The first thing one should say is that our system does reward hard work, up to a point. Other things equal, those who put more in will earn more.
But a lot of other things are, in fact, not remotely equal. These days, America is the advanced nation with the least social mobility (pdf), except possibly for Britain. Access to good schools, good health care, and job opportunities depends on lot on choosing the right parents.
So when you hear conservatives talk about how our goal should be equality of opportunity, not equality of outcomes, your first response should be that if they really believe in equality of opportunity, they must be in favor of radical changes in American society. For our society does not, in fact, produce anything like equal opportunity (in part because it produces such unequal outcomes). Tell me how you’re going to produce a huge improvement in the quality of public schools, how you’re going to provide universal health care (for parents as well as children, because parents in bad health affect childrens’ prospects), and then come back to me about the equal chances at the starting line thing.
The report Krugman links to includes this graph:
Note that they’re measuring inter-generational mobility by comparing fathers to sons. They have a legitimate reason for doing that — good data about lifetime earnings is available for fathers and sons, but not for other measures, and without good matching datasets you can’t do international comparisons well — but it’s still annoying.
So what does that difference mean, in practice? Basically, in the USA and Britain, it generally takes about six generations for the advantages of being born in a wealthy family to fade out; in countries like Canada and Denmark, that advantage fades after just three generations.
More importantly, the economic floor in the US is just much stickier than it is in other countries:
Starting at the bottom of the earnings ladder is more of a handicap in the United States than it is in other countries. What is new and striking about these findings, however, is a particularly high amount of stickiness at the bottom for American males.
Specifically, men born into the poorest fifth of families in the United States in 1958 had a higher likelihood of ending up in the bottom fifth of the earnings distribution than did males similarly positioned in five Northern European countries—42 percent in the United States, compared to 25 to 30 percent in the other countries (see top half of Table 1).
Furthermore, in the United States, only 8 percent make the “rags to riches” climb from bottom to top rung in one generation, while 11 to 14 percent do so in other countries.
However , when making this comparison, it is important to note that the Americans who climb from bottom to top in one generation are climbing further in absolute dollars than their counterparts in Europe, given the broad income dispersion in the United States. Still, according to this measure, rising on one’s own bootstraps is harder in the United States than it is in several northern European countries.
So in the US, we essentially have accepted more people being stuck in poverty, in exchange for the chance for the few who work their way out of poverty being richer.
Or have we accepted that? Maybe we haven’t — because accepting that exchange would mean being aware that it exists, and Americans lack awareness. One of the most striking things in the report Krugman links to is that, although Americans have less opportunity than most people who live in wealthy countries, we believe we have more opportunity. Americans, more than anyone else, believe that hard work matters and the family you were born into doesn’t. In contrast, countries that actually provide more opportunity, also believe that family wealth matters more to outcomes. It’s all very ironic and annoying, if you ask me.
So in the US, we essentially have accepted more people being stuck in poverty, in exchange for the chance for the few who work their way out of poverty being richer.
How is 52% of a group “the few”?
here’s a question:
how much of that discrepency is because of the greater [at least, apparantly greater] DOWNWARD mobility of the US?
as in; men who’s fathers made MORE than they make today, because those jobs are gone, mostly gone, or so devalued that they no longer pay a living wage? i’m thinking mostly of the various industrial jobs that have fled, for various reasons – but also “middleclass” things like professors and teachers [and the current USELESSNESS of high school diplomias, Associate’s diplomias, and the current devalueing of BACHELOR’S degrees, too]
i remember being SHOCKED when i got married, in 1994, at how much my then-husband got paid. in the AIRFORCE. he was an Airman 1st Class [E-4 rank]. and BEFORE BAS and BAQ [“Basic allowance for sustenance/quarters] he made less than $800 a month. i mean, getting MARRIED *doubled* his “pay” [because non-married BAS and BAQ assume that the person will live on base, getting free food and housing; once married or having a child, they look at the average cost of housing in your area, and then give a BAQ that’s now supposed to pay for JUST RENT. and since rent/mortage at the time, where we lived, averaged $700, and BAS was assumed to be $100/month/person… we got a bit more the $900 in BAQ and BAS]
that’s in 1994 dollars, of course –
but the SHOCKING thing, to me, was that when my DAD was an A1C, his pre-BAQ/BAS pay [in 1974] was$500 [in 1974 dollars]
so in those 20 years, the base pay was raised by $300 a month – which means that the base pay went DOWN.
and that happens all over the place. my oldest step sister lived in the same, rent-controlled apartment in Oceanside [Monteray] CA, for $900 a month, for 14 years. she moved out – and the next people to move were SO PLEASED to “only” pay $2300 a month!
i can’t get the PDF to open – were these things included in their data, or was it JUST comparing, say, income in the 70s to income today?
