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The Path to the Healthcare of Tomorrow

Patient-centric, precision-medicine-based healthcare seems within reach. So, what’s holding it back?
The post The Path to the Healthcare of Tomorrow…

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In 2062, the world may be a futuristic utopia with elaborate robotic contraptions, holograms, and whimsical inventions, like flying cars that morph into briefcases after sending the kids in glass pods to Little Dipper Elementary. The outer-space home is filled with push-button conveniences including 3D food printing technology along with real-time virtual visits with care providers.

This now not-so-distant future—the premise of the popular American animated sitcom The Jetsons that hit the airwaves in 1962—might be nearer than we think, especially the part regarding healthcare.

Jay G. Wohlgem, MD
Quest Diagnostics

The idea of patient-centric, personalized, and at-home medicine is no longer a theory, let alone a wild idea whipped up by the imagination of Hanna-Barbera cartoonists from 60 years ago. It’s precisely the type of healthcare that Jay G. Wohlgemuth, MD. senior vice president, R&D, medical and chief medical officer at Quest Diagnostics, thinks is just at our fingertips. In his eyes, a healthcare system with a seamless, highly engaging, and online medical experience around preventative and chronic care is not out of reach.

Wohlgemuth envisions all the necessary information—questionnaires, blood samples, biometrics (e.g., waist circumference and height)—will enable preventive care recommendations at home. “It’ll be done by artificial intelligence and reviewed by a clinician, who can run through the analysis and check off prescribing cholesterol medication or sending a colorectal screening kit for cancer,” said Wohlgemuth. “You will only have to come in to see a doctor or go to a health care system when there is an issue like getting a knee replacement.”

House calls 2.0

One of the silver linings of COVID is that people looked for ways to interact with health care from the comfort of their own homes. Coming out of the pandemic, people now embrace, appreciate, understand, and trust at-home testing and telemedicine more. Virtual models like Telehealth do not require patients to go to a pharmacist, have a laboratory test, or even visit their physician to relay any of this information.

Jeffrey A. Shaman
Jeffrey A. Shaman, PhD, MS
Coriell Life Sciences (CLS)

And beyond COVID, telemedicine has an important role in our healthcare. “Take the example of people in remote areas, like Appalachia and the Gulf States, who live hundreds of miles away from a pharmacy or are homebound but should continue to have access to healthcare and, more so, precision medicine,” said Jeffrey A. Shaman, PhD, MS, the chief science officer at Coriell Life Sciences (CLS). “What’s more, academic health centers are not typically in rural areas, and that’s where some cutting-edge work is being done. To get those living in the Bayou to benefit from the work these good academic institutions are doing, we need to reach out and make at-home healthcare easier and less intimidating.”

The irony of the situation, to Shaman, is that doctors used to go to people’s homes making house calls. “We’re kind of returning to house calls in a way,” said Shaman. “We’re also enabling patients to have the specialist show up and not just the family doctor. Precision medicine is about giving people the power to ask questions and be advocates of their own healthcare in a comfortable environment.”

Shaman points to a study demonstrating that at-home testing and care outcomes result in clinical and economic improvements. Comparing members that opted into the program to those who did not (i.e., identified interventions and controls, respectively), the paper demonstrates an average calculated $218.34 savings per patient per month. Those people with comprehensive medication management who spoke with a pharmacist to create a medication action plan, those participants never had to leave the comfort of their homes for any of this. Moreover, there was a 1.9%, 6.8%, and 14.9% reduction in the outpatient emergency department and inpatient events, respectively, suggesting an increase in the use of sound, scalable health care.

User acceptance has gone up not only from a patient perspective but also gained traction from the physician’s standpoint. With telemedicine and at-home testing, physicians don’t need to feel like they must be geneticists, radiologists, oncologists, cardiologists, etc. when they have a pharmacist and specialist assisting them through this at the center of care. “We find that the physicians have been more willing to integrate and adopt pharmacogenomics into their practice when they have the pharmacist to help because now, they don’t have to be a specialist in every medication,” said Shaman.

On top of that, Shaman would have assumed that the new generation of doctors would be dialed into all this new tech, whilst a lot of the geneticists and older generation of doctors would say that they didn’t need it and already knew everything. To his surprise, Shaman found that it was the other way around. “Some older doctors said that while they always had a hunch, they would much prefer if they could give their patient a test and get an actual scientifically-based result.”

We (almost) have the technology

In addition to patient and provider adoption, there are significant barriers to the widespread adoption of patient-centric, precision medicine. For example, the technology infrastructure needs to be built to have a seamless interaction that interfaces with the complicated existing healthcare IT systems and electronic medical records (EMRs). Wohlgemuth said, “It’s not just that we must develop software that will engage you. We must do it in a way that links into that healthcare system, which is pretty fragmented. The software to engage you around your preventative care and telemedicine, that all exists, but figuring out how to make all the software come together is a whole other challenge.”

Tasso+ device
The Tasso+ device allows users to successfully collect blood samples at home without direct interaction at a lab or with a mobile phlebotomist.

Another barrier is that more home-based diagnostics need to be validated. One of the significant breakouts of the COVID pandemic was the conversion of respiratory viral testing to home-based self-collection. Showing off one of Quest’s new self-collection devices for serum plasma or blood, which gets plenty of liquid to enable lots of testing, Wohlgemuth said that the technology exists today but needs to be validated and brought to market for many indications, such as diabetic and transplant monitoring panels, and preventative care. He thinks that 90% or more of lab testing can be done from home, a home-based phlebotomist, a patient service center, or a retail site. “You need the home-based lab to bring it to life at scale. 95% of preventative healthcare can be done at home with telemedicine and electronically prescribing for labs and drugs when those components are in place.”

While there has been so much growth in the genomics space, with more and more human samples being sequenced, accessing genomics data is far from ubiquitous. It is not commonplace for a person to be able to access their genomics data, and have it kept in a useful format for future analysis as our health changes over time. “There’s a development on the horizon now, via a collaboration between Quest and Boston Children’s Hospital, to give you your genomic data on a zip drive or a cloud in a standardized format so that anyone in the future at your behest can analyze your genetic data for you,” said Wohlgemuth. “If you had a whole-exome in a physical format or on the cloud, you could have a clinician look at it any number of years from now.”

Breaking the healthcare mold

While we already have a lot of technology, Wohlgemuth thinks it takes a long time to implement change in the healthcare system. The U.S. healthcare system was built around physicians and hospitals when things couldn’t be done remotely because we didn’t have the technology, resulting in an extensive, concentrated healthcare system localized to hubs. Until the last ten years, the whole model was to bring patients to the healthcare setting for everything, even for a doctor to have a conversation with a patient to communicate that they need to have ‘labs’ done. Physicians and healthcare systems are paid to see people in person and perform procedures.

