Rich Man, Poor Man
The stratification in American incomes is a reflection of the stratification in education. In an era when a four-year degree has become the ultimate ticket to middle-class security and prosperity, those who have a university degree are the most likely to move out of the income bracket from which they started. Education, however, is no longer the giant escalator moving everyone inexorably upward. America's pre-eminence as an industrial economy in the latter part of the 19th century and the early part of the 20th was built on mass secondary education. College education, stimulated by the GI Bill after World War II, did the same for America from the 1950s on. This is beginning to change at two levels, however. At the secondary level, American education is financed largely by local property taxes so that wealthy suburbs can afford superior schools, a reverse of the days when the best public schools were in the cities. In addition, the cost of a university education has soared. An Ivy League education is out of the reach of most middle-class and poorer students. State universities, which provide a college education for 80 percent of American college graduates, have been constrained by state budget cuts over the past five years, leading to increased fees in state colleges and squeezing out students from poor and low-income families. A student from the top income quartile is six times as likely to enter the workforce with a bachelor's degree as someone from the bottom quartile: 46 percent of 24-year-olds in the top quartile earned a bachelor's degree, compared with just 8 percent from the bottom income quartile--a disparity that, believe it or not, is even worse at our most elite universities. But how could it be otherwise when tuitions at four-year colleges have more than doubled, in real terms, since 1980, reinforcing the educational gaps created by class and race, which have regressed to where they were 30 years ago?
Human capital. The widening gap in educational opportunity is aggravated by the fact that upward socioeconomic mobility is often determined by family behavior, which includes finishing an education, getting and staying married, and finding and holding a good job. College-educated women tend to postpone children for their careers. But at the lowest income levels, more women have children younger, more have them out of wedlock, and more are without a job--whereas college graduates tend to marry other college graduates and typically enjoy the benefits of two good incomes, plus their educations.
Human capital, then, is critical. Income inequality is driven, at least in part, by human inequality, which is why we must now focus intensively on building human capital. Development of the brain function is affected by the number of words children hear from their parents, and the children of college-educated professionals hear roughly twice as many words as children of working-class parents and about three times as many as the children of welfare parents, limiting the ability of those children to develop the necessary brain function while providing dramatic advantages to the children of educated parents that continue to accumulate all along the trajectory of their academic accomplishment. That's why it is so necessary that governors and state legislators begin thinking about creating and enhancing preschool programs, because the earlier one starts learning, the better one continues to learn later on in life.
Americans still retain that great sense of optimism that derives from our faith in social mobility. To a limited extent, the concept still works. Despite the fact that very few from the bottom of society get college degrees, the majority of those who begin at the bottom still manage to climb at least one tier up the income scale, while about a third move up two or more tiers. But we must make climbing the ladder of success a reality for more and more Americans, and begin reducing the gap between the rungs. This means that governments, at all levels, must give more of a helping hand to poorer qualified college students, expand preschool education, and develop a tax system that no longer turns the American dream into an American nightmare.
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