But that graph does not measure opportunity. It measures outcomes. It makes the presumption that you can measure opportunity by measuring outcomes. That’s not necessarily true.
Denelian, what’s your basis for stating that batchelors’ degrees are devalued. What does that mean? Over what period of time?
Presuming you mean something along the lines of “average inflation-adjusted wage for a B.A./B.S. holder has gone down over ‘x’ years”, what do you think the reason is for that? I’d say a couple of reasons are 1) a lot more people are earning batchelors’ degrees, especially B.A.s, and are getting jobs that don’t require them but that the employers want B.A.s for because they’re cheap on the market, showing that the laws of demand and supply haven’t been repealed, and 2) there are a lot more people getting B.A.s in disciplines that have little application to employment.
For that last I’m minded of the NYT article about a woman bemoaning that she had no way of paying back her $100K of student loans because she couldn’t get a job that paid enough. In the 9th paragraph on the 2nd page you find out she got a B.A. in Women’s Issues and Religious Studies. I’d guess you couldn’t even get a B.A. in that 20 years ago. I’m sure she enjoyed her studies, but choices are not consequence-free and nobody owes you a living. If you’re going to borrow $100K to get a degree you really ought to see what kind of job an employer would consider you qualified for and what it is expected to pay. If a larger and larger fraction of people in the “All B.S./B.A. earners” have degrees like that, no wonder that the average amount of money that B.A./B.S. holders are being paid is going down. What would be interesting would be to track what the value of particular kinds of degrees are, and what the changes have been in their value over the years. For example, I bet a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering has held its value pretty well. A B.A. in English, maybe not. A B.A. in Women’s Issues and Religious Studies probably never had much value to begin with and hasn’t exactly improved over the last 10 years. Note we’re talking monetary value here, not anything subjective.
When people said “Getting a batchelors degree is a key to a middle-class life” I don’t think they meant “Regardless of what that degree is.”
RonF;
i was specifically basing it on “Business” type Bachelors – let me explain.
13 years ago, i was hired into Credit Card Customer Service at BankOne [no longer exists].
to advance to a “supervisor” position, one had to have an AA or AS related to the job – so, a marketing, accounting, business Associates. to become a “manager” one needed to have a Bachelors [again, a RELATED bachelors]. for the next higher level, one needed a Masters.
now? to get that C/S level job, the WANT a Bachelors. [they are accepting people with Bachelors in the aboved silly women’s studies – not all women’s studies ARE silly, mind. there are lots of jobs for them but you have to do it RIGHT. it appears your example above did it wrong… erm. digression sorry]
i have seen people with SILLY bachelors get hired over people with 10+years of experience. i have questioned it, too – and been told that, anymore, a Bachelor’s is seen as a High School diploma was seen 40 years ago…
now, i totally grant that this is not true across the board. but, aside from specific job types [engineers being one – but one that so many people could not thrive in…] they are “worth less”.
take my [hypothetical – i have 4 classes left, that i cannot physically do at this time] DOUBLE degrees – in 4 classes, i’ll have a BA in Political Science and a BS in Journalism.
this seemed like a GREAT idea – i want to get at least a Master’s in each [and it DOES NOT cost more to get a double degree, again if you do it right. i had to take ONE extra class … and that cost me no more than NOT taking that one extra class] because my ultimate goal was to work for the State Department, doing inbound news coalation.
