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Education as the critical problem behind current inequality
Here is an excerpt from my New York Times column today:
The return for a college education, in percentage terms, is now about what it was in America’s Gilded Age in the late 19th century; this drives the current scramble to get into top colleges and universities. In contrast, from 1915 to 1950, the relative return for education fell, mostly because more new college graduates competed for a relatively few top jobs, and that kept top wages from rising too high.
Professors Goldin and Katz portray a kind of race. Improvements in technology have raised the gains for those with enough skills to handle complex jobs. The resulting inequalities are bid back down only as more people receive more education and move up the wage ladder.
Income distribution thus depends on the balance between technological progress and access to college and postgraduate study. The problem isn’t so much capitalism as it is that American lower education does not prepare enough people to receive gains from American higher education.
Bottlenecks currently keep more individuals from improving their education...
Note that education is a fundamental issue behind the kinds of inequality we should worry about most, namely the failure of many poor people to do better over time. It is not the fundamental problem behind every kind of measured inequality, as the column itself explains. It does not, for instance, explain rising gains to the top one percent. Inequality debates too often conflate different phenomena.
Here is a non-gated version of the very interesting Goldin-Katz paper which I cover.
In a dynamic era does educational access have much of a chance of keeping up with technological improvement? Even if we had optimal educational policies, which of course we don't, modern technology goes "whoosh," education often just pokeys along.
Brad DeLong offers related commentary, though I think he is too quick to accuse Becker and Murphy of confusing the Marshallian scissors. Mark Thoma offers commentary and relevant links. Concerning Krugman's claims, in general the data (see David Card's Econometrica 2001 piece, plus the work of James Heckman) still find relatively high returns to additional education.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on May 17, 2007 at 12:57 AM in Economics | Permalink
Comments
sigh... IQ. IQ. IQ. Why do companies flock to get Harvard grads with useless degrees in gender studies or whatever? Because only really high-IQ people GET into Harvard. What college you get into is used by companies as an indicator of what they are really after - IQ.
Posted by: adrian at May 17, 2007 1:53:20 AM
Excellent column.
I am optimistic about the possibilities of improving primary and especially secondary school (K12) education. But I strongly suspect current institutional arrangements cannot deliver this.
Furthermore, nobody knows what changes are required. So, what is needed is a period of educational experiment, competition and evolution of the forms of primary and secondary education - and this reform should be driven by parental choice (probably by something like a voucher system).
Future schools should increasingly be private, competing for pupils, funded by the fees (and vouchers) of their pupils and state intervention should be restricted to subsidies for the poorest and perhaps to areas of national need (eg promoting math by bursaries to study it, or by cash rewards for exam success).
And we shall see what range of educational forms emerges from the process.
Will it happen? Yes - but maybe not soon. The opposing interest groups (educational administrators and teachers unions) will need to be overcome; however this may be made easier as the chronic and intractable failure of current K12 systems erodes their self confidence.
Posted by: Bruce G Charlton at May 17, 2007 2:11:00 AM
"still find relatively high returns to additional education."
Most people who continue on are studying things like medicine or law, so duh. An couple extra years of gender studies? Not a great additional return methinks.
Posted by: adrian at May 17, 2007 2:16:54 AM
sigh... IQ. IQ. IQ. Why do companies flock to get Harvard grads with useless degrees in gender studies or whatever? Because only really high-IQ people GET into Harvard. What college you get into is used by companies as an indicator of what they are really after - IQ.
Yes, IQ. You're a smart guy, do yourself a favor and stop ignoring it, Tyler.
What matters in a society, in any society, is a healthy mean IQ. I've noticed a tendency on this blog by some people to assume that if IQ matters at all then it is strictly the presence of a reasonable percentage of high IQ individuals that is important. This is all wrong. If all the Ashkenazic Jews in America were to immigrate to Ethiopia, then Ethiopia might have more high IQ people than Germany. Yet Germany, which has few Jews these days, will still be a First World country while Ethiopia will remain, on the whole, a Third World country. A country that wants to succeed must maintain a sufficient mean IQ.
Posted by: tommy at May 17, 2007 2:43:24 AM
I am optimistic about the possibilities of improving primary and especially secondary school (K12) education.
If the phrase "irrational exuberance" ever made it into a dictionary, I might have to nominate this as the definition.
