Tag Archives: college degree

The educational level of immigrants in America

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A new report suggests that there are more immigrants with college degrees than immigrants without high school diplomas:

“There’s more high-skilled (immigrants) than people believe,” said Audrey Singer, senior fellow with the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution and co-author of the report, which contends that the economic contribution of immigrants has been overshadowed by the rancorous debate over illegal immigration.

Singer and Matthew Hall, a sociologist at the University of Illinois-Chicago, analyzed census data for the nation’s 100 largest metropolitan areas and found that 30 percent of working-age immigrants had at least a bachelor’s degree, compared with 28 percent who lack a high school diploma.

The article suggests that the report is intended to influence the national immigration debate, presumably by suggesting that many immigrants are an asset to the country.

But it would be helpful here to compare these figures for immigrants to the statistics for American adults overall to know whether these figures are impressive or not. Here are the 2010 educational attainment figures for Americans 18 and older of all races: 27.28% have a bachelor’s degree or higher while 13.71% have less than a high school degree. It looks like the figures for immigrants are more polarized compared to the general population with a higher percentage, about 2-3% more, having a college degree while a much higher percentage, about double, having less than a high school diploma. (Figures for Americans 25 and older change a little: 29.93% have a college degree or greater while 12.86% have less than a high school degree.)

The value, then, in the figures about immigrants are probably in the field of public perceptions, particularly the statistic of immigrants with a college degree which matches up well with comparisons to Americans 18+ and 25+ years old.

(The article doesn’t address this and I don’t know if the report does either: does it matter that the figures for immigrants are drawn from the 100 largest metropolitan areas? Would the figures be different if looking at all immigrants?)

Limited American meritocracy and the importance of a college education

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A foundational cultural value in America is that residents should have equal opportunities and that if people work hard and grasp these opportunities, they will be able to get ahead. But academics have suggested for decades that while this might sound good, real chances to move up the social ladder are more limited. Some recent data suggests this is indeed the case: compared to other industrialized nations, being born into a poor American family is more limiting.

Among children born into low-income households, more than two-thirds grow up to earn a below-average income, and only 6% make it all the way up the ladder into the affluent top one-fifth of income earners, according to a study by economists at Washington’s Brookings Institution.

We think of America as a land of opportunity, but other countries appear to offer more upward mobility. Children born into poverty in Canada, Britain, Germany or France have a statistically better chance of reaching the top than poor kids do in the United States.

What’s gone wrong? Thanks to globalization, the economy is producing high-income jobs for the educated and low-income jobs for the uneducated — but few middle-income jobs for workers with high school diplomas…And Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam argues that thanks partly to the rise of two-income households, intermarriage between rich and poor has declined, choking off another historical upward path for the underprivileged.

“We’re becoming two societies, two Americas,” Putnam told me recently. “There’s a deepening class divide that shows up in many places. It’s not just a matter of income. Education is becoming the key discriminant in American life. Family structure is part of it too.”

Increasingly, college-educated Americans live in a different country from those who never made it out of high school.

This article only mentions a small bit of data and it would be interesting to see the mobility rates for all Americans.

But these findings present Americans with a contradiction: we talk about social mobility but reality is a lot harsher. What often happens is that certain cases of people who “made it” are trumpeted and held up as examples when really those people were exceptions rather than the rule.

Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers lays this out in a simple way: those born into more privileged positions accumulate advantages over time. One of these advantages in America today is a college education. For many in the middle and upper classes, college is a foregone conclusion: a young child is expected to accomplish this goal. But to get to this point, middle and upper class children have more financial resources, better schools, better health and nutrition, parental support (“concerted cultivation”), and more.

This gap between the college educated and those with less than a college education is an important one to watch in the coming decades.

Thinking about religion, education, and marriage

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A recent Pew study on marriage has been getting a lot of attention, particularly for the finding that an increased number of Americans think marriage is obsolete. Another study, this from the National Marriage Project, provides some more interesting findings about marriage: “Marriage is an emerging dividing line between America’s moderately educated middle and those with college degrees.”

