This Week’s Essential StateImpact

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We're trusting the collective wisdom of the crowd to pick our top StateImpact posts for the week

Student debt dominated our coverage last week, and for a good part of this week as well.  And it looks like you definitely dug it.  Normally, we like to keep our weekly top posts roundup to 5 but it just so happens that this time around, a couple of the posts you really, really liked were things that we aggregated from other sites.

So what does that mean?

In addition to our regular five posts, we’ll include two more original StateImpact posts you might have missed.

Bonus!

1. Q&A: What’s Driving UNH’s High Student Debt Numbers?: In addition to our regular readers, our Twitter followers (and their followers!) took an active interest in this piece, making it our top-moving story for the week.
2. Q&A: Explaining Dartmouth’s (Relatively) Low Student Debt Load: This Ivy League institution offers some of the lowest average student debt in the state.  (And it’s not because the student body comes from more affluent families than at other colleges.)
3. “Agency Releases NH’s Top 500 Pension Recipients“: When a court order forced the state to release the names–and earnings–of government retirees, a lot of people took notice.  Our link to a bit of coverage from the Boston Herald generated quite a bit of interest.
4. Latest Links: Layoffs At Health And Human Services, Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, Presstek: Every morning, we scan various state and regional media outlets to give you your daily dose of aggregated media coverage.  Our Latest Links feature has been popular since we launched, but this one really had legs.  We were intrigued by the sheer number of articles written about layoffs and planned layoffs.  It seems that you were, too.
5. Losing The Lotto: How A Massachusetts Gas Station Is Eating Into NH’s Education Funding: StateImpact visited Ted’s Stateline Mobil, which is, actually, right on the state line between Massachusetts and New Hampshire.  And it sees a lot of lottery business from Granite Staters.  While the average Massachusetts lotto agent does around $750,000 in annual sales, Ted’s pulls in closer to $13 million.
6. After UNH, Plymouth State’s Class of ’10 Had Highest Average Student Debt: Late last week, we published another tidbit on student debt in New Hampshire.  Come to find out, although Plymouth State has the second-lowest tuition in the state’s public four-year university system, its students also carry the second-highest average debt.
7. Is New Hampshire Really As Anti-Tax As It’s Cracked Up To Be?: This is another one of those posts that has some real staying power.  There was a lot of interest when we published it late last month, and after a lull in activity, it’s experiencing a bit of a renaissance.