(Radio Iowa) – The board which governs the three state universities will ask the Iowa Legislature to increase funding for the schools by 32 million dollars next year. University of Northern Iowa President Mark Nook says they want to use the extra money to help with tuition. He says there should be a bigger difference between what students pay at U-N-I compared to the research schools.

“The four million that we are asking for to help us differentiate will help us keep our tuition down for all of our students, and provide better access for students across the state of Iowa,” Nook says. University of Iowa president, Barbra Wilson, says they will target one particular area.

“We are really laser-focused on nursing. This is one of the workforce issues I think president Nook pointed this out already. People are calling on the need for more nursing — not just in Iowa — but across the country,” Wilson says. Wilson says they are also looking to bring in more first-generation college students.

Iowa State University President Wendy Wintersteen says the amount of money coming from the state has gone up and down in the last decade, but is currently about the same as it was in 2014. “And when you factor in inflation it’s more like a 25 percent decrease in funding because of the purchasing power of a dollar that has declined so much,” Wintersteen says.

The request is nearly seven percent more than what was approved last year. The legislature approved a five-and-a-half million dollar increase — which was about one third of what the universities had requested.

(Radio Iowa) – The University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics is ending its Eating Disorder Program’s inpatient care this fall. The program provides intensive residential treatment for individuals 16 and older managing a severe eating disorder. Hospital officials say they’re redistributing funding to take on the growing numbers of Iowans with acute mental health care needs. Twenty-two-year-old April Bannister is currently in the program and will be among the last participants.

“It leaves me in a pretty precarious position, but I might have the partial program,” Bannister says. “If nothing else, I will have my outpatient team, and honestly, I’m one of the lucky ones that I have two people who are specialized in eating disorders.” Bannister has anorexia, an eating disorder characterized by unhealthily low body weight and a fear of gaining weight. During dangerous episodes, she has been admitted to the hospital for monitoring. Most recently in July, her therapist confronted her about being severely underweight. That day, she committed Bannister to her seventh hospital stay. Bannister is stunned the program is being discontinued.

“It’s terrifying quite honestly. This program, while it has its issues, does save lives,” she says. “It has saved my life on more than one occasion and it’s saved my life seven times, each time that I’ve been admitted.” A spokesperson for the U-I-H-C says the decision to end the program was not made lightly, and a range of services for people with eating disorders will continue, including intensive partial hospitalization and other outpatient programming.

(reporting by Zachary Oren Smith, Iowa Public Radio)

(Radio Iowa) – The state unemployment rate inched up one-tenth of a percent in August — the first increase in seven months. Iowa Workforce Development director, Beth Townsend, says the increase is mostly tied to students. “That is almost, not entirely, but almost entirely related to individuals going back to school and leaving their jobs,” she says. The increase still leaves the unemployment rate at two-point-six percent and in the range of pre-pandemic levels. “We gained three-thousand-800 jobs in August — and that puts us within 55-hundred jobs of making a full recovery from the number of jobs we had pre-pandemic,” Townsend says. “So in other words, we’ve gained almost 97 percent of the jobs back that we had lost as a result of the pandemic. And that’s a really good sign.”

Townsend says manufacturing continues to chug along and add jobs despite all the economic turmoil. “This is several months that we’ve seen a positive move in manufacturing, we added 700 jobs in August, they’ve added seven-thousand jobs in the past few months with growth throughout 2022,” according to Townsend. “And when you think about what’s going on in the national economy with inflation and supply chain issues, the fact that we continue to grow in advanced manufacturing is a really good, good sign for Iowa’s economy.” Townsend says it is likely the unemployment rate will rebound in September. 

“We traditionally see in September, people who go back to work because school started — so you’ve got people leaving the workforce in August going back to school — but you have teachers, bus drivers, janitorial staff cooks returning to work ….. in late August, early September. So, you know, hopefully, in September, we’ll be back to trending down again,” Townsend says.

Townsend says there are more than 80-thousand open jobs in Iowa and they continue to work hard to fill those jobs. And she says there are almost 40-thousand people who are unemployed but not receiving an employment benefit. She says they are trying to help anybody who was looking for and wants a job to find one.