OTHER than said state job [which has a LOT more competition that i was told it has] and OTHER than further education, these Bachelor’s? are almost useless. you can NOT be hired as a journalist on just a BS alone – you either need at LEAST a Master’s, or a LOT more experience than you get… there are only so many internships that COUNT as “experience” [at my LARGE college, with about 6,000 journalism majors, there are less than 50 internships that actually count as “experience” in JOURNALISM]
*shrug* it’s been a slow decline, and it STARTED with high school diplomas no longer being worth anything. the cost of education goes up [$100,000 for FOUR YEARS?!?!?!?!? what the holy hell!] the cost of NOT having the education goes up faster. especially when SO MANY are wanting to work IN acedemia – told that it’s possible in fact, when each year the number of actual tenures go DOWN, more and more. at my particular college, if you aren’t currently tenured, you’re like to NEVER be tenured – because they can always ALWAYS make doctorate students teach pretty much everything, for 1/4 of what they’d pay a real professor [NOT including benefits]
outside of academia – Bachelors that USED to be worth getting [English, History, Art, etc] because one could be a teacher with them, are NOT worth it – one must first get said BA THEN get a Masters in “Education” [which is almost always essentially STARTING OVER. because the curriculum in most states is VERY different for an education degree, and many people are skipping that original BA, which means they can ONLY teach grades k-5…]
then one becomes a teacher – and, unless one is in a program [with not that many open slots] for teaching in “disadvantaged” areas, they aren’t paid enough to both live AND pay off their school debt. US-wide, the AVERAGE yearly salary for teachers in 30grand. but a new teacher? makes about 20k. i have a friend who just got her Teaching Cert, and she makes MORE on disability than she can make teaching – she quite literally cannot afford a job [she’s figuring it out – she wants to work. hell, i’d LOVE to work. sigh]
it’s becoming harder to pay off those loans… because we have to take out bigger loans, because the cost of going to school keeps going up while the VALUE is going down.
Credential creep, plus tuition inflation from federal loan programs. This is the inevitable result of attempts to make everybody above average.
There’s an alternate explanation, at least for part of this: Rightly or wrongly, Americans tend to value a high payoff more than other people. So we structure our goals and beliefs around those values.
Imagine that you can choose:
(a) a lottery ticket which costs $1 and has a 1% chance of paying $100,
or
(b) a lottery ticket which costs $1.25 and has a 1-in-a-million chance of paying $1 million.
Statistically, you should always choose (a). But a lot of people will choose (b). Especially here.
My understanding is that Americans are more like this than are other countries: we value the possibility of extreme benefit, even if it is almost never going to happen.
So this part:
Is really critical. It’s part of why a lot of folks will blow their chances at stability and a low-but-better-than-they-have-now wages in exchange for a minuscule chance at striking it rich. In fact, it’s part of our national cultural history: “striking it rich,” for example, usually was talking about selling everything you owned and going for a mining stake. Gambling with your life, in some cases.
As a result, this part:
doesn’t really ring true. Since we place added value on the chance to get extraordinarily wealthy, we seem to be aware of the tradeoffs–we’re just applying our own bizarre weightings to the various sides. We do have more opportunity of the type we value most even though we have less statistical benefit overall.
G-N-W, I’d agree that it’s possible that this is a trade-off that Americans have consciously made, but without some kind of evidence of that, I’m not sure the rest of your argument holds together.
The specific quote from the cited report is, “Americans believe that the opportunities for moving up the economic ladder are greater in the United States than they are in other countries.” That’s simply not true. Your response seems to be that Americans are consciously weighing alternatives and are willing to trade a lower chance of moving up the economic ladder in return for a greater reward, but that’s not really a possible interpretation of the quote.
If it said something that could refer to either theory, something like, “Americans believe that the United States has a more fair chance of rewarding efforts to move up the economic ladder than other countries,” then I think your argument might hold some weight, though, again, I think it would need some evidence behind it.
Basically, the report seems to say both that 1) Americans believe they have more social mobility than other countries and 2) Americans have less social mobility than other countries. Saying, “Americans are okay having less social mobility than other counties because the payoff is bigger,” may well be true but it doesn’t address #1.
—Myca
But it might be true, Myca. Measured outcomes does not necessarily represent opportunity. It is perfectly possible to have the United States provide greater *potential* mobility while delivering less *actual* movement, in which case the psychology of the American people could be just as G&W described it.