Posted by: tommy at May 17, 2007 2:47:50 AM
"In a dynamic era does educational access have much of a chance of keeping up with technological improvement?"
Not whether it can, but rather **how it can** because it absolutely must!
IMHO Elitist gatekeepers like Harvard or Stanford or UC Berkeley or U of Mich are essential drivers of excellence, but:
1. Supply has not expanded proportionally with the demand of qualified applicants, too many 4.0 high school graduates cannot get into their idealized university, so it admissions becomes a lottery (or at least the criteria are not predictable in advance).
2. Coverage in courses and research is not expanding to keep up with knowledge.
For example, whole large parts of the world are neglected. I gave up ages ago looking for a place to do PhD work in Burmese history.
Unless the instructor was a geek, the IT instructors at a foreign university I taught at were clueless about open source software (probably what this blog runs off of, either OS or applications software). This leads to clueless decisions down the line when students graduate and get jobs in IT, whereas if students were actively participating in these projects, they would be doing apprenticeships during their coursework.
3. Skill set diversification with a eye towards what you would do if your whole sector of the economy was laid off, like combining carpentry with computer programming, i.e. cross-training.
4. Never-ending education, education should account for a fraction of the work day, continual technological upgrade.
5. It doesn't have to be like it is, because near costless self-education via the internet is quickly becoming much more of a reality, everywhere in the world.
Posted by: jonfernquest at May 17, 2007 3:21:45 AM
"Bottlenecks currently keep more individuals from improving their education..."
Gee, do you think that the cost of higher education might be one of those bottlenecks? Recent graduates from middle income homes are under a mountain of debt many will never pay for, particularly if their expertise isn't something immediately in high demand. This makes college a bad purchase for them. Bankruptcies are way up, even among highly educated people, while there are legions of people with advanced degrees who have been greatly underemployed or out of work for a long, long time.
In fact, the government projections for areas of job growth have typically been in direct personal services like nursing and cosmetology, not fields requiring higher education which is becoming just another privilege of the rich. Professors Goldin and Katz should take a sabbatical from their ivory towers for a year or two and investigate what's going on in real America where people with multiple masters degrees in engineering are working as waiters.
Blaming the loss of the middle class on the lack of education is disingenuous and the supporting statistics miss the point that only wealthy parents can keep their progeny in top colleges and then offer them the networking and support to make use of that education. Most high school grads know they are better off becoming plumbers or sanitation workers than advanced degree liberal arts majors, and while that's a sad commentary on our current state, the simple fact is that we value plumbers more and their jobs can't be outsourced.
Posted by: johnc at May 17, 2007 4:34:56 AM
If IQ is all there is to it, why spend all that money on the degree? Just administer a test which gives you sufficient confidence in applicant IQ and hire away.
Posted by: Tom at May 17, 2007 6:12:24 AM
"Blaming the loss of the middle class on the lack of education is disingenuous and the supporting statistics miss the point that only wealthy parents can keep their progeny in top colleges and then offer them the networking and support to make use of that education."
Johnc: You can't talk about that kind of stuff here, it ain't 'economics.'
Posted by: jake at May 17, 2007 7:25:36 AM
What, not even a passing mention of the signaling theory of education? These private gains to education need not correspond to much net social gain. Tyler knows better, but as with his articles on health care, Tyler clearly expects that his NYT audience would prefer not to hear about such "cynical" considerations.
Posted by: Robin Hanson at May 17, 2007 7:59:25 AM
Robin, the studies cited in my post attempt to control for signaling and estimate the returns to education holding type constant. Their "natural experiments" are pretty good, albeit not perfect. Note, however, that these are marginal returns for people on the cusp of going to college. Signaling still might be more important inframarginally.
Posted by: Tyler Cowen at May 17, 2007 8:11:05 AM
Education is all well and good (please note that I did not say schooling), but most people do not have basic creativity or problem solving skills/abilities that are required to fully utilize that knowledge. Combine that with a cultural sense of entitlement and lack of motivation and we have a recipe for disaster.
The sophists will tell you that the main benefit of the college education is that it demonstrates learning abilities and motivation. Where as I see a group of people's whose approach to life and knowledge is voyeuristic and shallow; and whose approach to problem solving is to throw money at it.
