Why Education Is Not an Economic Panacea
…That common wisdom consists not just of the fact that income inequality is real and rising—Bush is right, it is—but that income inequality results primarily from differences in education. Whereas someone with only a high-school diploma could once earn a middle-class living by, say, working in a factory, those days, or so the thinking goes, are over. In the new, postindustrial knowledge economy, the job market rewards those with an education and punishes those without one.
Remarkably, this faith in the power of education to make or break lives traverses the political spectrum. Indeed, a surprising consensus has grown up in the United States around the belief that what causes poverty and economic inequality is lack of education, and that what will fix those ills is more and better education. Crucially, the conventional wisdom explains not just why some people get ahead, but also justifies why some people are left behind. And though they may agree on little else, liberals, conservatives, and cameramen can nevertheless agree on this.
One could quote many authorities—and any number of ordinary people—who hold such views about the economic power of education. And these people are not wrong. Those who have advanced degrees earn more than those who have bachelor’s degrees, who in turn earn more than those who have high-school degrees, on down the line. And the returns on education, as economists put it, have increased in recent years. In short, education pays, and pays more than ever. If so, it must seem as if the best way to get ahead is to get an education. Unsurprisingly, then, nothing dominates our thinking about poverty and economic inequality so much as the belief that education (or lack of it) causes these problems, and thus that education (and more of it) will fix them.