RonF:
Do you have a preferred method of measuring opportunity?
The thing is, especially as compared to other countries, if you don’t accept that there’s an opportunity gap at play here, you still have to explain the social mobility gap somehow. I mean, if poorer Americans have the same chance of getting ahead as poorer Danes, why don’t they? You end up kind of stumbling into a sort of American-anti-exceptionalism argument, in which the lack of social mobility is because Americans are less driven, lazier workers than Danes. I don’t think that makes much sense. (Of course, I don’t think that an argument premised on American workers being more driven and industrious than (say) Brazilians makes sense either.)
Alternately, maybe America has reached a point of perfectly equal opportunity, and every single other country on the list (Except the UK!) are artificially inflating the opportunities for social mobility through government programs that mitigate the inherent virtues of the wealthy and the inherent flaws of the poor. Maybe, but it still seems to be an awful reach.
I mean, look, I agree that this isn’t measuring opportunity in some sort of Platonic way, but 1) I’m not sure what that would even look like, and 2) it is showing that the way Americans think about our chances of social mobility don’t seem to match up to the facts.
—Myca
Sure, sure, there’s just no evidence for it, like I said.
—Myca
Myca,
You may well be right. I don’t know of any evidence off the top of my head–this isn’t my field–but going on my oft-shoddy memory I am reasonably sure that I’ve seen evidence somewhere. IOW I don’t think I’ve just conjured that proposition out of thin air; I’m fairly certain that I was convinced of it, somewhen, somehow.
That said:
Well, that depends on how people interpret and respond to “opportunities for moving up the economic ladder,” right? (or whatever the survey language was.) Which is sort of my point.
Some people think of “opportunity for advancement” logically. They’d rather work at a company where they are likely to make middle manager even if they’ll never make director status; after all, they are only giving up a 1% chance of being director anyway.
Other people think of “opportunity for advancement” in
Hmm. i’m not saying thesurvey is wrong, exactly; i’m just suggesting that it might (not HAS, but MIGHT) have neglected a different tack.
Don’t some incredible proportion of people believe that their skills and intelligence are highly above average? And isn’t that ALSO one of those traits which has a higher rate in America?
That ties in to my point. If you think you’re way above average, you’ll be more likely to prefer a scheme which rewards top performers, even at the expense of middle- or low-level performers. You will judge such a scheme as “fair” or even “better,” although it may on average be worse.
she got a B.A. in Women’s Issues and Religious Studies. I’d guess you couldn’t even get a B.A. in that 20 years ago
What a funny coincidence, that the illustration you chose was of a lefty-sounding discipline. Nice use of the chance to evoke a shibboleth of the right about higher education.
(College degree offerings are getting more conservative in my experience, not more liberal – 50 years ago majors like Philosophy, English Literature, and Religious Studies were huge departments turning out degrees that were well-respected. Now they’re seen as a suicide move by those who think the point of college is a kind of white collar vocational ed program.)
Just to balance the scales, let’s look at something that doesn’t fit so neatly into the “liberal pinheads and their crazy, wacky ethnic and gender studies” narrative: Law degrees.
Given that I have a close friend who graduated from an extremely highly-ranked law program well over a year ago and has not been able to find steady employment in all that time, this caused me a pang of empathy when I read it. I have loans that are approaching law school levels, but I have at least been working semi-steadily since finishing my classes other than being unemployed for 6 months last year, though my salary opportunities in Marriage and Family Therapy, even in academia, bear little resemblance to the salaries of lawyers. But, you know, getting that PhD was supposed to be a good bet for creating economic security for myself….
I don’t know if it’s right to blame the degrees, the available positions, or the hiring process.
Say you want to hire a staff writer for your magazine.
If you’re looking for smart people who can think and write, then philosophy majors are a perfectly reasonable bet. OTOH, if you’ve got 500 applicants for the position, and 300 of them have journalism degrees and 100 of those have multiple internships and published writing samples, you may not bother interviewing the philosophy majors at all.
They aren’t unqualified, they simply don’t have the “right” credentials to make the first cut.
This is becoming a bigger problem as people use computer keyword screening for initial job searches.
