Education Gap Growing Between the Rich and The Rest of US

A great post by Paul KrugmanMarch 12, 2012, 6:04 PM

Building A Caste Society

Thomas Edsall has an excellent piece on growing educational stratification in America, specifically how access to higher education is increasingly being denied to the children of the less affluent. And as he says, this is very much about policy. One graphic he links to (ppt) but doesn’t include is just stunning: here’s the declining value of Pell grants compared with college costs:

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/12/building-a-caste-society/?smid=tw-NytimesKrugman&seid=auto

Here is a portion of Edsall's piece in the NY Times:

March 12, 2012, 12:31 AM

The Reproduction of Privilege

By THOMAS B. EDSALL

Instead of serving as a springboard to social mobility as it did for the first decades after World War II, college education today is reinforcing class stratification, with a huge majority of the 24 percent of Americans aged 25 to 29 currently holding a bachelor’s degree coming from families with earnings above the median income.

Seventy-four percent of those now attending colleges that are classified as “most competitive,” a group that includes schools like Harvard, Emory, Stanford and Notre Dame, come from families with earnings in the top income quartile, while only three percent come from families in the bottom quartile.

Anthony Carnevale, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce and co-author of “How Increasing College Access Is Increasing Inequality, and What to Do about It,” puts it succinctly: “The education system is an increasingly powerful mechanism for the intergenerational reproduction of privilege.”

These anti-democratic trends are driven in part by a supposedly meritocratic selection process with high school students from the upper strata of the middle class performing better on SAT and ACT tests than those from poor and working class families.

Contrary to those who say that this is the meritocracy at work, differences in scores on standardized tests do not fully explain class disparity in educational outcomes. When high-scoring students from low-income families are compared to similarly high-scoring students from upper-income families, 80 percent of the those in the top quarter of the income distribution go on to get college degrees, compared to just 44 percent of those in the bottom quarter.

Post-secondary education is not, in fact, functioning to dissolve long-standing class hierarchies.

[goto: http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/12/the-reproduction-of-privilege/?src=me&ref=general ]