I have absolutely nothing against scholarship, there are decided benefits to people who wish to dedicate their lives to it. Today the model is so abused and stretched that it has lost its value. Most people who go to a university today would be much better suited with vocational training in many fields that involved reinforcing algebra and trig.
Just my self-righteous pontifications, dismiss at your leisure.
Posted by: Jacob at May 17, 2007 8:31:55 AM
The real issue is to do with parenting. Without strong family support, kids are much less likely to get a good education.
Posted by: Chris at May 17, 2007 8:35:25 AM
"modern technology goes "whoosh," education often just pokeys along."
Yeah, but the rate at which education can change is not fixed and we should try to speed it up.
How will we know how fast schools can change till we try a free market? Sweeden doesn't count as an example.
Posted by: stuart at May 17, 2007 8:38:10 AM
"In a dynamic era does educational access have much of a chance of keeping up with technological improvement? Even if we had optimal educational policies, which of course we don't, modern technology goes "whoosh," education often just pokeys along."
This observation brought to mind Carlota Perez's great insights into the long term workings of the economy and in particular the dislocation between technology and institutions during the "installation" phase of a new technological paradigm:
"Suddenly, in relation to the new technologies, the old habits and regulations become obstacles, the old services and infrastructures are found wanting, the old organizations and institutions are inadequate. A new context must be created; a new 'common sense' must emerge and propagate." (from Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital)
Surely this exactly the situation the world finds itself in with respect to education - the existing educational paradigm is mal-adapted for the current (and future) technological paradigms but by virtue of the enormous inertia endemic to most social institutions. The alternatives (at least by historical standards) seem to be wait decades for the institutions to adapt or undergo a more violent, sudden, almost revolutionary shift which would be a likely result of pressure in 'the system' rising to a critical point (ie if the sub-optimal outcomes generated by the system became entirely untenable.
Posted by: Sean at May 17, 2007 8:41:13 AM
Electricians; plumbers: those guys can write their own ticket. Plus, they're useful.
Education? pffooey!
Posted by: ricpic at May 17, 2007 9:13:35 AM
@ricpic
Only if their good. As more and more (competent) people abandon the trades, the value of a good tradesman will rise. But again we are back at basic math skills that are sorely lacking. Why is an odd question.
What I noticed in my educational adventure in the land of mediocrity is that there was no expectation of knowledge retention. Students in Precalc had no idea what an exponent was even though they had been learning it every year since the 4th grade. I have come to the conclusion that our grading system is the primary point of failure. The unfortunate reality is we expect students and teachers to generate grades NOT to engage in learning. Reform grading practices, enforce an expectation of retention, and hopefully return relevancy to the quantification process.
Again feel free to dismiss at your leisure.
Posted by: Jacob at May 17, 2007 9:29:30 AM
Tom
"If IQ is all there is to it, why spend all that money on the degree? Just administer a test which gives you sufficient confidence in applicant IQ and hire away."
The Supreme Court's 1971 Griggs v. Duke Power decision made it difficult for companies to assess the general intelligent of job applicants. Some companies, like Google and Microsoft, rigorously test for g in their interviews, but it's not a blatant IQ test so they get away with it. Only the military uses IQ tests to decide everything: politically correct lies about IQ cost too much when war is concerned, as the cost of those lies is dead soldiers.
Tommy
"What matters in a society, in any society, is a healthy mean IQ."
Yes, LaGriffe's Smart Fraction Theory explains this. High IQ people are important, but they can't do EVERYTHING. So you need a stable number of reasonably capable individuals: store managers, detectives etc, to keep a society ticking along.
LaGriffe pretty much sums up the universe here:
"In a developed country like Belgium with an average IQ of 100, thirty-four percent of the general population makes up its smart fraction. Morocco, in contrast, has an average IQ of 85. Less than eight percent of its people are capable of doing smart-fraction jobs, a fact made plain by its dreary third-world economy. But if you think that's bad, black Africa is utterly hopeless with less than two percent qualifying for smart-fraction jobs. The demise of colonialism sealed its economic doom."