And THAT is becoming a bigger problem as the economy goes south. If you list a job and have 3 applicants, you’ll read all the resumes. If you have 30, you’ll skim the resumes. If you have 300, you’ll arbitrarily set standards for those you read, even though you will usually miss some.
In the law world, I know people who won’t even read a resume unless it’s from a tier 1 applicant, law review, top 10%. They end up with high double-digit numbers of applicants even after that, so I guess it works for them.
This (from Raw Story) may be relevant, for discussing what Americans believe about inequality:
So Americans both underestimate how much wealth the richest people in the US have, and believe that even the underestimated figure is higher than it should be.
Good link, Amp.
And THAT is becoming a bigger problem as the economy goes south. If you list a job and have 3 applicants, you’ll read all the resumes. If you have 30, you’ll skim the resumes. If you have 300, you’ll arbitrarily set standards for those you read, even though you will usually miss some.
In the law world, I know people who won’t even read a resume unless it’s from a tier 1 applicant, law review, top 10%. They end up with high double-digit numbers of applicants even after that, so I guess it works for them.
And what do we call it when not only are there not enough jobs to go around, but the only people who even have a shot at the jobs that do exist are the people who could afford to go to the absolute most expensive, most exclusive, elitist schools, the ones you had the most chance to get into if you came from an exclusive prep school and an Ivy League college and could afford expensive exam preparation classes and tutoring and the cost of re-locating across the country and could manage to not have to work while in school so you could have the best shot at getting your grades in that coveted top 10%, none of which have anything to do with your actual aptitude but which have to do with your class background?
The Aristocrats!
Er, no. What I meant to say was “inequality of opportunity,” QED.
(Though funnily enough, “The Aristocrats” captures that fairly accurately as well…)
We also call that “oversupply” or, less charitably, borderline mass fraud on the part of the bottom four tiers of law school.
People in the United States of America supported a system where people were slaves because of parental skin color. People supported a system where people inherited other people because of family wealth. There’s no reason to be surprised that our nation is still very happy with the idea that people with wealthy grandparents deserve many more opportunities than people with poor grandparents.
Examine the debate over inheritance taxes. Wealthy people who die after the age of 65 probably already provided their children with cars, excellent educations and privileged lives. Their children are probably already settled in high paying careers and can afford to pay mortgages and support children of their own. Plus there’s still going to be money left over after the taxes are paid. It’s a very bitter debate with screams of “Don’t touch my money (that I’m going to inherit from my grandmother because one of her great-uncles ran a successful motorcycle restoration business)!” It’s a belief that seizing an opportunity and working hard will pay off in the form of being able to support generations of heirs who won’t have to work as hard for opportunities.
Well, if you have the ability to leave money to your kids (and if you want your kids to do well in the world) it gives you an incentive to make lots of money. There’s nothing theoretically wrong with just keeping what you need/use, but as a practical matter it seems to influence people’s incentives to at least some degree.
There’s nothing theoretically wrong with a property tactic in which all of your stuff goes to the state when you die. It’s just that such a theory won’t do a very good job of promoting savings, for example: if you save money and die, you’ll lose it.
Or, to rephrase your last sentence:
It’s a very bitter debate with screams of “Don’t touch my money (that I’m going to inherit from my grandmother because one of her great-uncles ran a successful motorcycle restoration business)!”
If you want that great-uncle to put in those 80-hour weeks and make MORE than he feels like spending at the time, it’s handy to provide him some incentive to do so.
It’s a belief that seizing an opportunity and working hard will pay off in the form of being able to support generations of heirs who won’t have to work as hard for opportunities.
Yup.
I can work normal hours and my kids will be where I am.
I can blow off life and my kids will be worse off.
I can work my ass off and try to make enough money to advance my kids’ position above where they are now (and where I am.)
But as is usual with most people, I wouldn’t work for fun. If I had no incentive (if I was assured of keeping my house and getting what i wanted and not injuring my kids’ future, etc etc) then I might work but i’d sure as hell work a lot less.
