Curry College president offers job guarantee to grads
When the trustees at Curry College tapped Jay Gonzalez last year to be its next president, they picked an unconventional leader.
Gonzalez had no significant academic work on his resume. But the former Democratic candidate for governor did lead a health insurer (CeltiCare), held a Cabinet position in state government (under former governor Deval Patrick), and worked as a lawyer (at Hinckley Allen).
Now, Gonzalez is serving up an unconventional idea, but one he believes may be essential to Curry’s survival: a job guarantee program for all full-time undergraduates starting with the current crop of around 500 first-year students. He announced the Curry Commitment, as he calls it, at his inaugural celebration on Friday at the Milton campus. From his research, only a handful of US colleges offer something similar.
Curry will provide career services, including counseling and interview skills training. Students who fully participate but do not get a job offer or graduate school admission within six months of graduating could pick from one of three options: getting student loan payments covered by Curry for up to 12 months, a paid internship in their field (possibly at Curry) for up to 12 months, or waiving tuition for six credits of graduate studies there.
“This is what students and families most want today out of their investment in college,” Gonzalez said. “If we aren’t delivering this, then what are we doing?”
Gonzalez figures Curry can’t really afford not to offer the program. This is part of his effort to boost the school’s graduation rate, currently at about 50 percent. Curry is suffering like many other smaller New England schools by demographic shifts, as fewer kids apply to college each year. Today, Curry’s enrollment sits at around 2,000, including about 400 adult learners and graduate students. Five years ago, Gonzalez said, that number was around 2,500.
“The fact we’re ... differentiating ourselves in a meaningful way not only will likely result in more demand for Curry, it’s also going to force us to be hyper-focused and make sure we deliver,” Gonzalez said. “We can’t just keep doing what we have been doing. Curry is not going to be sustainable.”
Wu shelves housing tax break
Back in September, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu expressed her frustration to the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce at how higher inter
est rates were preventing construction from starting on thousands of housing units that already have city permits. City Hall, she said then, was strongly considering a tax incentive program to jump-start stalled projects.
Developers saw this as a welcome change following Wu’s push for rent control and a transfer tax, not to mention higher environmental and affordable housing standards. Eventually, the word around town was that Wu would unveil tax incentives at her State of the City speech in January. Nope.
Developers later pinned their hopes on the mayor’s speech to the Boston Municipal Research Bureau, a budget watchdog group. But when Wu delivered the speech on Thursday, it was more bad news.
While she did mention her separate tax breaks to convert downtown offices to apartments, Wu also touted her proposal to get the state Legislature’s permission to hike property tax rates on commercial properties.
Then she talked about how her administration worked with Harvard economics professor Edward Glaeser to analyze the housing incentives she floated last year. They deemed that interest rates remain too high for tax incentives — at least the ones the city can afford — to make much of a difference. Forgoing many years of future tax revenue for the program, Wu said, isn’t in the best interest of the city’s residents right now.
Will that change? Many developers have apparently given up.
“The impression many people took away from the speech ... is that door has closed,” said Tamara Small, chief executive of the NAIOP Massachusetts trade group. “It’s death by a thousand cuts, that’s kind of how it’s viewed.”
For Nexamp, a quick trip to find funding
When Nexamp chief executive Zaid Ashai launched another round of funding to propel the solar company’s growth, he didn’t go far to find his latest major investor.
Last week, Nexamp announced a $520 million capital raise, with new investor Manulife Investment Management alongside existing investors Diamond Generating Corp. and Generate Capital. Manulife, parent company of Bostonbased insurer John Hancock, is headquartered in Toronto. But the investment team, led by Pradeep Killamsetty, is here in Boston, continuing to share offices in the Back Bay with John Hancock colleagues — and only a mile away from Ashai’s downtown digs.
Nexamp is active in 19 states and employs about 500 people, including 260 in Boston and 85 in its new second headquarters in Chicago. The new investment will help Ashai grow his workforce and expand Nexamp’s footprint. He wants to enter another eight states over the next 18 months.
This Manulife-led funding round was Nexamp’s biggest yet.
“It was dumb luck that they’re local,” Ashai said. “For any entrepreneur, having an investor that’s a four-minute
Uber drive away is easier versus someone across the country.”
Kornbluth cheers for MIT to tackle climate change
MIT president Sally Kornbluth is a cancer biologist, not a climate scientist. But when she joined MIT last year from Duke University, several friends asked her essentially the same question: “Can you please fix the climate?”
An impossible task? Maybe. But Kornbluth is determined to harness MIT’s considerable brainpower to tackle it.
Last week, Kornbluth described her vision at a cleantech entrepreneurship event in Boston hosted by the federal Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, led by on-leave MIT professor Evelyn Wang, and the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center. She mentioned her newly announced Climate Project at MIT, which commits $75 million and dozens of faculty to solving some of the biggest climate problems. She also told a room packed with entrepreneurs and investors that she’s seeking collaborators for the initiative.
That request already seemed to bear some fruit. After Kornbluth finished, MassCEC chief executive Emily Reichert said she was impressed by Kornbluth’s ambitions and planned to have someone from the CEC reach out to offer assistance.
Kornbluth believes MIT is up for the task in part because of the culture of entrepreneurship she found when she arrived on the Cambridge campus. Pretty much everyone there is interested in starting a company, she said, if they haven’t already done so. To make per point, she talked about a “Demo Day” last September, overseen by Bill Aulet at the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, that featured cheerleaders.
“I didn’t know MIT had cheerleaders,” Kornbluth said. “They were there, cheering for entrepreneurship. I can tell you at Duke, the cheerleaders were cheering for other things.”
Martin leaves WBZ — and the news business
Liam Martin just walked away from his dream job: TV anchor, at WBZ-TV. Not only did he walk away, Martin wrote about why he did it, with an essay in Boston magazine.
In that essay, Martin details his emotional struggles, not to mention the physical challenge of waking up at 2:15 a.m. for the morning shift. He previously worked an evening shift but that meant barely seeing his two young children. The move to the morning shift meant he was often too tired to be truly present for them.
So he left the news business completely, joining former NBCUniversal newscaster Jackie Bruno as a partner in her public relations and communications business, Newsmaker Marketing, along with third partner Rachel Robbins, formerly with Greenough Communications. (Bruno penned a similarly themed essay a year ago.)
Martin wrote his essay in part because men often don’t feel comfortable talking about mental health issues or the struggles of balancing family and work. The response has been overwhelming.
He still gets to tell stories, but in a different way. For example, he just spent a day in New Hampshire working on a documentary-style video about Cyclyx, a plastics recycling company.
Martin misses the rush of the newsroom. But he’s also glad to no longer be in it.
“I miss the people at WBZTV,” Martin said. “I do not miss having to be in the know all the time about everything.”