Posted by: adrian at May 17, 2007 10:11:13 AM
Re Griggs and Duke Power
College fees began their inexorable rise right after this decision. Companies no longer used IQ tests, so they began using SAT's, what college you got into etc as a gauge of your g. Of course ordinary Americans quickly concluded that the relationship thus went from education to high income, when it the causation remained IQ-income. Hence the deluded clamor to get into college, and the willingness to pay large sums of money in the process, leading, in turn, to the endless rise in college fees. It's all a con.
Posted by: adrian at May 17, 2007 10:21:02 AM
"Smart fraction theory" is obviously counterfactual. A smaller "smart fraction" in third world countries implies that smart people are more productive at the margin, after controlling for purchasing power. The fact that we don't observe a huge brain drain from Belgium to Morocco or black Africa suggests that institutional factors are more important.
Posted by: guest at May 17, 2007 10:46:31 AM
Johnc,
You said "Professors Goldin and Katz should take a sabbatical from their ivory towers for a year or two and investigate what's going on in real America where people with multiple masters degrees in engineering are working as waiters."
I will venture that said engineer is either:
A) a lucky thimble-wit,
-
B) so dysfunctional in a social context as to be disruptive to a team doing high-complexity work,
-or-
C) so inflexible as to expect to work in precisely the fields he's got his masters in
Hint: My undergrad was in physics, but I've never worked in a particle physics lab and yet manage to find interesting, well-paying work that utilizes many of the skills I picked up in the course of said undergrad. My difficulty in finding similar folks come hiring time tells me they're either in short supply or aren't looking in the right places for work.
Note that I'm not saying our hypothetical engineer will be making precisely the same money he did in his original field on day one. Starting on another path implies a learning curve and therefore a lower salary. That said, it'd still beat hustling for tips at a greasy-spoon.....
Posted by: Bernard Guerrero at May 17, 2007 11:08:19 AM
I liked the article, but I find the reference to the racist propaganda book "The Bell Curve" a big turn off to anybody reading your article. To even reference it gives it credibility it does not deserve. Judging from the previous posting you have opened to door to anybody with a racist agenda. Which I'm sure was not the intend of your article.
Posted by: Terry Leach at May 17, 2007 11:33:56 AM
Racist in favor of who? Asians?
Posted by: adrian at May 17, 2007 11:41:46 AM
Racist in favor of Asians and Jews? Interesting.
Posted by: adrian at May 17, 2007 12:00:01 PM
What fun. I spent 12 hours researching income inequality yesterday.
Anyway:
1. The Bell Curve asserts that as the number of people in college went up, so did the IQ. That means more inequality, since IQ and education both raise wages.
2. Correlation of wages between husband and wife generates household inequality. If correlation has gone up (IE, more college students pairing off and less marrying with non-college grads), then so does inequality. Very significant in ensuring that their children have a good educational experience.
3. Family stability: Half of poor households are headed by a female (I assume single moms being the vast majority). High earning households are much more likely to be stable families.
4. Like you said, this doesn't speak much for the Top 1%. I'm very concerned about that as well, particularly since you imply that we shouldn't care about it.
Posted by: Robert at May 17, 2007 12:31:09 PM
Tyler: "the studies cited in my post attempt to control for signaling and estimate the returns to education holding type constant"
Call me skeptical. Just like Black/White or Male/Female wage differentials that "control for" education via years of education, these controls often leave a lot of correlated omitted variables, and this residual is then assumed to be due to the dummy variable in question.
Posted by: eric at May 17, 2007 1:26:05 PM
@Adrian
I agree it is a con. But its the tune you have to dance to, no matter how badly played.
Here is another trend I find troubling. There is an inverse relationship between financial success and the amount of children they have. Professional men and women, or the "Smart Fraction Jobs" people, aren't breeding. This is causing serious problems in the entire western world.
Posted by: Jacob at May 17, 2007 2:18:27 PM
I agree that it is not the education system that has the inherent problem. Even socialist monopoly schools can do a reasonable job of teaching a student who behaves and is willing to work to learn.
What we have in the US is a failure of many children to behave in school and be willing to work to learn.
Socialist monopoly government schools are unable to be responsive enough to address this "in loco parentis" issue, and are often held back by the limitations of power of government in getting the little devils to properly behave.
In a perfect world, parents would provide proper parenting to get their children behave and work to learn in school. I don't know if government can really solve this problem, but I suspect if more parents had to directly pay for school (especially if they had to pay more if children got lower grades), they would have enough "skin in the game" to take a more active role.
