Amerika

Looks like we finally got some data on how useless American education has become, since lower degrees no longer convey much of an earnings boost:

There has been almost no increase in the increment to individual earnings for each year of schooling between K and 12 since 1980. It was roughly 6 percentage points per year in 1980, and it still is. The earnings increment for a B.A. has risen from 30.4 percent in 1980 to 50.4 percent in 2000 to 56.4 percent in 2017. The gain to a four-year graduate degree (a Ph.D., for example, but an M.D., J.D., or perhaps even an M.B.A.) relative to high school was approximately 57 percent in 1980, rising to 127 percent in 2017.

What would make graduate degrees so much more valuable? They are the new college degrees, since the voters decided that government needed to send more people to college because college degrees magically end poverty, so now a college degree is like a high school degree, and a high school degree is just as valuable now as it was in 1980.

If you want to end poverty, the conservative solution is to reduce costs, which means making government smaller, ending public education, ceasing all wealth transfer programs, cutting regulations to the bone, limiting lawsuits, and otherwise making it cheaper to start and run businesses. These cost savings are passed on to the consumer through competition.

The Left hates that idea because it makes their power unstable. When anyone can get ahead, the Left finds itself broadsided by people who are naturally talented, instead of the people it likes, who are blindly obedient to the System.

Instead, they prefer subsidies. These buy the poor into silence, and keep anyone who is not already super-wealthy from getting into the system, except through government where only the obedient are rewarded.

It’s just another control system. That is what Leftists want: people who struggle through thirty years of school, then fifteen years of career, to the point where they will never deviate from “the way things are done around here.”

Tags: college degrees, education, poverty