However, this vision is happening at a glacial pace in the US standard, brick-and-mortar health systems. Wohlgemuth thinks this is partly because the incentives are not aligned. “I’m very optimistic that all the pieces are there, but incentives are still a problem because the current healthcare system is still mostly ‘fee for service,’” said Wohlgemuth. “There’s a real incentive to do things to people and to see people in person with facility charges. Healthcare should be designed around the consumer. We have all these tools, so how can we make it happen?”

But it is not as if these trends toward patient-centric health can’t also benefit insurers and health systems. Wohlgemuth thinks it makes a lot of sense for someone managing spending at a health plan to ensure that if people can get tests done at home or a retail location, it will be much cheaper for the insurers. But there’s still a lot of pushback from the insurer side.

One trend in this space that Wohlgemuth is excited about is employer healthcare. “In an employer-sponsored self-insured health plan, which is where 90 million people get their healthcare right in the US, the incentives are pure because employers run their health plan,” said Wohlgemuth. “At Quest, we have 60,000 members for an average of 10 years, some of them for 40 or 50 years. We are paying for all their healthcare. At the same time, they’re paying for a piece of it. We’re on the hook for their healthcare. So, when you’re in that environment, all the incentives are suddenly aligned: improved patient experience, lower cost of healthcare, and improved outcomes.”

Wohlgemuth thinks that the best way to do that is to deliver directly to the employees in their homes in a virtual primary care experience. “It’s a thing of beauty because we’re doing our employees a great service, and we’re not paying an outrageous amount for it. The reality is a lot of people are not going to have healthcare unless the employer provides it. They’re not going to wander in to see a doctor. So, the employer healthcare arena is where consumer-driven healthcare comes to life.”

The preventative care paradox

Michael E. Chernew, PhD, Professor of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School, said that, in a fee-for-service system where people get paid for what they do, there’s a lot of concern that testing and treatments are overdone. “There are sometimes limits on how certain types of services are reimbursed, which might make it challenging in our current fee-for-service system to use those types of care,” said Chernew. “In other words, we will restrict access to a certain number of tests or limit the provider network in ways that may be considered impediments to patient-centered care.”

Michael E. Chernew
Michael E. Chernew, PhD
Harvard Medical School

The economics of preventative care is very case-dependent. For example, Chernew doesn’t think that more testing saves money. “More testing doesn’t save money, even if it’s used for preventative care,” said Chernew. But he doesn’t think that the healthcare system should ignore at-home tests. “Like every other medical service, testing can be underdone and overdone. The more people are tested, typically, the more money gets spent. That doesn’t mean there aren’t examples of testing that couldn’t save money. But as a general premise, if you take a population and dramatically increase the amount of testing, you will increase the spending. You may improve health in ways, but it’s very case dependent.”

Even in the case of preventative testing, Chernew thinks lots of money is wasted. For example, a system of continual testing that is very aggressive will, just by chance, get false positive results that don’t necessarily indicate a health problem. “If I just were to take your blood pressure hourly, I’m going to find some readings that are above normal and may decide that I’m now going to put a patient into a protocol, which could end up being bad for your health and spending,” said Chernew. Getting more information is applicable only if it’s integrated wisely. While there was already plenty of high-tech at-home testing that could be brought into healthcare, the COVID era has triggered a boom in the development of at-home testing. But Chernew cautions that at-home testing must be used practically and not be overdone, saying, “While I’m not opposed to at-home testing, I also don’t believe that everything at home will make things cheaper and more information automatically makes care better.”

Ideally, the financing system would be set up to separate these services’ high- and low-value utilization. Because the world is so complex, the financing system is imperfect. On the one hand, we’re often being too permissive—encouraging a lot of utilization that probably shouldn’t be done but making sure we get all the high-value use. On the other hand, we’re often too restrictive; in other words, our concern about overuse may impede access to high-value things, even if it’s cutting out low-value items. The system’s merits boil down to how well we can develop financing, information, and technology to get that level of clinical nuance where we are promoting the use of high-value tests.

Chernew said whether a test is high- or low-value depends on the context. For example, when testing many low-risk people, there will be many false positives, depending on how low-risk they were. “When many people are tested, there will be many more findings, which might be good, but, on the other hand, it might be harmful,” said Chernew. “So, the testing paradigm needs to be thought through thoroughly. If I took an otherwise healthy person and gave them remote patient monitoring for various conditions, I’m much more likely to mess things up than make things better. But if I took somebody who I knew had a lot of conditions in terms of fluctuation in their blood sugar, remote patient monitoring might help.”

“I think we haven’t yet fully understood the ramifications,”said Chernew. “Even then, most patient monitoring has a lot of potential. But there are a lot of risks and challenges associated with remote patient monitoring.” Chernew said that there’s a lot to be done to understand how to use it and how to use it differently based on different patients. It’s a question of building in the structures to understand the information and how it will be used. “How you build the systems around using that information matters because it’s not evident that the care patterns would be better if everybody were tested way more,” said Chernew.

Shaman pushes back on the idea that too much testing will lead to more unnecessary issues. “I understand that too much data will overwhelm our physicians, but the resolution afforded to us by new assays and new tests has, for the most part, been helpful. If we follow the science and understand the outcomes, we can use that resolution to increase our understanding of where the threshold should be. Without the data, we can’t make those determinations.” Shaman thinks that precision health should use as much information as possible. For example, take pharmacogenomics. Suppose the goal is to improve medication management. In that case, Shaman imagines that the health care system will want to ensure that all the risks associated with a patient’s medication regimen, such as drug-drug interactions, are accounted for. The key, according to Shaman, is that the data needs to provide medically relevant and clinically actionable results.

Dialing in dosages

But now, we are seeing more approaches beyond pharmaco-genomics and individualized treatments tailored to genetics as precision medicine. There are many drugs where physicians will make a diagnosis, write a script, and three months later, they come back and ask a patient how they are feeling. But patients can only really remember the last few days—not the last three months. So, the level of information that the clinician is using to decide is minimal, yet that information could potentially warrant a dose change. If that information can be captured to create an aggregated view of the last few months, clinicians may be able to decide whether a dosage should go up or down.