Posted by: Mr. Econotarian at May 17, 2007 2:28:59 PM
Yes Jacob, but it's not really a new phenomenon. There has been a dysgenic effect on high IQ individuals in the west since the advent of Christianity, where the cognitive elite tended to become Priests, Bishops etc, and not have any children by definition. An unusual number of western scientists and thinkers have been seemingly asexual as well (Newton, Kant).
Contrast that with Imperial China, where the high IQ mandarins who passed the rigorous exams had their pick of the fillies.
Posted by: adrian at May 17, 2007 3:09:32 PM
So how come the supply of high-quality education hasn't expanded to at least somewhat meet the demand?
Posted by: Nancy Lebovitz at May 17, 2007 3:11:21 PM
Why do companies flock to get Harvard grads with useless degrees in gender studies or whatever?
If companies are doing that, they are either stupid or they need to prove to the EEOC that they are not discriminating (and they have a strategy for limiting the damage caused by such employees).
Posted by: Loki on the run at May 17, 2007 4:10:22 PM
Tyler wrote:
"Robin, the studies cited in my post attempt to control for signaling and estimate the returns to education holding type constant. Their "natural experiments" are pretty good, albeit not perfect. Note, however, that these are marginal returns for people on the cusp of going to college. Signaling still might be more important inframarginally."
Only a tiny number of studies control for signaling. Many DO try to control for ability bias, but that's a totally distinct issue, as I explain here:
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2006/06/two_educational.html
Posted by: Bryan Caplan at May 17, 2007 4:27:07 PM
You write, "the new students must be prepared to learn." Good luck on that one. And I'm not sure additional college aid is the answer; won't that just encourage colleges to pump up their prices? On the other hand, if it doesn't, as Milton Friedman wrote in "Free to Choose", "Low tuition fees mean that while city or state colleges and universities attract many serious students interested in getting an education, they also attract many young men and women who come because the fees are low, residential housing and food are subsidized, and above all, many other young people are there. For them, college is a pleasant interlude between high school and going to work."
Posted by: hanmeng at May 17, 2007 5:50:16 PM
Contrast that with Imperial China, where the high IQ mandarins who passed the rigorous exams had their pick of the fillies.
This, of course, ignores the dynamics of society. It is arguably the case that the Taiping rebellion is a direct result of high-status males monopolizing too many females, so that a large proportion of low-status males had no access to females.
Beware the destabilizing effect of large numbers of males who are not tied down feeding a wife and children. Males are very good at coalitional violence.
Posted by: Loki on the run at May 17, 2007 6:11:56 PM
Access to education? We don't live in Lake Wobegon where all children are above average.
Take a look at the nation's biggest county, Los Angeles, the harbinger of our demographic future. In LA County, which has some of the richest suburbs in the world, only one out of six 18-year-olds (including private school students) scores 1000 or higher on the SAT (equivalent to only 890 on the SAT before scoring was made easier in 1995). There are large schools where only 1% of the entering 9th graders will ever score 1000.
Posted by: Steve Sailer at May 17, 2007 7:02:30 PM
Economists should start worrying about the opportunity cost of encouraging all these kids with sub-1000 SAT scores to dither around in college for a few years before they finally give up and start on a trade for which they have the skills.
Could it possibly be that lack of interest in this question might stem from lots of economists being employed to lecture in the general direction of students with 3 digit SAT scores? Okay, okay, forget I ever said that ... the notion that economists might be somewhat driven by self-interest is a violation of the Laws of Economics!
Posted by: Steve Sailer at May 17, 2007 7:10:18 PM
Oh yeah, certainly Loki. I'm not saying this is a GOOD thing, polygamy leads to social chaos. Some scholars say the dearth of wives for Greek males due to alpha female monopolization was one of the causes of the Trojan War. A mad desire to lie with Trojan women colors the Iliad.
"If companies are doing that, they are either stupid or they need to prove to the EEOC that they are not discriminating."
No, I gave a reason in my first comment - they got into Harvard. Companies couldn't care less what you study in college (unless its something like medicine or law naturally), with the rate at which technology changes these days most of what you learn will be obsolete in ten years anyway. They want brains, because high IQ people learn at a much quicker rate than medium/low IQ people, and companies love fast learners. And problem solvers, and everything else IQ measures.
