SNIP:
Education as the key to opportunity and upward mobility
March 20, 2015
Patrick Garry, RenewAmerica analyst
It is generally agreed that the most important social mobility function a government can perform – or promote – is education. In an open society, education gives each citizen the opportunity to advance on his or her own merit. Income can sustain a person's material life, but education can empower that person to shape and control one's life. But despite this importance, the American educational system is failing many young people. It is particularly failing the young people who need it most – the poor and disadvantaged.
The problems of the public school system
The woes of public education are well publicized, but still there is little reform. According to economist John Bishop, the middle class's economic problems have followed a decline in high school verbal scores, which dropped sharply between 1962 and 1980 and have not improved since. As the federal government recently reported, student vocabulary scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress continue to show no improvement.
At the primary and secondary level, government education spending has soared over the past decades, and yet student performance has not improved. Youth from poor and minority households continue to drop out of school at alarming rates, and many of those who do graduate from public high schools do not have the skills to continue their education or acquire a job with any meaningful future prospects.
There are many reform proposals being debated, just as there are many examples of how successful such reforms could be. In charter schools across the country, for instance, students are vastly outperforming their public school counterparts. But because of opposition from teachers' unions, the charter school movement faces a battery of obstacles. Union opposition has also made it very difficult for the regular public school systems to fire incompetent teachers.
Moreover, public educational spending may not be as focused as it should be. According to the 2012 report "The School Staffing Surge," the U.S. spends more than other nations on nonteaching staff. Between 1970 and 2010, for instance, nonteaching staff positions increased 138 percent nationally, while teaching positions increased 60 percent and student enrollment increased less than 8 percent.
The high costs of higher education
The crisis of higher education is intimately tied up with its soaring costs. And to fund these costs, tuition has also soared. Tuition at public four-year colleges has nearly quadrupled since 1980. To pay this tuition, students have gone into severe debt. And with this debt has come default.
Student borrowers are increasingly falling behind in their loan payments. The New York Federal Reserve has found that almost 30 percent of student loans are now delinquent. More than 600,000 borrowers who graduated in 2010 had defaulted by 2012, according to Education Department data. This was the sixth consecutive year of rising defaults.
Delinquency and default rates are higher for student loans than for other types of lending. Partly this reflects the nonexistent credit standards for these loans, which allow students with a high probability of dropping out of college to borrow on the same terms as good students.
According to the Federal Reserve, educational debt has surpassed every other borrowing category except home mortgages, reaching some $1.3 trillion this year. In the class of 2014, the average borrower had a debt of $33,000. And research from the Pew Research Center indicates that 20- and 30-year-olds are delaying marriage and childbearing because of their student loan debt.
Debt-enticing government policies
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Education as the key to opportunity and upward mobility