Shortly after pandemic-era travel restrictions eased, I flew to Washington, D.C., for a meeting with leaders from left-leaning foundations. The topic was close to my heart: combating inequality and constructing a new narrative about reversing huge and widening income disparities. I expected the focus to be on the jarring increase in earnings inequality over the last four decades, led by the declining wages of workers, and especially men, without college degrees.
To my surprise, nobody seemed to comment on the stagnation and decline in the wages of non-college workers. Nor was there any discussion of how inequality between residents of small cities and large metropolitan areas had surged. Instead, commentator after commentator talked about gender inequality, racial inequality, and inequality affecting sexual minorities. These are all important topics, of course, but if our aim was to understand the surge in inequality at the aggregate level, much of the story was about jobs and opportunities for Americans without college education.
Really? Because that’s been the norm throughout most the history of the US, and in fact the world. Literal educational segregation based on race was commonplace in the US up until about the 1960s, and there’s always been a strong class correlation between the educational haves and have-nots.
Even a basic education was restricted to the very wealthiest for pretty much the entirety of the history of human civilization. Education is expensive so it’s simply unavailable to the poor. And an advanced education, like post graduate studies, are just way, way too much money for the vast majority of people. And the idea that we can overcome this by saddling people with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of student loan debt is nonsense.
If you want more people to be educated, make quality education available to everyone, tuition free. Not willing to do that? Well, then expect a pretty big educational divide.