Hakim Yadi
Hakim Yadi, PhD, CEO
Closed Loop Medicine

There’s a huge opportunity space for precision medicine in dosing. “Precision medicine has often been viewed as the domain of high-cost oncological drugs,” said Hakim Yadi PhD, CEO of Closed Loop Medicine—a U.K.-based TechBio healthcare company developing combination products of drug and software, where the software, as a medical device, informs the precision care of that therapeutic and changes the dose of that therapy. “But every drug needs to be given in a precise way. That’s where we are trying to get to, which is a grand vision. We should consider dose optimization of every therapeutic, old and new.”

Yadi believes that the vision for how you do that is through combination therapeutics that link digital health with existing therapeutics. “Every time a patient takes a drug, the dose that will deliver the optimal balance of benefits versus unwanted effects should be prescribed. But it’s not. There’s a lot of ‘one size fits all’ and guesswork. And little follow up of the patient to fine tune.,” said Yadi.

The British company’s approach includes a Software as a Medical Device dosing engine. An important aspect is taking an outcome-focused approach, with dose adjustment based on longitudinal data. That data may be coming from a diagnostic, device, or patient recorded outcome, whatever it is that’s required to give the feedback loop to inform the optimization of that therapy. Closed Loop Medicine has taken a 21st-century medicine approach, incorporating elements of a pharma company along with big tech, to drive efficiencies in healthcare delivery and deliver better outcomes for patients through precision medicine.

Many elements need to come together to deliver this: quality systems, technical, regulatory and commercial. This is all platform, with the therapies and data collected, depending on the indication. Closed Loop Medicine is not changing the ingredients of the standard of care, just optimizing how they are used. “If we take blood pressure management for hypertension, currently this involves a blood pressure cuff reading, although the technology is evolving fast,” said Yadi. “We want to work with the existing standard of care technology, but integrate new tools as they emerge. Another indication that we are looking at will require a blood test and a resulting lab result. The engine is the same, the inputs and outputs are different.”

Personalized printed prescriptions

Today, many patients are coming through the door for things that could have been done remotely in an automated way. In the future, diagnostics and combination medicines will help inform clinical decision-making. Safely automating that decision-making, incorporating appropriate AI approaches, will be the big tech transformation that ultimately happens. Availability of clinicians is arguably now the biggest health challenge and freeing patients from dependency of frequent doctor interaction will improve quality and cost. That is the future to which we are building. Closed Loop Medicine is applying its platform to a whole range of therapeutics. “If you look at the pharmacopeia, there’s only a handful of very well-dosed drugs, such as warfarin and insulin,” said Yadi. “But that trail quickly disappears.”

So, Yadi’s long-term vision is a more tailored opportunity for individual patients. “We are doing our own drug development, working with drug manufacturers to develop our formulation that will lend itself to a more tailored approach,” said Yadi. “Although we’re far away from an Amazon drone-delivered 3D-printed pill, we are mindful of laying the right foundations. I believe we are making significant steps towards that.”

Yadi imagines that today’s children will be telling their parents in twenty years: When you were younger, they used to give you medicine but didn’t know if it was going to work or if the dose was right for you. That’s mad!

 

Jonathan D. Grinstein’s wonder for the human mind and body led him to an undergraduate education in Neural Science and Philosophy and a doctorate in Biomedical. He has 10 years of experience in experimental and computational research, during which he was a co-author on research articles in journals such as Nature and Cell. Since then, Jonathan hung up his lab coat and has explored positions in science writing and editing. Jonathan’s science writing work has featured in Scientific American, Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News (GEN), and NEO.LIFE.

The post The Path to the Healthcare of Tomorrow appeared first on Inside Precision Medicine.

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Spread & Containment

Another beloved brewery files Chapter 11 bankruptcy

The beer industry has been devastated by covid, changing tastes, and maybe fallout from the Bud Light scandal.

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Before the covid pandemic, craft beer was having a moment. Most cities had multiple breweries and taprooms with some having so many that people put together the brewery version of a pub crawl.

It was a period where beer snobbery ruled the day and it was not uncommon to hear bar patrons discuss the makeup of the beer the beer they were drinking. This boom period always seemed destined for failure, or at least a retraction as many markets seemed to have more craft breweries than they could support.

Related: Fast-food chain closes more stores after Chapter 11 bankruptcy

The pandemic, however, hastened that downfall. Many of these local and regional craft breweries counted on in-person sales to drive their business. 

And while many had local and regional distribution, selling through a third party comes with much lower margins. Direct sales drove their business and the pandemic forced many breweries to shut down their taprooms during the period where social distancing rules were in effect.

During those months the breweries still had rent and employees to pay while little money was coming in. That led to a number of popular beermakers including San Francisco's nationally-known Anchor Brewing as well as many regional favorites including Chicago’s Metropolitan Brewing, New Jersey’s Flying Fish, Denver’s Joyride Brewing, Tampa’s Zydeco Brew Werks, and Cleveland’s Terrestrial Brewing filing bankruptcy.

Some of these brands hope to survive, but others, including Anchor Brewing, fell into Chapter 7 liquidation. Now, another domino has fallen as a popular regional brewery has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

Overall beer sales have fallen.

Image source: Shutterstock

Covid is not the only reason for brewery bankruptcies

While covid deserves some of the blame for brewery failures, it's not the only reason why so many have filed for bankruptcy protection. Overall beer sales have fallen driven by younger people embracing non-alcoholic cocktails, and the rise in popularity of non-beer alcoholic offerings,

Beer sales have fallen to their lowest levels since 1999 and some industry analysts

"Sales declined by more than 5% in the first nine months of the year, dragged down not only by the backlash and boycotts against Anheuser-Busch-owned Bud Light but the changing habits of younger drinkers," according to data from Beer Marketer’s Insights published by the New York Post.

Bud Light parent Anheuser Busch InBev (BUD) faced massive boycotts after it partnered with transgender social media influencer Dylan Mulvaney. It was a very small partnership but it led to a right-wing backlash spurred on by Kid Rock, who posted a video on social media where he chastised the company before shooting up cases of Bud Light with an automatic weapon.

Another brewery files Chapter 11 bankruptcy

Gizmo Brew Works, which does business under the name Roth Brewing Company LLC, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on March 8. In its filing, the company checked the box that indicates that its debts are less than $7.5 million and it chooses to proceed under Subchapter V of Chapter 11. 

"Both small business and subchapter V cases are treated differently than a traditional chapter 11 case primarily due to accelerated deadlines and the speed with which the plan is confirmed," USCourts.gov explained. 

Roth Brewing/Gizmo Brew Works shared that it has 50-99 creditors and assets $100,000 and $500,000. The filing noted that the company does expect to have funds available for unsecured creditors. 

The popular brewery operates three taprooms and sells its beer to go at those locations.

