by James A. Bacon
The wealth gap in the United States is wide and getting worse. One presumed remedy, broadly accepted across the ideological spectrum, is to equalize educational opportunities for all. It may come as a surprise — it certainly did to me — to find that educational inequality, as measured by the number of years of education, has dramatically declined in the United States since 1960, even as the gulf in income has grown ever wider.
The chart to the left, taken from “Educational Inequality in the United States: Methodology and Historical Estimation of Education Gini Coefficients,” shows the trend lines. (Click on chart for more legible image.)
What could explain the divergence? One possible explanation is the decline of labor unions in the private-sector economy. Americans could earn a solid middle-class income in 1960 as working in the unionized work force even without completing a high school education. Another factor may be the declining return on investment in a college degree. Yet another explanation may be that the path to super wealth in today’s entrepreneurial economy requires attributes other than a college education.
Whatever the explanation, this chart calls into question the mindless acceptance of the idea — propagated by politicians as diverse as President Obama and Gov. Bob McDonnell — that increasing the number of college graduates will necessarily lead to an increase in income. If higher education has reached the point of diminishing returns, we may have more productive ways to invest students’ time and taxpayers’ money than pushing an increasing percentage of the population into college.