An auditor friend of mine tells me that less than 5% of what she learned in college helped her out, computers do pretty much everything she learned, the rest was ingested on the job. They hired her because she went to a really good college, which indicated she had a high IQ, they couldn't care less what rubbish she actually learned!
Posted by: adrian at May 17, 2007 7:11:02 PM
"There are large schools where only 1% of the entering 9th graders will ever score 1000."
Jesus Christ. And Cali is America's future. And what's this I read, the Senate passed the bill! Well, Mark Steyn, looks like the US will go under before Old Europe. A petty victory, I know, but still...
Posted by: adrian at May 17, 2007 7:22:29 PM
guest:
I don't see quite how that follows. I think you're assuming that the returns on intelligence are higher in the place with the lower average intelligence. What if you need a certain pool of people of a certain level of intelligence to get substantial returns on intelligence?
I don't know if this is true, but it does seem to be true of education at some level--the returns available for literacy and numeracy are higher in a society where most people are literate and numerate, because the society becomes much, much richer.
Posted by: albatross at May 17, 2007 7:33:00 PM
"Most people who go to a university today would be much better suited with vocational training in many fields that involved reinforcing algebra and trig."
Totally agree. When I go off on my 'ideal model of American education/workforce entry' rant, people look at me as if I've swallowed a goat whole. In my opinion, we should be encouraging apprenticeships straight out of high school, reinforced by continuing education classes in support of that trade/skill and adjunct ad hoc coursework to complement one's trade or line of business. There are in fact not many jobs that require a 4-year college degree - even though the notion that a college degree is necessary for success has been inculcated in our societal conscience.
That doesn't mean that there is no place for the college experience or advanced education, but that it should not be seen as the end-all be-all of our workforce. Take this anecdotally from someone with a Masters in Music Composition currently working in a Financial Services IT Department. My background is not unique in my firm. Contrasted with the prototypical latter-20th century worker who enjoyed job stability and was largely encouraged to stay with a single company through retirement, this century's worker will need to be - above all else - adept at learning new things and quick to adapt to new sectors, business models, and technologies.
Posted by: fustercluck at May 17, 2007 7:47:27 PM
A university degree doesn't JUST signal IQ.
It also signals the ability to turn up and perform (at some level) for 3 or 4 years in a row.
It signals that you can stay somewhere for years without being expelled for behaviour that you might have got away with as a minor in school. And if in a "real degree" (Engineering, Law, Medicine, Science, Maths) it signals that you can actually put some real work in.
All these things aren't covered in an IQ test. Or in a degenerate public school.
What I don't understand is why Americans have so few private schools. In Australia (where private schools also compete against free government schools) the % of graduates from private schools is nearing 50%.
Sure a private school might cost thousands of dollars per semester, but have you worked out the cost of buying into the suburbs that have a good state school?
Posted by: doctorpat at May 17, 2007 7:55:03 PM
Steve,
IMO, a bigger cost is credential inflation and more general credentialism. If you can't get a decent job without a BA, everyone has to have one, but even worse, the guy who formerly would have had a BA to prove he was smarter than average and had learned more has to get an MS or PhD. You get a world (we're getting a world) where an MS is a normal entry-level qualification for pretty standard technical work.
That doesn't just waste time on students that aren't going to get much out of an extra four years of education. It wastes time all along the line, and makes it very hard for anyone not so credentialed to break into any new field. Sorry, all our other applicants have masters degrees, you only have a BS.
This interacts badly with antidiscrimination and other employment decision lawsuits and the need to document hiring decisions carefully. Yes, she's the best candidate, but how do we justify passing over two people with better credentials?
Posted by: albatross at May 17, 2007 8:02:38 PM
Right, a lot of the credentialism that's rampant today exists to avert discrimination lawsuits. A company declares that job X is only doable by college graduates, and, what do you know, there aren't many blacks and Hispanics with college degrees, so we'll just have to hire whites and Asians for the job in disproportionate to the overall work force.
Posted by: Steve Sailer at May 17, 2007 9:00:34 PM
Tyler,
If you came flat out and told the truth -- that IQ matters a lot in terms of overall economic productivity and that importing a lot of 90 IQ average illegal immigrants is the surest way to drive down economic performance per capita -- could you keep your job at the New York Times?