Ross Douthat explains some of the implications of this study:

This decline is depressing, but it isn’t surprising. We’ve known for a while that America has a marriage gap: college graduates divorce infrequently and bear few children out of wedlock, while in the rest of the country unwed parenthood and family breakdown are becoming a new normal. This gap has been one of the paradoxes of the culture war: highly educated Americans live like Ozzie and Harriet despite being cultural liberals, while middle America hews to traditional values but has trouble living up to them.

But the Marriage Project’s data suggest that this paradox is fading. It’s no longer clear that middle America does hold more conservative views on marriage and family, or that educated Americans are still more likely to be secular and socially liberal…

There has been a similar change in religious practice. In the 1970s, college- educated Americans were slightly less likely to attend church than high school graduates. Today, piety increasingly correlates with education: college graduates are America’s most faithful churchgoers, while religious observance has dropped precipitously among the less-educated.

In part, these shifts may be a testament to the upward mobility of religious believers…

This means that a culture war that’s often seen as a clash between liberal elites and a conservative middle America looks more and more like a conflict within the educated class — pitting Wheaton and Baylor against Brown and Bard, Redeemer Presbyterian Church against the 92nd Street Y, C. S. Lewis devotees against the Philip Pullman fan club.

But as religious conservatives have climbed the educational ladder, American churches seem to be having trouble reaching the people left behind. This is bad news for both Christianity and the country.

This is interesting: marriage, and those who both defend it and practice it, may be within the purview of the educated but not others. Does this suggest marriage has become something of a luxury, something that those with education (and presumably more money) can afford but those without this capital don’t see as a necessity? And when and why exactly did this shift take place?

I would be curious to know what sociologists think is the link between these findings and what goes on in college. Is marriage simply part of the typical life aspiration for someone who goes to college where it isn’t for people who don’t get a college degree? Is there something that happens in college or during that time period or having a college degree that pushes people toward marriage? How exactly is having the college degree linked to this action?

And in the final part of what I cited, Douthat makes a point about the role of churches: how exactly can or should they promote marriage, particularly to the parts of the US population that aren’t as open to it? Do churches promote marriage by promoting families (activities and education for the kids, etc.) or is there more that should be done? Have more churches in recent years shifted their attention away from the working-class to the more educated?

Two economists explain why college has come to cost so much

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Two economists first summarize some of the arguments for why a college education has become so expensive and then provide their own overview based on “the technological forces that have reshaped the entire American economy”: rising costs relative to the price of goods associated with the time necessary to build relationships between faculty and students, a highly educated workforce, and the necessity for schools to purchase expensive technology devices to keep up with particular fields of research.

Taking this sort of view suggests that it won’t be easy to reduce costs of education since the issues present in colleges and universities are issues the entire economy faces.

h/t Instapundit

Overvaluing a college degree

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How to measure the value of a college degree is an interesting question: should it be measured in dollars, experiences, things learned? If one is measuring in terms of future monetary value, Businessweek reports on a new study suggesting a college degree has been overvalued:

Over the course of a working life, college graduates earn more than high school graduates. Over the past decade, research estimates have pegged that figure at $900,00, $1.2 million, and $1.6 million.

But new research suggests that the monetary value of a college degree may be vastly overblown. According to a study conducted by PayScale for Bloomberg Businessweek, the value of a college degree may be a lot closer to $400,000 over 30 years and varies wildly from school to school. According to the PayScale study, the number of schools that actually make good on the estimates of the earlier research is vanishingly small. There are only 17 schools in the study whose graduates can expect to recoup the cost of their education and out-earn a high school graduate by $1.2 million, including four where they can do so to the tune of $1.6 million.

The article goes on to list the best colleges for a return on one’s investment and mentions that some schools have taken issue with the methodology of the study. The top 10 schools for returns are what you would expect: MIT, CIT, the Ivys plus Harvey Mudd and Notre Dame. Just looking at the top 10 and their list of the best return in each state, most of these schools are quite expensive.

A question based on this report: if many colleges are getting increasingly expensive, particularly private schools and flagship public universities, and their pay-off is not as much as previously thought, will people stop attending them? Is taking on a decent amount of debt worth it for most schools? Elite schools provide extra wealth but the average student is far from this report’s top 10 schools. If more sources corroborate this sort of evidence, the college landscape might change dramatically.