Last year, Americans took 10.2 billion public transit trips.

People didn't increase their public transit use out of environmental concern, no, solely for economic reasons. Two years ago, when gasoline was plus $4 a gallon, and with every wisp of news the economy is strengthening the price heads quickly back, public transit use greatly expanded. Thinking we're going to rebuild the auto-industry at 35 mpg is stupid, whether looked at from an environmental, economic, or war and peace perspective. Cutting public transit is the last thing we should be cutting, we should be doing just the opposite, investing more, yet:

In a survey of 151 (public transit) member agencies released Thursday, the association found that about 9 in 10 of them reported flat or decreased local and state funding. Nearly 3 in 5 had already cut service or raised fares.

Understand, when the economy fails tens of millions of people on an essential element like transportation, it is failing grandly. So, when you see all the anger being vented, remember what really underlies it: an American economy that increasingly works for fewer and fewer people. Eldrin Bell, a black Commissioner of Clayton County put it best, "I've lived with racism, But this is a new one -- it's called classism. I've never seen anything like it."

When class becomes permanently entrenched in America, that will truly be the death of the American Dream.

To commemorate Women’s History Month, ND20 asked women thought leaders to reflect on past accomplishments and explore today’s key challenges. Lynn Parramore considers the legacy of Social Security and the threat from deficit hawks.

The passage of the health care bill has caused many of us to wax poetic about the potential for progressive social reform. Some of the worst abuses of the insurance industry will be curbed. Health insurance companies won't get away with charging more to cover women any longer, for example. That's certainly something to celebrate.

But there's danger on the horizon, particularly for women. Deficit hawks are poised to sink their talons into Social Security, the bedrock social program that allows both men and women to age with dignity. They aim to scare the bejeezus out of us, warning that the only way to reduce the deficit is by cutting Social Security and Medicare. Back in December, Ben Bernanke launched a shot over the bow, evoking legendary bank robber Willie Sutton to describe how he wanted to raid retirement and health care funds: "That's where the money is." Congress, he reminded us, could even repeal Social Security and Medicare.

This week's misleading story that the Social Security system will pay out more in benefits than it receives in payroll tax receipts has sent the hawks on a feeding frenzy. It's true that the Wall Street-fueled recession has taken its toll on Social Security's revenues this year. But who do the hawks want to pay for the Wall Street greed that got us into this? Your grandmother. The reason? Because the real culprits do not intend to pay.

As economist Randall Wray explains, the Social Security hysteria is a big boon to banksters:

"This is to direct attention away from the true insolvencies -- which is all of the major private banks. It is also designed to scare the population about Social Security: will I ever get my Social Security pension?...This is priority number one for Wall Street now, since it has lost trillions of dollars and is massively insolvent. It needs more government bail-out and it wants your Social Security."

Newsflash: Social Security is not contributing to the deficit. It has a surplus, and it isn't going broke. Responding to the recent explosion of nonsense, Monique Morrissey of the Economic Policy Institute noted that the Congressional Budget Office report, which was the source for the original story in the Associated Press, has stated that the trust fund for Social Security is actually still growing. The fund is projected to increase from $2.5 trillion this year to $3.8 trillion by 2020. Despite the fact that the fund will pay out more this year because of the massive job loss, Social Security gains interest income from Treasury bonds, so total receipts are still greater than payments.

Amid the myths and fear-mongering, women have a particular reason to be on high alert. We rely on Social Security more than men, but are getting sidelined in decision-making.

Obama's Fiscal Commission has been created to propose ways to reduce the current deficit, including possible cuts to Social Security. But there is only one woman among his five appointees, Alice Rivlin. And there is only one woman, Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky, among all the other appointments made by McConnell, Reid, Boehner, and Pelosi. Two women out of 18 appointees? That's 11 percent. It's an outrage, considering that women represent 57 percent of all Social Security beneficiaries age 62 and older, and 69 percent of beneficiaries age 85 and older.

Why are women not invited to the table when our economic security is being decided?

Women's participation in the workforce has skyrocketed since the 1950s, but it seems to have settled at around 70 percent for married women of working age (higher for single women), still far below the rates for working age men (over 90 percent). The incontrovertible fact is that women alone have babies, and they still bear the primary burden of childcare. Most women still leave the workforce after having children for at least a short time, and many leave for years. This means that women usually get lower Social Security benefits than they would have received if they had worked steadily, as most men do. And yet we live longer, and often have special burdens caring for children and grandchildren.

The lack of women on the Fiscal Commission is particularly insulting given that it was a woman who worked tirelessly to bring us Social Security in the first place. It was Frances Perkins, President Roosevelt's indomitable Secretary of Labor, who was responsible for encouraging FDR to include Social Security as part of the New Deal and benefit us all with one of the greatest pieces of social reform in American history. We can't allow deficit hawks and Wall Street greed to shred the critical social safety net that this inspirational woman, often called "FDR's conscience," managed to weave amid fear-mongering just as fierce in her day as it is in ours.  Obama, are you listening?