Posted by: Steve Sailer at May 17, 2007 9:03:43 PM
Hey, rich people live in nicer houses than poor people...so why not buy everyone a nice house, and they will be richer!
But seriously, high school dropouts are at a historical lows, and college attendance at historic highs. Have you ever been at a school like Ohio University, Bennington, University of West Virginia, etc? These places are filled with people who are getting absolutely nothing out of college than a 4 year spring break. And then the dumbing down of majors. Were you such a nerd in college that you didn't see that? Don't you know how 75% of college students just go to engage in 3 of the 4 Fs?
The following is the advice that the Wizard of Oz imparted to the Scarecrow, of which I think would satisfy those of Tyler's persuasion:
"Back where I come from we have Universities...seats of great learning, where men go to become great thinkers...and when they come out they think deep thoughts, and with no more brains than you have. BUT, they have one thing you haven't got...A DIPLOMA."
I have a friend who taught at Ohio State, and taught at a different school. His opinion was that the main problem with Ohio State is that too many kids are there because it has a good football team, and have absolutely no business in college. You can imagine trying to submit a paper to JET on Monday, then explain supply and demand to student accepted because they graduated high school on Tuesday. I'm all for better education, but more college? You are treating students too homogeneously.
Posted by: eric at May 17, 2007 10:19:05 PM
Note that I'm not saying our hypothetical engineer. . . That said, it'd still beat hustling for tips at a greasy-spoon.....
Posted by: Bernard Guerrero
I never said greasy spoon. Some waiters make as much as engineers and some engineers do such work while they're trying to replace the jobs they lost due to downsizing, which many older people are finding an impossible task. One former Lucent engineer I know is now looking for work in Brazil where he can at least find a job that will provide him a nice lifestyle. This is after over two years of looking here in the Northeast. A highly qualified and charming CAD/CAM designer I know spent the last three years tending the greens on a golf course after his company closed its doors. The job he found in his field pays about the same as his landscaping job.
Meanwhile, I also know people who are funtionally illiterate working in secure jobs like construction and dockwork that pay well into six figures. Thus, I have a hard time believing that simply educating our kids will make a better economy for this country when the country obviously doesn't value educated people that much in the first place.
Most kids from middle and lower income homes see this quite clearly and they aren't excited about jumping on the train to debt and unemployment. Many wind up in our new mercenary army and it's a wonder many more aren't going Columbine.
Posted by: johnc at May 17, 2007 10:43:38 PM
"The fact that we don't observe a huge brain drain from Belgium to Morocco or black Africa suggests that institutional factors are more important."
There is no migration to Africa for the same reason that there is no capital investment in Africa - insecurity of person and property rights. The black majority is pushing out the white minority all over the continent, look at Zimbabwe and South Africa.
I could point out a gazzilion other reasons not to migrate to Africa, but this is a family blog.
Posted by: adrian at May 18, 2007 6:00:41 AM
The black majority is pushing out the white minority all over the continent, look at Zimbabwe and South Africa.
Nope, they're pushed out by corrupt dictators and their cronies. The black majority has no say in it.
Posted by: guest at May 18, 2007 7:07:47 AM
Meanwhile, I also know people who are funtionally illiterate working in secure jobs like construction and dockwork that pay well into six figures.
I suspect that these jobs are overpaid due to artificial barriers to entry. What about all the functionally illiterate people who do not get a safe union job?
Posted by: guest at May 18, 2007 7:36:44 AM
Every South African I've met left because of the black crime rate and widespread intimidation. While Mugabes land seizures were more popular than the western press let on.
And I second Steve's question. Tyler, you must know where things are heading, in 20 years it'll be impossible to deny, so why do you stand athwart history?
Posted by: adrian at May 18, 2007 8:32:46 AM
Every South African I've met left because of the black crime rate and widespread intimidation. While Mugabes land seizures were more popular than the western press let on.
South Africa is a special case in some ways because of the legacy of Apartheid. And I can see how Mugabe's "land reform" would be popular among these blacks who were assigned the land, but most blacks are clearly losing out.
