What Alan Greenspan and others are saying about these figures is that they are caused, in large part, by bad schools. A rising inequality of incomes follows directly upon a rising inequality of schools.

From where I sit, it seems entirely possible that the problem is a generally declining quality of schools, which affluent parents have the means to counter. Either way, the effect would be the same.

And here is Tom Mortenson again (author of What's Wrong with the Guys?:

• Having a bachelor’s degree is today far more closely correlated with financial success. According to Tom Mortenson, a higher education policy analyst, “a person by age 24 whose family income falls within the top quartile is ten times more likely to have received a bachelor’s degree than a person whose family who falls in the bottom quartile.” More startling is that in 1979, “…before the redistribution of higher education opportunity began, the difference was four times.”

Speaking of men, the fact sheet repeats the statistic that alarms me most:

number of females enrolled in college: 56% number of males enrolled in college: 44%

I find this horrifying. I've been dipping in and out of Lawrence Kotlikoff & Scott Burns's The Coming Generational Storm, and one of his main points has to do with the crisis you find yourself in once women flock into the marketplace and stop having at least 3 kids apiece. It's off-topic, but I'll have to post some of that discussion one of these days. It's pretty amazing. Kotlikoff says basically we went through a huge social revolution with major implications for what would happen down the line without even thinking about it!

Actually, maybe it's not so far off-topic. It's more mathematical blindness.

I always felt, instinctively, that one child wasn't enough. As a matter of fact, I felt 2 kids weren't enough.

But I felt that way because I had 3 siblings myself, and I wanted my kids to have the same thing. (Talk about the worries you have aren't the worries you get.)

It never crosed my mind that a whole lot of one-child families might be a problem for the entire country down the line.

I believe that's Kotlikoff's point. We had a massive change in number of children born to indiviual women without anyone stopping to think there might be consequences.


Alan Greenspan on rising inequality
rising inequality, part 2
rising inequality, part 3
median income families UCSC students
another statistics question
channeling the Wall Street Journal
Financial Times on US college costs
Economist on US higher ed
The Economist on rising inequality in universities

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