I do believe in incentives, but I’m not sure how much the argument that people are primarily working to make money applies to the super-rich (who are the primary people effected by the estate tax), G&W. Take Charles Schulz: Do you really think the reason he did Peanuts for all those years is that he loved money and coudln’t get enough of it, even though he was a billionaire many times over? For that matter, he could have paid someone else a few hundred thousand dollars to draw Peanuts and spent his own time concentrating on running other parts of his empire, and possibly he would have made even more money.
Realistically, he was motivated by an internal drive to do the work, not by the level of the estate tax.
And that’s true of most super-rich people, I think. Super-rich people with jobs are generally people who are devoted to their jobs in the way the average American worker is not. This is true for a couple of reasons: First of all, except for some silver-spoon babies like George W Bush, only exceptionally internally driven people — people who are probably among the top .001% of the population in terms of how driven they are — acquire those jobs in the first place. So these are not people who are going to be easily deterred away from work. And second of all, these jobs are exceptionally rewarding, not only in terms of money, but also in terms of working environment, social prestige, and internal rewards.
So no, I don’t buy the idea that the people effected by the estate tax are all going to retire, or massively cut their work hours, because they have to pay an estate tax. The Clinton era wasn’t an economic hellhole when no one was willing to be productive, after all.
Sure. Did I miss some limitation to the super-rich? I don’t disagree with what you said. Nor do I think that a marginal increase in the estate tax will produce anything NEAR a marginally equivalent decrease in productivity. (I think it will eventually deter savings, though.)
People want to pass value to their kids. People will game whatever system you put in place, to get their wants met. Whether they do it through estate planning or direct gifts or political contributions is a function of what the system permits them to do.
Ampersand,
Let’s not miss the part about wealthy people with non-wealthy parents being the exception and not the rule. As Elusis said in 17, the university graduates who are untouched by the recession have white collar parents. Drive isn’t the deciding factor. Inequality of Opportunity is the point. I strongly disagree that people who are at the top were more driven 2-year olds than people who are not at the top. There is a system in place that provides tools and encouragement for some toddlers and neither for others. I don’t think it’s fair to say that the person who has had the tools and encouragement for twenty years accomplishes things on his or her own.
I should have said that people don’t realize we are still supporting a system where being born into the right family gives someone a tremendous advantage over people from less-wealthy families. It’s nice to see people beginning to understand that parental wealth is more of a factor in economic opportunity than it should be.
It’s nice to see people beginning to understand that parental wealth is more of a factor in economic opportunity than it should be.
How much should it matter? That’s the question I’m curious about–and I certainly do not claim to know the answer. Certainly, phrasing the issue as “inequality” generally suggests that only “equality” would be the answer. Removing any effect of accumulated wealth is relatively extreme, has been tried in various communist countries, and doesn’t seem to work too well.
So then we rephrase the problem as “too much inequality,” which makes much more sense in light of the various countries that succeed with more-than-zero inequality. And then what?
I agree that the U.S. has “too much” of a split. But all of the things which I envision doing to fix it, are really not addressing the ultimate level of inequality. Instead, my imagined fixes are more of providing a secure, basic, level.
I would like people to have something to eat which is nutritious. But rich people will always have more choice, tastier and better-prepared food, and the ability to eat more expensive things. that’s not equal.
I would like people to have decent schooling. But it’s not possible for everyone to get a level of school that is available at Exeter or Harvard–not only because it’s hideously expensive, but because those schools depend to some degree on the benefits of selectivity. There will always be inequality there, too.
And so on. Eventually, it gets to the issue of who gives up what in order to help someone else. And then it gets even harder because we’re fighting serious self interest. Say my kids manage to get into Harvard (unlikely) and say that i can afford to send them there (equally unlikely.) Would I want to deny them that opportunity to strive for elite status, in order to promote equality for others? No, I would not. It’s easy to imagine socking it to the super rich, because i am not super rich, and there are so few of them. But it’s damn hard to imagine taking something away from my own kids.
One thing to bear in mind:
Life is fundamentally unfair.
i know one thing that will, in a way, make it easier for more people to get into the “GOOD” colleges –
which is get rid of parental income measurments for student aid.
