Education and Equality

(left) UC students Walk Out 2-weeks ago

Today my partner did a show and tell of her job to our local 1st grade class. She is an "animal doctor" and the kids were mesmerized. All 60 of them, 3 classes, individually listened, through stethascope to the heart of a dog belonging to one of the teachers. While the teachers had a good time and the kids too, I recognized the main goal of the teachers: get the kids to realize that a "good education leads to a good job."

I'm a part of an educational mixed-marriage. While we were both from working class families where money was always tight, I left school at 16, my partner at 29. Two weeks ago we took our marriage and our 3-year old to join 5,000 students at the University of California participate in one of the largest student and worker walk-outs in many, many years. These students are facing a 32% hike in tuition. The workers are facing losing their jobs altogether.

Fifty years ago, US capitalism saw the need to have an educated workforce. For a whole period US society appeared to be becoming more equal. In 1945 only 6% of the workforce had a college degree. Today 29% of workers have graduated college. Something changed. US capitalism passed the GI Bill after World War Two and opened the doors for a practically-free college education. An educated workforce was necessary for the increased number of managers and researchers necessary for the post war changes in the US economy. Those days now seem to be gone. There are increasingly few differences between the cost of an education at a public University and that of a private college.

And has a college education truly increased equality in the US? Between 2000 and 2008, according to Mathew Slaughter, Associate Dean at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, only workers with a professional postgraduate degree saw any increase in their wages. That's only 2% of the workforce. So for the 98% whose wages fell, well, I guess that's a kind of equality. But not the kind of equality we're all fighting for. All other college graduates and even those with PhDs saw falls in their incomes over the last 8 years.

The last word of this blog entry goes to the most popular of government departments: the Inland Revenue Service: no friend of the workers. Their most updated data from 2007 points out that the top 1% of income 'earners' made 23.5% of total income earned. This was the highest ever and was the continuation of a 30-year trend of the rich increasingly becoming richer at the expense of the rest of us. So that rise in those people with college degrees definitively did not make America more equal.