Posted by: guest at May 18, 2007 9:04:38 AM
It's official, Marginal Revolution has been taken over by racists. I don't feel like going into some point-by-point argument for why the rhetoric on this board is so completely racist, but it should be obvious to anyone with even an average IQ (you guys are so full of yourselves) that it is at least being implied that Latinos are incapable of high IQ's for genetic reasons. If data suggests Latino immigrants do not test as well as Asians, does that mean Latinos are somehow inherently incapable of improving? OF COURSE NOT, THAT'S CRAZY!!! However, that's precisely the line of reasoning put forward by the racists contributing on this thread.
Posted by: Kevin Baca at May 18, 2007 2:16:08 PM
I think a major problem with higher education is the fact that you pick your major before you've probably had any practical experience in the field. Hence the tons of people who are working in fields wholly unrelated to their educations.
In particular there is the common practice of young women with college degrees getting jobs as Administrative Assistants right out of school, and then continuing along their careers in Admin. Then they wonder why they are making so little compared to their male classmates! It's an especially amusing trend considering the feminist distain for "traditional" work roles has caused the extinction of 1-year Secretarial schools the likes of which my grandmother and her sisters attended in the 20s. My compatriots are getting a far more rotten deal, trading a year of school with very low tuition, for 4+ years of school at a far higher tuition, and the same boring job.
Posted by: Christina at May 18, 2007 2:23:54 PM
If data suggests Latino immigrants do not test as well as Asians, does that mean Latinos are somehow inherently incapable of improving?
Of course not. They just have to go through the same couple of thousand years of selection that the Chinese went through, or get some cheap genetic engineering.
TANSTAAFL.
Posted by: Loki on the run at May 18, 2007 3:41:52 PM
Of course not. They just have to go through the same couple of thousand years of selection that the Chinese went through, or get some cheap genetic engineering.
This truly reveals ignorance about even basic high school facts on human evolution and the history of the Americas.
Posted by: Julian at May 19, 2007 6:58:39 AM
Kevin:
There's one thread of a pretty complicated debate assuming that; not the majority of people accepting or even discussing it. I'm pretty skeptical of the "importing marching morons" argument against immigration, for a bunch of reasons. But I also suspect that if we started importing Chinese as cheap labor instead of Mexicans, virtually none of the people making this argument would be happy with that policy either.
Posted by: albatross at May 19, 2007 1:42:14 PM
. If data suggests Latino immigrants do not test as well as Asians, does that mean Latinos are somehow inherently incapable of improving? OF COURSE NOT, THAT'S CRAZY!!
Kevin, you are correct that the fact of low IQ by itself doesn't necessarily suggest genetics, but familiarity with the relevant literature shows it does under most non-extreme circumstances.
I also research transracial adoption, and Mexican-Americans adopted into and raised in white American homes perform significantly worse, on average, in school and on IQ tests, despite often self-identifying as white. This and a number of other related facts suggest that the IQ difference does indeed have a genetic component. Of course, even if it doesn't, the evidence still shows it is largely intractable - and that there are going to be real national consequences from this.
Posted by: Jason Malloy at May 20, 2007 4:37:33 AM
I think IQ has a lot to do with getting into a college and whatever else comes after that in your life. But sometimes people put way too much importance on IQ. Just because they have an IQ doesnt determine their personality and who they are. Would Harvard let a guy/women who has a high IQ but a terrible crime record into their school? I hope not because that makes no sense. I do agree that IQ is an important thing but it should never be the determining factor to anything.
Posted by: Katie at May 20, 2007 6:51:27 PM
Corporates are always giving priority to students whom they finished their degree in big institutions,Because companies don't want to waste their time by giving training to newly joined staffs if they selected from some other mid level colleges..But the fact is we have to give training to every new joiner invariable of institutions and to solve this problem we have to increase the value of our primary education...
Car Breakdown Cover
Posted by: sakthi at May 21, 2007 8:58:53 AM
This may add or subtract to people's theories: Asians have, on average, a lower IQ than whites with the same level of achievement. Which means that Asians much more efficiently use whatever IQ measures. Which also means whatever IQ measures isn't so important to achievement.
Posted by: JB at Mar 26, 2008 8:44:50 PM
This may add or subtract to people's theories: Asians have, on average, a lower IQ than whites with the same level of achievement. Which means that Asians much more efficiently use whatever IQ measures. Which also means whatever IQ measures isn't so important to achievement.
Posted by: JB at Mar 26, 2008 8:45:30 PM