"Join us at Gizmo Brew Works Craft Brewery and Taprooms located in Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Find us for entertainment, live music, food trucks, beer specials, and most importantly, great-tasting craft beer by Gizmo Brew Works," the company shared on its website.

The company estimates that it has between $1 and $10 million in liabilities (a broad range as the bankruptcy form does not provide a space to be more specific).

Gizmo Brew Works/Roth Brewing did not share a reorganization or funding plan in its bankruptcy filing. An email request for comment sent through the company's contact page was not immediately returned.

 

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Government

Students lose out as cities and states give billions in property tax breaks to businesses − draining school budgets and especially hurting the poorest students

An estimated 95% of US cities provide economic development tax incentives to woo corporate investors, taking billions away from schools.

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Exxon Mobil Corp.'s campus in East Baton Rouge Parish, left, received millions in tax abatements to the detriment of local schools, right. Barry Lewis/Getty Images, Tjean314/Wikimedia

Built in 1910, James Elementary is a three-story brick school in Kansas City, Missouri’s historic Northeast neighborhood, with a bright blue front door framed by a sand-colored stone arch adorned with a gargoyle. As bustling students and teachers negotiate a maze of gray stairs with worn wooden handrails, Marjorie Mayes, the school’s principal, escorts a visitor across uneven blue tile floors on the ground floor to a classroom with exposed brick walls and pipes. Bubbling paint mars some walls, evidence of the water leaks spreading inside the aging building.

“It’s living history,” said Mayes during a mid-September tour of the building. “Not the kind of living history we want.”

The district would like to tackle the US$400 million in deferred maintenance needed to create a 21st century learning environment at its 35 schools – including James Elementary – but it can’t. It doesn’t have the money.

Property tax redirect

The lack of funds is a direct result of the property tax breaks that Kansas City lavishes on companies and developers that do business there. The program is supposed to bring in new jobs and business but instead has ended up draining civic coffers and starving schools. Between 2017 and 2023, the Kansas City school district lost $237.3 million through tax abatements.

Kansas City is hardly an anomaly. An estimated 95% of U.S. cities provide economic development tax incentives to woo corporate investors. The upshot is that billions have been diverted from large urban school districts and from a growing number of small suburban and rural districts. The impact is seen in districts as diverse as Chicago and Cleveland, Hillsboro, Oregon, and Storey County, Nevada.

The result? A 2021 review of 2,498 financial statements from school districts across 27 states revealed that, in 2019 alone, at least $2.4 billion was diverted to fund tax incentives. Yet that substantial figure still downplays the magnitude of the problem, because three-quarters of the 10,370 districts analyzed did not provide any information on tax abatement agreements.

Tax abatement programs have long been controversial, pitting states and communities against one another in beggar-thy-neighbor contests. Their economic value is also, at best, unclear: Studies show most companies would have made the same location decision without taxpayer subsidies. Meanwhile, schools make up the largest cost item in these communities, meaning they suffer most when companies are granted breaks in property taxes.

A three-month investigation by The Conversation and three scholars with expertise in economic development, tax laws and education policy shows that the cash drain from these programs is not equally shared by schools in the same communities. At the local level, tax abatements and exemptions often come at the cost of critical funding for school districts that disproportionately serve students from low-income households and who are racial minorities.

In Missouri, for example, in 2022 nearly $1,700 per student was redirected from Kansas City public and charter schools, while between $500 and $900 was redirected from wealthier, whiter Northland schools on the north side of the river in Kansas City and in the suburbs beyond. Other studies have found similar demographic trends elsewhere, including New York state, South Carolina and Columbus, Ohio.

The funding gaps produced by abated money often force schools to delay needed maintenance, increase class sizes, lay off teachers and support staff and even close outright. Schools also struggle to update or replace outdated technology, books and other educational resources. And, amid a nationwide teacher shortage, schools under financial pressures sometimes turn to inexperienced teachers who are not fully certified or rely too heavily on recruits from overseas who have been given special visa status.

Lost funding also prevents teachers and staff, who often feed, clothe and otherwise go above and beyond to help students in need, from earning a living wage. All told, tax abatements can end up harming a community’s value, with constant funding shortfalls creating a cycle of decline.

Incentives, payoffs and guarantees

Perversely, some of the largest beneficiaries of tax abatements are the politicians who publicly boast of handing out the breaks despite the harm to poorer communities. Incumbent governors have used the incentives as a means of taking credit for job creation, even when the jobs were coming anyway.

“We know that subsidies don’t work,” said Elizabeth Marcello, a doctoral lecturer at Hunter College who studies governmental planning and policy and the interactions between state and local governments. “But they are good political stories, and I think that’s why politicians love them so much.”

Academic research shows that economic development incentives are ineffective most of the time – and harm school systems.

While some voters may celebrate abatements, parents can recognize the disparities between school districts that are created by the tax breaks. Fairleigh Jackson pointed out that her daughter’s East Baton Rouge third grade class lacks access to playground equipment.

The class is attending school in a temporary building while their elementary school undergoes a two-year renovation.

The temporary site has some grass and a cement slab where kids can play, but no playground equipment, Jackson said. And parents needed to set up an Amazon wish list to purchase basic equipment such as balls, jump ropes and chalk for students to use. The district told parents there would be no playground equipment due to a lack of funds, then promised to install equipment, Jackson said, but months later, there is none.

Cement surface surrounded by a fence with grass beyond. There's no playground equipment..
The temporary site where Fairleigh Jackson’s daughter goes to school in East Baton Rouge Parish lacks playground equipment. Fairleigh Jackson, CC BY-ND

Jackson said it’s hard to complain when other schools in the district don’t even have needed security measures in place. “When I think about playground equipment, I think that’s a necessary piece of child development,” Jackson said. “Do we even advocate for something that should be a daily part of our kids’ experience when kids’ safety isn’t being funded?”

Meanwhile, the challenges facing administrators 500-odd miles away at Atlanta Public Schools are nothing if not formidable: The district is dealing with chronic absenteeism among half of its Black students, many students are experiencing homelessness, and it’s facing a teacher shortage.

At the same time, Atlanta is showering corporations with tax breaks. The city has two bodies that dole them out: the Development Authority of Fulton County, or DAFC, and Invest Atlanta, the city’s economic development agency. The deals handed out by the two agencies have drained $103.8 million from schools from fiscal 2017 to 2022, according to Atlanta school system financial statements.

What exactly Atlanta and other cities and states are accomplishing with tax abatement programs is hard to discern. Fewer than a quarter of companies that receive breaks in the U.S. needed an incentive to invest, according to a 2018 study by the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, a nonprofit research organization.