[what?!]
sooooooooooo many kids can get INTO a top school, but can’t afford it without aid – and their parent[s] make enough to deny that aid, while NOT making enough to give any sort of help.
the poorer you are, the worse this is – only the POOREST of people aren’t penalized by parental income – and i know kids who are completely estranged from their parents, who can’t pay for college because [for whatever screwed up reason] the system expects parents to pay for it, or a large part of it.
and, generally, non-rich parents CAN’T. [remember that episode of Roseanne? where the oldest daughter is throwing a shit-fit that her parents hadn’t saved money for her college, and Roseanne’s like “should we have been evicted so you could MAYBE someday go to college?”]
You’re right about the difficult incentives that parental income measurements produce, Denelian, but removing them is not likely to improve the situation on net. There’s still only so much aid to go around. With means-testing out of the picture, I can think of only three realistic ways to distribute what aid there is – random lottery (unlikely, Americans like meritocracy a lot more than randomness even if randomness would help them out), focusing aid to historically disadvantaged group (unlikely, same reason), or distributed according to academic merit.
Guess who has the highest academic merit, on average? Not the people who most need scholarships for school.
Robert;
yeah… in general, there’s only so much. i’d go so far as to say it’s INSANE how much college costs [take my college – easily 10grand a year, and every year they build more and MORE, because it’s a “public” university, and they can’t make a profit – yet everything is so overcharged they have to spend TONS each year, to throw away the “profit” – while not hiring new professors, because gods forbid they spend that extra money on something USEFUL. we don’t need more BUILDINGS, we need more professors and less cost. don’t even get me started on books…!]
but we really are setting up a system where only those who can afford college are ever going to GET to college – but that’s about ALL that’s taught in high school; vocational programs are almost non-existant. we prepare every student for a goal that’s probably not attainable for half the class.
insane. just… seriously, i don’t understand why even state universities cost so much!
Basically, (a) because the people paying the cost and the people getting the education are not the same people, and (b) because the government, out of a well-intentioned desire to improve the educational status of the people, subsidizes the actual payment of the costs so that the people in (a) are less sensitive to price.
(B) is a little abtruse to discuss, so let me focus on (a), and make it all about me. Me me memememememe!
I was admitted to two colleges – Oberlin College, in Ohio, and Trinity University, in San Antonio, TX. Of the two, Oberlin is a somewhat more selective school (58% admission for Trinity, about 33% for Oberlin) – that’s these days, not then, mumbledy years ago, but close enough. They’re both decent schools; Oberlin has a better reputation and is older.
Trinity was moderately expensive (a few thousand a year in tuition), Oberlin was super expensive – one of the pricier schools in the country, in fact.
Trinity offered me a full four-year scholarship – everything, books, tuition, housing, beer money. (They were in the midst of a drive to improve their average SAT scores, and I had high SAT scores.) Oberlin offered me admission and a nice fat tuition bill which, and this is key, other people would still be paying.
Guess which one I chose?
Fast forward fifteen years, after I dropped out of Oberlin after not working very hard at all (collect call from squandered opportunity, will you accept the charge? no? send it to your dad, same as with the tuition bill? ok). Time for me to go back to school. This time I’ll be paying for it myself, cash out of pocket plus whatever student loans I absolutely have to take in order to scrape by – I know I’ll be paying them back myself.
I could have gone back to Oberlin, no sweat – my kids would have loved it. That would mean $30,000 a year in debt, most likely. Or, I could go to the local state university and do it for $10k total.
Which do you think I chose?
Now, not everyone is as feckless as I was at age 18 – although a lot of people are. And not everyone is as skinflintedly tight-fisted as I was at age 40 – although a lot of people are.
But when you don’t pay for a thing, the cost of the thing is largely an abstract concept, glitteringly pretty perhaps but not something you base your major decisions on. The girls at Oberlin were prettier than the girls at Trinity, and I wasn’t writing the check either way.
(Thank God my dad doesn’t read this blog, or I’d give the poor man a heart attack. He probably dropped 10% of his future retirement income on me going to Oberlin to date pretty hippies.)
I don’t regret going to Oberlin; it was a good education and I did, snark aside, get a lot of value out of it.
But if I had been the one paying the bill, I would have gone somewhere else.
