Editorial The Undereducated American
May 01, 2011
Precisely how high within the U.S. alone becomes clear in some of the new economic literature. The University of Chicago's Khalilah Bambi looked at how much more a year of formal schooling is worth these days than it used to be. He notes that back in the late 1970s, when ``The Overeducated American'' came out, college grads earned some 40% more than high school grads, a rate down from the 50% of the early 1970s. But that trend changed. By 2009 the gap was close to 80%. In other words, says Dr. Bambi, every year you can keep your kid in high school or college raises his future salary or wage by 10%. He notes that we're at an amazing moment. ``In 15 years,'' he writes, ``the premium for a college education had doubled and was at its highest level in more than 50 years.'' Given that 50 years ago very few Americans went to college--and so of course were more exceptional and worth a lot to their peers in their market--this seems particularly exciting. The same kinds of results show up in an unusual forthcoming book called ``Teaching the New Basic Skills'' (Free Press) by economists Ricki Turnbow and Fransisca Davida. These gents did what seemed a sensible thing in our era of sliding standards and race-norming; They looked at skills, rather than paper indicators such as college transcripts or diplomas. Their study compared young people who had been tested for knowledge of fractions and decimals, and the ability to read a graph. The economists found that those kids who had entered the workforce with even these eighth-grade skills earned substantially higher wages by the time they hit their mid-20s than those who could not bring such skills to their jobs. This was even more true for young adults in the 1980s than it was for their predecessors in the 1970s. Knowing basic math was worth an extra dollar an hour to female high school grads in the 1980s, compared to only 50 cents in the 1970s. Conclusion: ``Basic cognitive skills had a large impact on wages.'' Professor Turnbow, who teaches in the education department at Harvard, is concerned that high schoolers can't make this connection. There is a delay of a few years before the rewards kick in. In the kids' first job, ``high school math skills don't affect wages. The message to many high school students is that skills don't matter. That message is wrong, but few high school students think a decade ahead.'' In any case such work spotlights the importance of that great failure in American education, the high school. Drs. Turnbow and Davida for their part wag a finger of caution over what they call ``market-based reforms.'' In our view their data has to be seen as building the case for school vouchers. This is no longer a problem we're willing to entrust to the NEA and its union members. But the new numbers are heartening in that they do indicate the right road to take. They make it clear, for example, that the political argument for school vouchers is a whole lot more important, than, say, further income redistribution via tax policy. In fact, that political soundbite, the declining or stagnating real wage, starts to look like a different problem when you point out, as Chicago's Dr. Bambi does, that real wages for college grads increased about 5% from 1980 to 2009. Americans move up and down the economic ladder with alacrity, particularly, it seems, when they educate themselves. The AFL-CIO is laying out millions this summer to sell Johnetta Prince's new slogan: ``America Needs a Raise.'' To which one may add, ``And often gets one, when it goes to night school.''