This means that at least 75% of companies received tax abatements when they’re not needed – with communities paying a heavy price for economic development that sometimes provides little benefit.

In Kansas City, for example, there’s no guarantee that the businesses that do set up shop after receiving a tax abatement will remain there long term. That’s significant considering the historic border war between the Missouri and Kansas sides of Kansas City – a competition to be the most generous to the businesses, said Jason Roberts, president of the Kansas City Federation of Teachers and School-Related Personnel. Kansas City, Missouri, has a 1% income tax on people who work in the city, so it competes for as many workers as possible to secure that earnings tax, Roberts said.

Under city and state tax abatement programs, companies that used to be in Kansas City have since relocated. The AMC Theaters headquarters, for example, moved from the city’s downtown to Leawood, Kansas, about a decade ago, garnering some $40 million in Promoting Employment Across Kansas tax incentives.

Roberts said that when one side’s financial largesse runs out, companies often move across the state line – until both states decided in 2019 that enough was enough and declared a cease-fire.

But tax breaks for other businesses continue. “Our mission is to grow the economy of Kansas City, and application of tools such as tax exemptions are vital to achieving that mission, said Jon Stephens, president and CEO of Port KC, the Kansas City Port Authority. The incentives speed development, and providing them "has resulted in growth choosing KC versus other markets,” he added.

In Atlanta, those tax breaks are not going to projects in neighborhoods that need help attracting development. They have largely been handed out to projects that are in high demand areas of the city, said Julian Bene, who served on Invest Atlanta’s board from 2010 to 2018. In 2019, for instance, the Fulton County development authority approved a 10-year, $16 million tax abatement for a 410-foot-tall, 27,000-square-foot tower in Atlanta’s vibrant Midtown business district. The project included hotel space, retail space and office space that is now occupied by Google and Invesco.

In 2021, a developer in Atlanta pulled its request for an $8 million tax break to expand its new massive, mixed-use Ponce City Market development in the trendy Beltline neighborhood with an office tower and apartment building. Because of community pushback, the developer knew it likely did not have enough votes from the commission for approval, Bene said. After a second try for $5 million in lower taxes was also rejected, the developer went ahead and built the project anyway.

Invest Atlanta has also turned down projects in the past, Bene said. Oftentimes, after getting rejected, the developer goes back to the landowner and asks for a better price to buy the property to make their numbers work, because it was overvalued at the start.

Trouble in Philadelphia

On Thursday, Oct. 26, 2023, an environmental team was preparing Southwark School in Philadelphia for the winter cold. While checking an attic fan, members of the team saw loose dust on top of flooring that contained asbestos. The dust that certainly was blowing into the floors below could contain the cancer-causing agent. Within a day, Southwark was closed – the seventh Philadelphia school temporarily shuttered since the previous academic year because of possible asbestos contamination.

A 2019 inspection of the John L Kinsey school in Philadelphia found asbestos in plaster walls, floor tiles, radiator insulation and electrical panels. Asbestos is a major problem for Philadelphia’s public schools. The district needs $430 million to clean up the asbestos, lead, and other environmental hazards that place the health of students, teachers and staff at risk. And that is on top of an additional $2.4 billion to fix failing and damaged buildings.

Yet the money is not available. Matthew Stem, a former district official, testified in a 2023 lawsuit about financing of Pennsylvania schools that the environmental health risks cannot be addressed until an emergency like at Southwark because “existing funding sources are not sufficient to remediate those types of issues.”

Meanwhile, the city keeps doling out abatements, draining money that could have gone toward making Philadelphia schools safer. In the fiscal year ending June 2022, such tax breaks cost the school district $118 million – more than 25% of the total amount needed to remove the asbestos and other health dangers. These abatements take 31 years to break even, according to the city’s own scenario impact analyses.

Huge subsets of the community – primarily Black, Brown, poor or a combination – are being “drastically impacted” by the exemptions and funding shortfalls for the school district, said Kendra Brooks, a Philadelphia City Council member. Schools and students are affected by mold, asbestos and lead, and crumbling infrastructure, as well as teacher and staffing shortages – including support staff, social workers and psychologists.

More than half the district’s schools that lacked adequate air conditioning – 87 schools – had to go to half days during the first week of the 2023 school year because of extreme heat. Poor heating systems also leave the schools cold in the winter. And some schools are overcrowded, resulting in large class sizes, she said.

Front of a four-story brick school building with tall windows, some with air-conditioners
Horace Furness High School in Philadelphia, where hot summers have temporarily closed schools that lack air conditioning. Nick-philly/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA

Teachers and researchers agree that a lack of adequate funding undermines educational opportunities and outcomes. That’s especially true for children living in poverty. A 2016 study found that a 10% increase in per-pupil spending each year for all 12 years of public schooling results in nearly one-third of a year of more education, 7.7% higher wages and a 3.2% reduction in annual incidence of adult poverty. The study estimated that a 21.7% increase could eliminate the high school graduation gap faced by children from low-income families.

More money for schools leads to more education resources for students and their teachers. The same researchers found that spending increases were associated with reductions in student-to-teacher ratios, increases in teacher salaries and longer school years. Other studies yielded similar results: School funding matters, especially for children already suffering the harms of poverty.

While tax abatements themselves are generally linked to rising property values, the benefits are not evenly distributed. In fact, any expansion of the tax base due to new property construction tends to be outside of the county granting the tax abatement. For families in school districts with the lost tax revenues, their neighbors’ good fortune likely comes as little solace. Meanwhile, a poorly funded education system is less likely to yield a skilled and competitive workforce, creating longer-term economic costs that make the region less attractive for businesses and residents.

“There’s a head-on collision here between private gain and the future quality of America’s workforce,” said Greg LeRoy, executive director at Good Jobs First, a Washington, D.C., advocacy group that’s critical of tax abatement and tracks the use of economic development subsidies.

Three-story school building with police officers out front and traffic lights in the foreground
Roxborough High School in Philadelphia. AP Photo/Matt Rourke

As funding dwindles and educational quality declines, additional families with means often opt for alternative educational avenues such as private schooling, home-schooling or moving to a different school district, further weakening the public school system.

Throughout the U.S., parents with the power to do so demand special arrangements, such as selective schools or high-track enclaves that hire experienced, fully prepared teachers. If demands aren’t met, they leave the district’s public schools for private schools or for the suburbs. Some parents even organize to splinter their more advantaged, and generally whiter, neighborhoods away from the larger urban school districts.

