More Education Cannot Solve Income Inequality
More college degrees is not the solution.
The Washington Post reports.
Why you can’t solve income inequality by sending people to college
There’s now broad agreement among politicians that inequality of income is a serious problem in the United States, but there’s little consensus on what to do about it.
A simple thought experiment may rule out one potential solution: Helping more people go to college.
Getting a college degree is valuable, according to calculations by a group of economists including former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers. If more people went to college, they’d be much better off. It’s just hard to imagine how helping more high school graduates to earn college degrees could substantially undo the massive increase in inequality of the past several decades, which is largely a result of skyrocketing earnings among the very rich. Indeed, the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans now claim nearly as large a share of national income as they did on the eve of the Great Depression.
“I am all for improving education,” Summers told Wonkblog earlier this month. “But to suggest that improving education is the solution to inequality is, I think, an evasion.”
Why you can’t solve income inequality by sending people to college (The Washington Post)
Comments
Most people live in a fantasy world where they believe that some goods are just intrinsically good and you don’t have to consider the costs. Depending on your political slant, education, health care, law enforcement, pollution prevention, national defense, scientific research, art, and more, might all fall into the “intrinsically good” category.
There are opportunity costs to every decision.
That depends on what is being taught, IMO.
That said, I cannot imagine an effective course of study being tolerated in today’s colleges.