SEEKING A SHOT AT THE GOOD LIFE
Inequality is holding economies back. Education and training could be part of the solution to levelling the uneven playing field
ANYONE who believes the system is rigged would have experienced a grim “told you so” moment this month when federal prosecutors charged 33 parents who’d bought into a scheme to ensure their children spots at elite universities.
The implicated included an Oscar-nominated actress, a co-chairperson of international law firm Wilkie and a former chief executive. Their alleged crimes were as varied as conspiring to fix test scores, bribing coaches and falsifying athletic records.
What they all had in common was wealth.
The indictment underlined how unfair US higher education has become.
Success in the modern economy often seems to be more an accident of birth than a reward based on individual ability and achievements. It’s an impression that cuts deep, given how crucial education is to economic mobility.
College attainment is a decent proxy for a shot at the good life, at least in the US. Four-year graduates earn about twice as much a week as high school drop-outs and have better health outcomes.
Non-hispanic white adults are almost 60 percent more likely to have graduated from college than their black counterparts, Census Bureau data show.
The Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education finds that nearly 90 percent of high school graduates from affluent families enroll in college versus 60 percent in the bottom quarter of income.
Unequal access to opportunities is a global story. Children are generally more likely to earn incomes similar to their parents in nations with higher income inequality. Kids in Panama and Madagascar, where income is unequal, are more likely to stay poor if they’re born poor.
In countries where earnings are fairly evenly spread, such as Denmark and Finland, they’re more likely to be masters of their own fates.
America is further toward the high-inequality, high-immobility end of the scale than other advanced economies.
Such stickiness leads to a problem that International Monetary Fund economist Shekhar Aiyar calls “talent misallocation”.
When high-aptitude people are shunted to the margins of society, it is unfair – and bad for growth, he says. Countries with high income inequality paired with low mobility see slower economic progress.
Jonathan Greenberg and Tyrell Jackson graduated from high school with big dreams of working in music.
But their stories demonstrate how different life can look depending on the world you were raised in.
Greenberg, 43, grew up in an affluent suburb of Boston, the highachieving son of two white parents.
His father is a physician. If there was ever a question around college at his private high school, it wasn’t whether he would go but where? Brown University was Greenberg’s answer. His parents paid his tuition.
He graduated with degrees in music and philosophy – and no debt.
He worked relatively low-paying but résumé-padding jobs. After a Fulbright-administered teaching gig in Austria, he pursued a fellowship funded PHD in musicology from the University of California at Los Angeles. He later earned a second Master’s in library science, from the City University of New York at Queens College.
Today, he and his wife hold fulltime, salaried jobs and are raising their nine-year-old son in Queens.
He’s not rich, but he has a good work-life balance and feels like he’s making a contribution.
Jackson, 31, grew up in New Jersey, the black son of a single mother who hadn’t graduated from college but held down a decent job. Lacking guidance and familiarity with the higher-education system, he enrolled in a community college musical theatre programme.
He was living with family and working at a restaurant in Newark’s airport to support himself, commuting an hour and a half from home to get there.
Getting from work to college took another hour.
Not long after classes started, he was kicked out of his home. After about a month, Jackson dropped out. He was $2 000 in debt, with no college credits and nowhere to live.
In the 13 years since, he’s held jobs as a waiter, a singer with a Motown-style band, and a nursing assistant. He’s attending a free programme at Per Scholas, which provides job training in technology. When he’s finished, he hopes to land a job that will allow him to help people and pay rent.
For now, he calls a Bronx men’s shelter home.
While Greenberg’s upbringing laid a foundation for his evolving dreams – one built on familial and community expectations, with an emphasis on education – Jackson had less to fall back on.
First-generation and lowerincome students often have trouble navigating the opaque higher education system.
In fact, poorer students who perform well on standardised tests generally don’t apply to selective colleges and universities, according to research by Stanford economist Caroline Hoxby, even when they’re highly qualified.
College admission is part of the mobility story. Elite college graduates dominate Chile’s top corporate jobs, for example, but women and poor men who attend top schools aren’t among those with better access to the most elevated roles.
The country’s preferential network goes beyond alma mater, suggests economist Seth Zimmerman of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, to favour men who went to pricey private schools.
Education and training can help to level an uneven playing field. It’s an imperfect relationship, but places with educational mobility – where parental education is less likely to determine a child’s education – also tend to have better income mobility, World Bank researchers find.
Terri Collins, 31, is hoping to break through her circumstances. She was raised by her mother, who worked on and off as a home health aide, but mostly they lived on her grandmother’s pension. Collins was a good pupil who wanted more than Brooklyn’s Flatbush neighbourhood seemed to offer.
She got a scholarship to study English at Union College in New York, but it wasn’t enough to secure her path to prosperity. Her grandmother died before she left for college, and her mother died while she was in school. At her
2011 graduation, Collins found herself alone, grieving, and with few prospects in a tough economy.
“My opportunities were limited to whatever I could land a job in,” she says.
Collins is living in Harlem and studying at Per Scholas, where’s she’s completing a 15-week training programme in IT Support. She goes to class five days a week then clocks a shift at a Trader Joe’s.
Per Scholas has a good track record: About 85 percent of students at its Bronx location graduate, and 80 percent of them report getting jobs related to their training within the year. New York City’s tech industry, like the nation’s, is thirsty for qualified workers.
Participants in the philanthropy funded programme have to fall below 200 percent of the federal poverty level to qualify, and admission is selective – only 25 percent of applicants get in.
But such approaches could help reduce America’s twin gaps: opportunity and skill.
Collins hopes it’s a ticket to a fulfilling career. |