Those parental demands – known among scholars as “opportunity hoarding” – may seem unreasonable from the outside, but scarcity breeds very real fears about educational harms inflicted on one’s own children. Regardless of who’s to blame, the children who bear the heaviest burden of the nation’s concentrated poverty and racialized poverty again lose out.

Rethinking in Philadelphia and Riverhead

Americans also ask public schools to accomplish Herculean tasks that go far beyond the education basics, as many parents discovered at the onset of the pandemic when schools closed and their support for families largely disappeared.

A school serving students who endure housing and food insecurity must dedicate resources toward children’s basic needs and trauma. But districts serving more low-income students spend less per student on average, and almost half the states have regressive funding structures.

Facing dwindling resources for schools, several cities have begun to rethink their tax exemption programs.

The Philadelphia City Council recently passed a scale-back on a 10-year property tax abatement by decreasing the percentage of the subsidy over that time. But even with that change, millions will be lost to tax exemptions that could instead be invested in cash-depleted schools. “We could make major changes in our schools’ infrastructure, curriculum, staffing, staffing ratios, support staff, social workers, school psychologists – take your pick,” Brooks said.

Other cities looking to reform tax abatement programs are taking a different approach. In Riverhead, New York, on Long Island, developers or project owners can be granted exemptions on their property tax and allowed instead to shell out a far smaller “payment in lieu of taxes,” or PILOT. When the abatement ends, most commonly after 10 years, the businesses then will pay full property taxes.

At least, that’s the idea, but the system is far from perfect. Beneficiaries of the PILOT program have failed to pay on time, leaving the school board struggling to fill a budget hole. Also, the payments are not equal to the amount they would receive for property taxes, with millions of dollars in potential revenue over a decade being cut to as little as a few hundred thousand. On the back end, if a business that’s subsidized with tax breaks fails after 10 years, the projected benefits never emerge.

And when the time came to start paying taxes, developers have returned to the city’s Industrial Development Agency with hat in hand, asking for more tax breaks. A local for-profit aquarium, for example, was granted a 10-year PILOT program break by Riverhead in 1999; it has received so many extensions that it is not scheduled to start paying full taxes until 2031 – 22 years after originally planned.

Kansas City border politics

Like many cities, Kansas City has a long history of segregation, white flight and racial redlining, said Kathleen Pointer, senior policy strategist for Kansas City Public Schools.

James Elementary in Kansas City, Mo. Danielle McLean, CC BY-ND

Troost Avenue, where the Kansas City Public Schools administrative office is located, serves as the city’s historic racial dividing line, with wealthier white families living in the west and more economically disadvantaged people of color in the east. Most of the district’s schools are located east of Troost, not west.

Students on the west side “pretty much automatically funnel into the college preparatory middle school and high schools,” said The Federation of Teachers’ Roberts. Those schools are considered signature schools that are selective and are better taken care of than the typical neighborhood schools, he added.

The school district’s tax levy was set by voters in 1969 at 3.75%. But successive attempts over the next few decades to increase the levy at the ballot box failed. During a decadeslong desegregation lawsuit that was eventually resolved through a settlement agreement in the 1990s, a court raised the district’s levy rate to 4.96% without voter approval. The levy has remained at the same 4.96% rate since.

Meanwhile, Kansas City is still distributing 20-year tax abatements to companies and developers for projects. The district calculated that about 92% of the money that was abated within the school district’s boundaries was for projects within the whiter west side of the city, Pointer said.

“Unfortunately, we can’t pick or choose where developers build,” said Meredith Hoenes, director of communications for Port KC. “We aren’t planning and zoning. Developers typically have plans in place when they knock on our door.”

In Kansas City, several agencies administer tax incentives, allowing developers to shop around to different bodies to receive one. Pointer said he believes the Port Authority is popular because they don’t do a third-party financial analysis to prove that the developers need the amount that they say they do.

With 20-year abatements, a child will start pre-K and graduate high school before seeing the benefits of a property being fully on the tax rolls, Pointer said. Developers, meanwhile, routinely threaten to build somewhere else if they don’t get the incentive, she said.

In 2020, BlueScope Construction, a company that had received tax incentives for nearly 20 years and was about to roll off its abatement, asked for another 13 years and threatened to move to another state if it didn’t get it. At the time, the U.S. was grappling with a racial reckoning following the murder of George Floyd, who was killed by a Minneapolis police officer.

“That was a moment for Kansas City Public Schools where we really drew a line in the sand and talked about incentives as an equity issue,” Pointer said.

After the district raised the issue – tying the incentives to systemic racism – the City Council rejected BlueScope’s bid and, three years later, it’s still in Kansas City, fully on the tax rolls, she said. BlueScope did not return multiple requests for comment.

Recently, a multifamily housing project was approved for a 20-year tax abatement by the Port Authority of Kansas City at Country Club Plaza, an outdoor shopping center in an affluent part of the city. The housing project included no affordable units. “This project was approved without any independent financial analysis proving that it needed that subsidy,” Pointer said.

All told, the Kansas City Public Schools district faces several shortfalls beyond the $400 million in deferred maintenance, Superintendent Jennifer Collier said. There are staffing shortages at all positions: teachers, paraprofessionals and support staff. As in much of the U.S., the cost of housing is surging. New developments that are being built do not include affordable housing, or when they do, the units are still out of reach for teachers.

That’s making it harder for a district that already loses about 1 in 5 of its teachers each year to keep or recruit new ones, who earn an average of only $46,150 their first year on the job, Collier said.

East Baton Rouge and the industrial corridor

It’s impossible to miss the tanks, towers, pipes and industrial structures that incongruously line Baton Rouge’s Scenic Highway landscape. They’re part of Exxon Mobil Corp.’s campus, home of the oil giant’s refinery in addition to chemical and plastics plants.

Aerial view of industrial buildings along a river
Exxon Mobil Corp.’s Baton Rouge campus occupies 3.28 square miles. AP Photo/Gerald Herbert

Sitting along the Mississippi River, the campus has been a staple of Louisiana’s capital for over 100 years. It’s where 6,000 employees and contractors who collectively earn over $400 million annually produce 522,000 barrels of crude oil per day when at full capacity, as well as the annual production and manufacture of 3 billion pounds of high-density polyethylene and polypropylene and 6.6 billion pounds of petrochemical products. The company posted a record-breaking $55.7 billion in profits in 2022 and $36 billion in 2023.

Across the street are empty fields and roads leading into neighborhoods that have been designated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture as a low-income food desert. A mile drive down the street to Route 67 is a Dollar General, fast-food restaurants, and tiny, rundown food stores. A Hi Nabor Supermarket is 4 miles away.

