Insecurities for the Bottom 90% of the US Population – part 5 – Education

Education

Education has long been a central American value and seen as a key to improving one’s position in life. Parents struggle to find and enroll their children in the best public schools available. However, there are enormous differences in the resources available because almost all K-12 education is funded by property taxes. For example, Allentown, PA, spent about $14,854 per pupil in 2019, while the town of Salisbury to the immediate south spent $22,841 per pupil. That is 54% more. This is an example of how your postal ZIP code determines the quality of education available.¹

Looking at the issue at the national level, a recent study provides a distribution of educational insecurity that looks startlingly familiar. The SAT for college admissions has been widely used for decades. A score of 1300 and up provides a high likelihood of entrance to elite colleges and universities. A recent study², summarized by the NY Times (see chart below),³ displays a shocking similarity to the grotesqueries of US income distributions.

The rich send their children to elite private schools and provide intensive tutoring—hardly a level playing field.

Gaining admission to the top colleges is a precursor to top leadership positions throughout society. This is part of the self-perpetuating nature of wealth and income inequality today.

“Leadership positions in the United States are held disproportionately by graduates of a small number of highly selective private colleges. Less than half of one percent of Americans attend Ivy-Plus colleges (the eight Ivy League colleges, Chicago, Duke, MIT, and Stanford). Yet these twelve colleges account for more than 10% of Fortune 500 CEOs, a quarter of U.S. Senators, half of all Rhodes scholars, and three-fourths of Supreme Court justices appointed in the last half-century….”⁴

Even though plenty of evidence shows that pre-primary(early childhood) education provides kids with a genuine boost in learning the skills needed to succeed in school and life, in 2019, only 47% of 3 and 4-year-olds were enrolled in public or private preschool.⁵

In recent decades, the cost of higher education has skyrocketed and become a significant source of debt and anxiety. Combining these costs with the meager pay for the bottom 80% of the population, education almost becomes a hazard. Again, it must be noted that conservative small-government policies have caused funding for higher education at public universities to fall significantly over the past decades. This means these schools that once were quite affordable now require substantial tuition fees. This is not to be explored here, but is an amazing and weird phenomenon. What other industry can raise its prices in multiples of the inflation rate for decades?

Rising education costs have been funded by students taking on personal debt, which is now a significant stressor in the lives of millions. One can only suspect that higher education managers look at the availability of government-backed student loans and grants as an endless source of funding to support their ever-larger budgets.

US teachers at all levels are underpaid, underappreciated, and overworked. The US “…pays them, on average, less than 60 percent of the salaries of similarly educated professionals…..”⁶ US higher education is perhaps worse, with an enormous growth in adjunct faculty who are poorly paid and have little job and schedule security.

1. “How ZIP Codes Determine the Quality of a Child’s Education,” AP NEWS, April 28, 2021, https://apnews.com/article/education-tax-reform-pennsylvania-pa-state-wire-technology-1d856cd98d4c491e8443576b3a817740.
2. Raj Chetty, David Deming, and John Friedman, “Diversifying Society’s Leaders? The Determinants and Causal Effects of Admission to Highly Selective Private Colleges” (Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, July 2023), https://doi.org/10.3386/w31492.
3. Claire Cain Miller and Francesca Paris, “New SAT Data Highlights the Deep Inequality at the Heart of American Education,” The New York Times, October 23, 2023, sec. The Upshot.
4. Chetty, Raj, David Deming, and John Friedman. “Diversifying Society’s Leaders? The Determinants and Causal Effects of Admission to Highly Selective Private Colleges.” Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, July 2023. https://doi.org/10.3386/w31492.
5. Kevin McElrath, Kurt Bauman, and Eric Schmidt, “Preschool Enrollment in US: 2005-2019,” accessed August 31, 2022, https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/newsroom/press-kits/2021/paa/paa-2021-presentation-preschool-enrollment-in-the-united-states.pdf.
6. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2017/09/14/teachers-in-u-s-paid-nearly-60-percent-less-than-other-professionals-report-finds/