More and better education is good but is no solution to our jobs and inequity problems.

The current issue of American Prospect has a good article by Lawrence Mishel of Economic Policy Institute, The Overselling of Education: We need a better-educated citizenry, but the cure for increasing inequality lies elsewhere. He concludes:

The nation's productivity increased by 80 percent from 1979 to 2009, and good productivity growth can be expected in the future. It is not education gaps that have caused nearly all of those gains to be captured by the top but rather economic policies that redistributed economic and political power.

Mishel explains why our economic and political elites, who have benefited greatly from the policies of the last three decades, want to focus on inadequate education as the supposed cause of our pervasive economic problems and better education as the solution: They don't want attention focused on the real causes of rising economic inequity, grossly inadequate job creation, declining class mobility, decline in prosperity from one generation to the next, and unaffordability of infrastructure and other public goods. I reached a similar conclusion in May 2008 in Education is doing a lot less for the economy than we all thought it would.

Although Mishel makes the arguments well, he didn't have room for the type of supporting data that I included in my post and its addenda where, for example, I documented the following contradictions to the education-as-panacea meme (if that's what it is). Click here for the discussions and links to sources:

In recent decades, the US has not had a shortage of college-educated workers for jobs requiring a college education. At least half of college graduates under 25 are working in jobs that do not require a college degree. This continues a downward trend from a shameful 58% working in jobs requiring college degrees [amended 3/3/11] in the supposedly-tight labor market of 2000. According to OECD, 33% of US college graduates ages 25-29 are in low skill jobs.*

Several studies reported that many college graduates end up in jobs for which college training is not required.  For example, 12% of mail carriers, a quarter of travel agents and retail-sales supervisors, a third of flight attendants, and nearly half of aerobics instructors have B.A. degrees. 

Only 2 of the 10 job categories projected to grow the fastest require college degrees. 

The income gap between high school graduates and college graduates is not widening because incomes of college graduates have accelerated through the last 2 or 3 decades. To the contrary, average incomes of recent college graduates have risen only modestly and not at all since 2001. The widening gap is because the incomes of high school graduates grew at a much slower pace or not at all.

From 2000 to 2007, those with professional degrees (J.D., M.D., MBA, etc.) were the only educational group for which median incomes rose—even Ph.D.s lost ground. 

States and nations that have a high percentage of college educated people do not necessarily have faster economic growth, and at least one study found a negative correlation. 

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*Only two OECD nations have higher rates of underutilization of college educations: Spain (44%) and Canada (37%).

Update on Tuesday, March 6, 2018 at 02:58PM by Skeptic

The conventional wisdom continues to be that people without college degrees earn less because they lack the necessary skills; this is true, it is said, because advancing technology increasingly requires skills one cannot get in high school or on the job; therefore, everybody should go to college, get the skills they need, and get better jobs.  Jared Bernstein takes data from the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere to show convincingly that the "skills gap" has not increased since 2000.  Importantly, the earnings gap between HS and college grads has not increased at all in that time.  So, if these is an increasing skills gap, you have to ask why there is not an increasing earnings gap.  Lots to be said for universal college education, but that would not solve, or even mitigate, our income inequality problem. 

Comments

[Christine]

So Roger, when do we have our revolution. How is this going to be stopped?

[Leonard V.]

I like the end of the quote. Yeah, it is not actually education but those political an economic changes that have been creating numerous changes in the communities and other countries that makes it really hard to conceptualize the real current system.

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