East Baton Rouge Parish’s McKinley High School, a 12-minute drive from the refinery, serves a student body that is about 80% Black and 85% poor. The school, which boasts famous alums such as rapper Kevin Gates, former NBA player Tyrus Thomas and Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient Gardner C. Taylor, holds a special place in the community, but it has been beset by violence and tragedy lately. Its football team quarterback, who was killed days before graduation in 2017, was among at least four of McKinley’s students who have been shot or murdered over the past six years.

The experience is starkly different at some of the district’s more advantaged schools, including its magnet programs open to high-performing students.

Black-and-white outline of Louisiana showing the parishes, with one, near the bottom right, filled in red
East Baton Rouge Parish, marked in red, includes an Exxon Mobil Corp. campus and the city of Baton Rouge. David Benbennick/Wikimedia

Baton Rouge is a tale of two cities, with some of the worst outcomes in the state for education, income and mortality, and some of the best outcomes. “It was only separated by sometimes a few blocks,” said Edgar Cage, the lead organizer for the advocacy group Together Baton Rouge. Cage, who grew up in the city when it was segregated by Jim Crow laws, said the root cause of that disparity was racism.

“Underserved kids don’t have a path forward” in East Baton Rouge public schools, Cage said.

A 2019 report from the Urban League of Louisiana found that economically disadvantaged African American and Hispanic students are not provided equitable access to high-quality education opportunities. That has contributed to those students underperforming on standardized state assessments, such as the LEAP exam, being unprepared to advance to higher grades and being excluded from high-quality curricula and instruction, as well as the highest-performing schools and magnet schools.

“Baton Rouge is home to some of the highest performing schools in the state,” according to the report. “Yet the highest performing schools and schools that have selective admissions policies often exclude disadvantaged students and African American and Hispanic students.”

Dawn Collins, who served on the district’s school board from 2016 to 2022, said that with more funding, the district could provide more targeted interventions for students who were struggling academically or additional support to staff so they can better assist students with greater needs.

But for decades, Louisiana’s Industrial Ad Valorem Tax Exemption Program, or ITEP, allowed for 100% property tax exemptions for industrial manufacturing facilities, said Erin Hansen, the statewide policy analyst at Together Louisiana, a network of 250 religious and civic organizations across the state that advocates for grassroots issues, including tax fairness.

The ITEP program was created in the 1930s through a state constitutional amendment, allowing companies to bypass a public vote and get approval for the exemption through the governor-appointed Board of Commerce and Industry, Hansen said. For over 80 years, that board approved nearly all applications that it received, she said.

Since 2000, Louisiana has granted a total of $35 billion in corporate property tax breaks for 12,590 projects.

Louisiana’s executive order

A few efforts to reform the program over the years have largely failed. But in 2016, Gov. John Bel Edwards signed an executive order that slightly but importantly tweaked the system. On top of the state board vote, the order gave local taxing bodies – such as school boards, sheriffs and parish or city councils – the ability to vote on their own individual portions of the tax exemptions. And in 2019 the East Baton Rouge Parish School Board exercised its power to vote down an abatement.

Throughout the U.S., school boards’ power over the tax abatements that affect their budgets vary, and in some states, including Georgia, Kansas, Nevada, New Jersey and South Carolina, school boards lack any formal ability to vote or comment on tax abatement deals that affect them.

Edwards’ executive order also capped the maximum exemption at 80% and tightened the rules so routine capital investments and maintenance were no longer eligible, Hansen said. A requirement concerning job creation was also put in place.

Concerned residents and activists, led by Together Louisiana and sister group Together Baton Rouge, rallied around the new rules and pushed back against the billion-dollar corporation taking more tax money from the schools. In 2019, the campaign worked: the school board rejected a $2.9 million property tax break bid by Exxon Mobil.

After the decision, Exxon Mobil reportedly described the city as “unpredictable.”

However, members of the business community have continued to lobby for the tax breaks, and they have pushed back against further rejections. In fact, according to Hansen, loopholes were created during the rulemaking process around the governor’s executive order that allowed companies to weaken its effectiveness.

In total, 223 Exxon Mobil projects worth nearly $580 million in tax abatements have been granted in the state of Louisiana under the ITEP program since 2000.

“ITEP is needed to compete with other states – and, in ExxonMobil’s case, other countries,” according to Exxon Mobil spokesperson Lauren Kight.

She pointed out that Exxon Mobil is the largest property taxpayer for the EBR school system, paying more than $46 million in property taxes in EBR parish in 2022 and another $34 million in sales taxes.

A new ITEP contract won’t decrease this existing tax revenue, Kight added. “Losing out on future projects absolutely will.”

The East Baton Rouge Parish School Board has continued to approve Exxon Mobil abatements, passing $46.9 million between 2020 and 2022. Between 2017 and 2023, the school district has lost $96.3 million.

Taxes are highest when industrial buildings are first built. Industrial property comes onto the tax rolls at 40% to 50% of its original value in Louisiana after the initial 10-year exemption, according to the Ascension Economic Development Corp.

Exxon Mobil received its latest tax exemption, $8.6 million over 10 years – an 80% break – in October 2023 for $250 million to install facilities at the Baton Rouge complex that purify isopropyl alcohol for microchip production and that create a new advanced recycling facility, allowing the company to address plastic waste. The project created zero new jobs.

The school board approved it by a 7-2 vote after a long and occasionally contentious board meeting.

“Does it make sense for Louisiana and other economically disadvantaged states to kind of compete with each other by providing tax incentives to mega corporations like Exxon Mobil?” said EBR School Board Vice President Patrick Martin, who voted for the abatement. “Probably, in a macro sense, it does not make a lot of sense. But it is the program that we have.”

Obviously, Exxon Mobil benefits, he said. “The company gets a benefit in reducing the property taxes that they would otherwise pay on their industrial activity that adds value to that property.” But the community benefits from the 20% of the property taxes that are not exempted, he said.

“I believe if we don’t pass it, over time the investments will not come and our district as a whole will have less money,” he added.

In 2022, a year when Exxon Mobil made a record $55.7 billion, the company asked for a 10-year, 80% property tax break from the cash-starved East Baton Rouge Parish school district. A lively debate ensued.

Meanwhile, the district’s budgetary woes are coming to a head. Bus drivers staged a sickout at the start of the school year, refusing to pick up students – in protest of low pay and not having buses equipped with air conditioning amid a heat wave. The district was forced to release students early, leaving kids stranded without a ride to school, before it acquiesced and provided the drivers and other staff one-time stipends and purchased new buses with air conditioning.

