The Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) recently announced $3,889,964 in funding for the Appalachian Investors Alliance (AIA),  a seed fund network that includes several SSTI members. The award was funded through ARC’s Appalachian Regional Initiative for Stronger Economies (ARISE) initiative.

Why are people registering for SSTI's 2024 conference at a record pace?

A recent National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) working paper, Immigrant Entrepreneurship: New Estimates and a Research Agenda provides fresh insights into the growth and characteristics of immigrant-founded firms across the United States. The study also outlines directions for future research in this field.

State support for higher education in the United States over the last four decades can best be characterized as having fluctuations and shifts in priorities. Using fiscal year (FY) 1980 as a starting point, while overall state support for higher education has grown, it has done so with volatility driven in part by decreased revenue as a result of recessions, and it has frequently taken years for state support to recover to pre-recession levels. In four states, state support on a constant 1983-dollar basis is still less than was spent in 1980. Looking back at the impacts of the Great Recession of 2008 is even more illustrative of the long recovery period after recessions; in FY2024, just 20 states and Washington, D.C., spent more in constant dollars than they did in FY2008. An additional nine states surpassed their FY2008 spending levels at some point after FY2011 but did not maintain that through FY2024. In fact, just one state, North Dakota, has provided support for higher education above FY 2008 values in every year since.

In this Digest issue, SSTI continues its examination on the state of higher education. Today, we start with rising student loan debt, which research shows has dire consequences on borrowers, including delayed home ownership, hindered retirement savings, and financial stress.

In the last 20 years, college tuition has doubled, making tuition and required fees the major component of the rising costs of attending college. Figure 1 shows that the average tuition and fees at public four-year schools increased by 84% between the 1999-2000 and 2019-2020 academic years, far faster than the 15.7% increase in median household income during that period (note this period was chosen to avoid pandemic era swings in data).

Total student loan debt in the United States increased 558% from the first quarter of 2003 to the second quarter of 2024, increasing from $240 billion to $1.58 trillion, according to Federal Reserve Bank of New York data. However, as seen in Figure 1, the rate of change has remained essentially flat since the first quarter of 2021, coinciding with a dip in undergraduate enrollment and federal loan forgiveness programs totaling nearly $160 billion, as the U.S. Department of Education reported.

The Fearless Fund and Fearless Foundation, which made awards restricted to Black female entrepreneurs, announced a settlement on September 10 with the American Alliance for Equal Rights (AAER) and will end its Fearless Strivers Grant Contest that was targeted in a racial discrimination lawsuit by AAER. The settlement means that states within the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit’s jurisdiction will be subject to the rationale behind the court’s preliminary injunction that found grants awarded through contracts cannot be restricted based on race. For grantmakers outside of these states, the implications are less clear.

While production of internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles are expected to decline from 12 million in 2023 to 5.2 million in 2029 and battery electric vehicles (BEVs), powered exclusively by an electric battery, would increase from 1.1 million to 7.3 million vehicles during the same period, the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago concludes the change is unlikely to cause much change in the geographic location of automobile manufacturers, according to an Economics Perspectives paper. The paper's authors investigated what impact, if any, such a change in the number of types of vehicles produced would have on the locations where cars are manufactured. They concluded that the changeover to manufacturing electric vehicles (EVs) should not cause much disruption to the geographic location of automobile manufacturers.

With the release of the Economic Development Administration’s (EDA) 2024 Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) for its Build to Scale program, time has begun ticking towards the October 28 application deadline. To assist organizations with determining eligibility under EDA’s Equity Investment Priority, SSTI has developed a map visualizing counties that are either rural or in persistent poverty, made public through SSTI’s Technology-Based Economic Development (TBED) Community of Practice (CoP).

The Economic Development Administration has released the 2024 Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) for its Build to Scale program. With $50 million in available funding, the program continues to support regional commercialization, entrepreneurship, and capital formation efforts. This year’s competition, however, comes with a restructured application process and updated evaluation criteria.

Ohio recently awarded more than $97 million for the Northwest Ohio Glass Innovation Hub in Toledo, the onMain Innovation Hub in Dayton, and the Greater Akron Polymer Innovation Hub in Akron. These hubs are part of the recently created a $125 million Ohio Innovation Hubs Program. The program is “designed to make Ohio a national leader in innovation, creating new jobs and business opportunities by supporting world-class research in industry-aligned platforms that build upon Ohio’s existing legacy industries and research strengths,” according to the Ohio Department of Development which administers the program.

Quantum technologies are revolutionizing sensors, computation, and communication, according to an article from the World Economic Forum.