A college degree is worth less to poor kids

[eridani]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/02/22/still-think-america-is-the-land-of-opportunity-look-at-this-chart/?wpmm=1&wpisrc=nl_wonk

Policymakers on the left and right often tout education as the bridge to help poor kids make their way up the income ladder -- people with more education make more money. But striking new research from the Brookings Institution shows that simply sending more kids to college won't fix income inequality: As it turns out, a college degree is worth a lot less, earnings-wise, to poor kids than to rich ones.

Brookings's Brad Hershbein analyzed data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, a massive, nationally representative study that's tracked the economic progress of 18,000 individuals in 5,000 families since 1968. Because the study tracks the same families over close to 50 years, researchers can see things like how the family environment a person grows up in affects their earnings decades later.

https://img.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=

[CBGLuthier]

1. I think a distinction needs to be made between worth less and worthless.

Yeah a hole is a hard thing to climb out of but being all that you can should be the experience of all humans.

[eridani]

2. I agree. No reason not to try anyway

Just a word to the wise about profit-seeking scams, though.

[Baobab]

10. Suppose we are doing a simulation and the liklihood of said education leading to work, ever

becomes much lower.

And the cost of education increases because of the loss of public higher education , public institutions of learning to the forces of market liberalisation.

What happens then?

Say if the chance of getting a job in your field with a 4 year degree is 20% and with a 6 year degree 35% and with a PhD 45% and with 5 published papers in good journals 55-60%

Average debt for 4 year degree becomes $50k (in todays money) $75k
for 6 yr and $100k for 8 yrs.

Meanwhile number of employed drops and many families are losing their homes because no income. Falling off the economic and political maps (since the homeless may have trouble voting anywhere)

Who goes to college then? And where? Remember, there are fewer and fewer or just as likely, no public institutions of higher learning or K-12 education, eventually.

And fewer and fewer jobs. So basically a larger and larger group of people are forced into an informal early retirement. At the same time services liberalisation gives corporations from all around the world a legal right to perform contracts won in countries like the US with their own staffs. Whatever their wages are its none of our business or perhaps minimum wages apply but cannot be verified. (due to wages being paid on the other side of the world)

Who goes to college then and why?

[FBaggins]

3. I don't see enough analysis to draw that conclusion

They already say that they haven't looked at which colleges (and presumably which degrees) each group is associated with. More importantly, I don't see a definition of "income" here. PSID studies often look at household income (which could mean that marital decisions of the two groups makes a big difference). Which income is evaluated? Do relative debt levels play a factor? What about capital gains and dividend income? If you graduate with lots of debt, then you're paying it back while the upper-middle-class kid is investing her money.

What about geographic region? A bank teller in a major city might make 30-40% more than one in a rural area, but the second teller may have the better standard of living because of the local cost of living. Did they evaluate that?

[Nay]

4. It doesn't say what possibilities the researchers are investigating, but

surely a big part of why rich kids do so much better in life is the contacts they make as rich kids, plus the strings that parents can pull to get them the best internships, first jobs, etc. I personally never was able to get a truly well-paying job, despite a degree, until someone on the inside recommended me for it. It was all who you knew, not what you knew or what your resume said.

[noamnety]

5. Everything you said

plus I would add geographic mobility. Poorer students from inner cities, for example, might live at home and go to college instead of going away and paying for a dorm - but then their contacts and job opportunities are still within the inner city, unless they can pay to travel for job interviews, which is a crazy gamble when you are broke.

[DawgHouse]

11. You are exactly right. Every great job I had was one that I was referred to.

Who you know makes a big difference.

[Baobab]

6. Smells like the usual rationalization for depriving more and more Americans of an education.

A four year degree is rarely enough any more, but they never say that.

here is the real reason public services are struggling

[eridani]

7. No--it means that education by itself isn't enough n/t

[Baobab]

8. Do you mean that the stress of poverty impacts poor people's health?

Last edited Tue Mar 22, 2016, 10:27 PM - Edit history (1)

(It does) So does noise. Noise actually causes permanent decrements in IQ. Early life noise can cause substantial measurable decrements in intelligence. It also seems to be important in late middle age in terms of neuroinflammation.

Stress shrinks the hippocampus and amygdala and uses up aspects of the brain's repair capacity as measured by telomere length.

Also, see the emerging concepts of allostasis and/or allostatic load.

[Baobab]

9. I totally agree, if one does not have a support network, its nearly impossible.

for kids to make it on their own.

These days. It was hard for me but for kids now, its even harder.

Rents are SO high now, relative to many people's incomes.

And its going to get worse as we are getting pushed into a race to the bottom. Both parties leadership want wages to fall. They just wont admit it.

We should focus on higher wage jobs and making our workforce smart enough to do them. To be able to do that legally, we now need to make big changes. They wont wait. Thanks to the recent WTO ruling on solar panels its clear to me at least that we're going to be stuck with a very unworkable situation if we dont immediately carve out everything that is service, infrastructure, all the possible areas which might be part of a New Deal like job stimulus. We dont realize it but thats now been taken off the table unless we act to put it back.

We really do need a return to protectionism on job creating important things.

Otherwise we will be unable to stimulate the economy. Sanders could win and be unable to do a damn thing. Thats how they work.

And TiSA and WTO will destroy working and middle class wages. We would be forced to match very low bids and we would be unable to do so without joining a race to the bottom. Trade deals are silent on wages, wages are not working conditions. Jobs in countries are not jobs for those countries people, necessarily. In the future often they wont be.

WTO goals are to maximize "efficiency" which means higher profits and lower wages.

Mad Mike (WTO DG in the late 1990s) actually said as much.

Also, we need to carve out education completely- 100% K12- higher education, distance education, everything. We need to do that to protect teachers jobs otherwise they will be privatized bit by bit and then subcontracted out to huge multinationals - we need to carve out education soon. Now, before the election. Otherwise it could easily be over before then.

Obama is a privatizer.