The district also agreed to reestablish transfer points as a temporary response to the shortages. But that transfer-point plan has historically resulted in students riding on the bus for hours and occasionally missing breakfast when the bus arrives late, according to Angela Reams-Brown, president of the East Baton Rouge Federation of Teachers. The district plans to purchase or lease over 160 buses and solve its bus driver shortage next year, but the plan could lead to a budget crisis.

A teacher shortage looms as well, because the district is paying teachers below the regional average. At the school board meeting, Laverne Simoneaux, an ELL specialist at East Baton Rouge’s Woodlawn Elementary, said she was informed that her job was not guaranteed next year since she’s being paid through federal COVID-19 relief funds. By receiving tax exemptions, Exxon Mobil was taking money from her salary to deepen their pockets, she said.

A young student in the district told the school board that the money could provide better internet access or be used to hire someone to pick up the glass and barbed wire in the playground. But at least they have a playground – Hayden Crockett, a seventh grader at Sherwood Middle Academic Magnet School, noted that his sister’s elementary school lacked one.

“If it wasn’t in the budget to fund playground equipment, how can it also be in the budget to give one of the most powerful corporations in the world a tax break?” Crockett said. “The math just ain’t mathing.”

Christine Wen worked for the nonprofit organization Good Jobs First from June 2019 to May 2022 where she helped collect tax abatement data.

Nathan Jensen has received funding from the John and Laura Arnold Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. He is a Senior Fellow at the Niskanen Center.

Danielle McLean and Kevin Welner do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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Revving up tourism: Formula One and other big events look set to drive growth in the hospitality industry

With big events drawing a growing share of of tourism dollars, F1 offers a potential glimpse of the travel industry’s future.

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Sergio Perez of Oracle Red Bull Racing, right, and Charles Leclerc of the Scuderia Ferrari team compete in the Las Vegas Grand Prix on Nov. 19, 2023. Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu via Getty Images

In late 2023, I embarked on my first Formula One race experience, attending the first-ever Las Vegas Grand Prix. I had never been to an F1 race; my interest was sparked during the pandemic, largely through the Netflix series “Formula 1: Drive to Survive.”

But I wasn’t just attending as a fan. As the inaugural chair of the University of Florida’s department of tourism, hospitality and event management, I saw this as an opportunity. Big events and festivals represent a growing share of the tourism market – as an educator, I want to prepare future leaders to manage them.

And what better place to learn how to do that than in the stands of the Las Vegas Grand Prix?

A smiling professor is illuminated by bright lights in a nighttime photo taken at a Formula 1 event in Nevada.
The author at the Las Vegas Grand Prix. Katherine Fu

The future of tourism is in events and experiences

Tourism is fun, but it’s also big business: In the U.S. alone, it’s a US$2.6 trillion industry employing 15 million people. And with travelers increasingly planning their trips around events rather than places, both industry leaders and academics are paying attention.

Event tourism is also key to many cities’ economic development strategies – think Chicago and its annual Lollapalooza music festival, which has been hosted in Grant Park since 2005. In 2023, Lollapalooza generated an estimated $422 million for the local economy and drew record-breaking crowds to the city’s hotels.

That’s why when Formula One announced it would be making a 10-year commitment to host races in Las Vegas, the region’s tourism agency was eager to spread the news. The 2023 grand prix eventually generated $100 million in tax revenue, the head of that agency later announced.

Why Formula One?

Formula One offers a prime example of the economic importance of event tourism. In 2022, Formula One generated about $2.6 billion in total revenues, according to the latest full-year data from its parent company. That’s up 20% from 2021 and 27% from 2019, the last pre-COVID year. A record 5.7 million fans attended Formula One races in 2022, up 36% from 2019.

This surge in interest can be attributed to expanded broadcasting rights, sponsorship deals and a growing global fan base. And, of course, the in-person events make a lot of money – the cheapest tickets to the Las Vegas Grand Prix were $500.

Two brightly colored race cars are seen speeding down a track in a blur.
Turn 1 at the first Las Vegas Grand Prix. Rachel Fu, CC BY

That’s why I think of Formula One as more than just a pastime: It’s emblematic of a major shift in the tourism industry that offers substantial job opportunities. And it takes more than drivers and pit crews to make Formula One run – it takes a diverse range of professionals in fields such as event management, marketing, engineering and beyond.

This rapid industry growth indicates an opportune moment for universities to adapt their hospitality and business curricula and prepare students for careers in this profitable field.

How hospitality and business programs should prepare students

To align with the evolving landscape of mega-events like Formula One races, hospitality schools should, I believe, integrate specialized training in event management, luxury hospitality and international business. Courses focusing on large-scale event planning, VIP client management and cross-cultural communication are essential.

Another area for curriculum enhancement is sustainability and innovation in hospitality. Formula One, like many other companies, has increased its emphasis on environmental responsibility in recent years. While some critics have been skeptical of this push, I think it makes sense. After all, the event tourism industry both contributes to climate change and is threatened by it. So, programs may consider incorporating courses in sustainable event management, eco-friendly hospitality practices and innovations in sustainable event and tourism.

Additionally, business programs may consider emphasizing strategic marketing, brand management and digital media strategies for F1 and for the larger event-tourism space. As both continue to evolve, understanding how to leverage digital platforms, engage global audiences and create compelling brand narratives becomes increasingly important.

Beyond hospitality and business, other disciplines such as material sciences, engineering and data analytics can also integrate F1 into their curricula. Given the younger generation’s growing interest in motor sports, embedding F1 case studies and projects in these programs can enhance student engagement and provide practical applications of theoretical concepts.

Racing into the future: Formula One today and tomorrow

F1 has boosted its outreach to younger audiences in recent years and has also acted to strengthen its presence in the U.S., a market with major potential for the sport. The 2023 Las Vegas race was a strategic move in this direction. These decisions, along with the continued growth of the sport’s fan base and sponsorship deals, underscore F1’s economic significance and future potential.

Looking ahead in 2024, Formula One seems ripe for further expansion. New races, continued advancements in broadcasting technology and evolving sponsorship models are expected to drive revenue growth. And Season 6 of “Drive to Survive” will be released on Feb. 23, 2024. We already know that was effective marketing – after all, it inspired me to check out the Las Vegas Grand Prix.

I’m more sure than ever that big events like this will play a major role in the future of tourism – a message I’ll be imparting to my students. And in my free time, I’m planning to enhance my quality of life in 2024 by synchronizing my vacations with the F1 calendar. After all, nothing says “relaxing getaway” quite like the roar of engines and excitement of the racetrack.

Rachel J.C. Fu does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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