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Blog Posts

2509, 2023

Insight: Working from Home in Utah

September 25th, 2023|

By Heidi Prior The COVID-19 pandemic significantly accelerated growth in the number of Utahns who work from home. Between 2019 and 2021, Utah’s home-based workforce nearly tripled, and the share of workers based at home rose from 7.4% to 20.0%, according to the 2021 1-year data from the American Community Survey. […]

2109, 2023

Insight: New Detailed Race and Ethnic Group Insights from 2020 Census

September 21st, 2023|

By: Mallory Bateman and Heidi Prior Today the Census Bureau released new data on racial and ethnic groups, providing insights into 300 detailed race and ethnic groups and over 1,100 American Indian and Alaska Native tribes and villages. This data was collected as part of the 2020 census and comes from <a href="https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2023/2020-census-detailed-dhc-file-a.html">the Detailed Demographic and Housing Characteristics File A (Detailed DHC-A</a>).<!--more--> When you filled out your 2020 census questionnaire, you were given the opportunity to provide additional detail describing both your racial and ethnic identity. For example, after checking the box for Black or African American, an individual[...]

109, 2023

Insight: The Role of Education in the Utah Economy

September 1st, 2023|

By: Andrea Thomas Brandley Note: The opinions expressed are those of the author alone and do not reflect an institutional position of the Gardner Institute. We hope the opinions shared contribute to the marketplace of ideas and help people as they formulate their own INFORMED DECISIONS.™ Education plays a crucial role in Utah’s economy. One of the most discussed contributions is workforce development—or educating and training students to be prepared to enter the labor force. Whether in preschool or graduate school, education helps Utahns expand their knowledge and build skills they can later apply in both their personal and professional[...]

2906, 2023

Insight: Utah’s Migrants Changed (a little) During the COVID-19 Pandemic

June 29th, 2023|

By: Emily Harris Note: The opinions expressed are those of the author alone and do not reflect an institutional position of the Gardner Institute. We hope the opinions shared contribute to the marketplace of ideas and help people as they formulate their own INFORMED DECISIONS™. Researchers and journalists have been diving into the most recent ACS data (2021) to start answering the question people have been asking since 2020: how is the pandemic impacting our society’s trends and behaviors? Emily Badger from the New York Times has been highlighting migration-related insights at the national level, looking at how education levels[...]

2206, 2023

Insight: Census Bureau Releases July 1, 2022 Age, Sex, and Race and Hispanic Origin Population Estimates

June 22nd, 2023|

By: Emily Harris Note: The opinions expressed are those of the author alone and do not reflect an institutional position of the Gardner Institute. We hope the opinions shared contribute to the marketplace of ideas and help people as they formulate their own INFORMED DECISIONS™. If you follow our demographic work at the Gardner Policy Institute lately, you may be overwhelmed with the sheer amount of Census Bureau data products being released. That’s ok, we are a bit overwhelmed, too. Between the typical population estimates release schedule and then the 2020 Demographic and Housing Characteristics release less than a month[...]

806, 2023

Insight: Demographic Inputs for Projections

June 8th, 2023|

By: Mike Hollingshaus Note: The opinions expressed are those of the author alone and do not reflect an institutional position of the Gardner Institute. We hope the opinions shared contribute to the marketplace of ideas and help people as they formulate their own INFORMED DECISIONS™. […]

206, 2023

Insight: Superb Communications Critical to Making Informed Decisions

June 2nd, 2023|

By: Nick Thiriot Note: The opinions expressed are those of the author alone and do not reflect an institutional position of the Gardner Institute. We hope the opinions shared contribute to the marketplace of ideas and help people as they formulate their own INFORMED DECISIONS™. […]

3105, 2023

Insight: County Migration Patterns are Not the Same as State Migration Patterns

May 31st, 2023|

By: Emily Harris and Heidi Prior Note: The opinions expressed are those of the author alone and do not reflect an institutional position of the Gardner Institute. We hope the opinions shared contribute to the marketplace of ideas and help people as they formulate their own INFORMED DECISIONS™. When people find out that we study Utah’s migration patterns, they immediately ask “Is it really all Californians moving to Utah?”. And the not-so-straightforward answer is (like it is for most demographic questions) “Well, it depends.” If you live in Cache County, you are going to see different sources of migrants than[...]

3005, 2023

Insight: Becoming a Switchpoint

May 30th, 2023|

By: Carol Hollowell Note: The opinions expressed are those of the author alone and do not reflect an institutional position of the Gardner Institute. We hope the opinions shared contribute to the marketplace of ideas and help people as they formulate their own INFORMED DECISIONS™. No one I’ve ever known wakes up one morning and decides to become homeless. Rather, life happens. Sometimes it crashes down in the form of a catastrophic event, like the loss of a job. In other instances, it evolves through time rooted in the deep crevasses of intergenerational poverty. Most often whatever the trigger, the[...]