Hardly anyone pays their own bill. We may think we do, but at the state school it’s in fact the taxpayer paying most of the cost – it never even shows up on the tuition statement. There’s just a whacking great operational subsidy every year (although those are going away as the bad economics of the whole rotten system become more and more stinky).
Milton Friedman famously articulated the great divide of money and spending decisions. There are four, and only four, basic ways to spend money.
A) You spend your money on yourself.
B) You spend your money on other people.
C) You spend other people’s money on yourself.
D) You spend other people’s money on other people.
In the case of A and C, you look for the best product or service you can find, the one that will make you happiest. In the case of A, you are constrained by budget and the acute awareness that there are other things you could also be buying. In the case of C, that constraint is usually considerably less. It wasn’t MY money, it was my dad’s money, and so I chose the best option without regard to the cost.
In the case of B you look for the best deal, with quality a distant second unless you really care about the other person and even then you’re still aware of the budget. I bought my daughter souvenirs and such at Disneyworld; I also said “no” a lot. And I based much of my decision on what I thought was good value rather than on what she (temporarily) wanted the most. (She’s pretty smart, though, and understands at age 8 the limitations on Daddy’s money better than I understood it at 18.)
Governments do most of their spending in category D. Even with the best will in the world, category D spending is rarely as optimized as A or B, or even C. Government tuition and educational spending subsidies fall into category D; the government officials and legislators and such have already been to college. Their personal taxes are an infinitesimal fraction of the money they’re allocating.
Items that are usually bought as category A items are items where the market works very efficiently to deliver high value and high quality at the best price; they have to be.
Items that are usually bought as category D items, not so much.
“A lot of people” meaning, what, exactly? Anything statistically significant, or would that impede the hand-waving?
RonF, I had assumed you were about my age, but this comment makes you sound like you just got out of high school. That, or you were one of those engineering students who huddled in their corner of the campus lest some passing Liberal Arts professors seize them and force them to study Shakespeare or something. Yes, you could get a B.A. in that 20 years ago. But you knew that.
You don’t bother to link to the NYT article, but given the “$100K” comment, you’re probably sniping about a law-school graduate; law school famously being post-graduate education where your undergraduate degree only matters if you’re going into a handful of sub-specialties (for example, patent law). The crisis in legal jobs has really nothing to do with the proliferation of the dreaded Women’s Studies major and everything to do with the ridiculous inflation of law-school tuition, coupled with frankly dishonest representations by law-school career offices and a crash in the legal job market.
Robert;
i’m speaking of people [like me] who ARE spending their own money, at least in part. those whose parents CAN’T AFFORD TO HELP WITH COLLEGE. this isn’t “dad’s bill” – it’s MINE [or “ours”]
let me explain by talking about *MEMEMEMEME!* again [lol]
i was a wee bit crazy when i was 17. i had been accepted to too many colleges [IS there such a thing?]. many partial scholarships – no full.
and, for really REALLY weird math, divorced-but-remarried parents? they are each presumed to have full income and NO OTHER KIDS. so – i have 4 sisters. my parents made money on paper; in reality, we were BEYOND poor.
i got married instead. actually, one of the hopes was that, married, i’d qualify for the aid i needed to fill in the gap between “scholarship” and “be damned happy that we aren’t eating government cheese this week”.
i lost my scholarships [who knew getting married would cause one to lose their scholarships? sigh]. i took lots of classes, paying for one class at a time, because that’s ALL i could do [i did CLEP a lot of stuff, the military being cool enough to pay for it for SPOUSES, even if the won’t do it for CHILDREN. i still don’t get that, but whatever]
when i finally went back to school full time, in 2005, i was able to get some aid [never enough] and had to get loans. [loans i couldn’t get the first time, 16 years ago. sigh]
but… i mentored teens until recently [disabled now, long story, not worth it] and of the 14 kids i’ve seen thru high school, only *5* have gone on to college immediately – because their PARENTS made “too much” money, but still had kids at home and so couldn’t AFFORD to send kidA to college. i mean, a single mother who has had sole custody of 7 kids since the oldest was 10, and who made $28,700 a year after taxes – because the girl’s father, who skipped out on them, never paid a DIME of child support or contacted them in ANY way, was found by the FAFSA people, and it turns out he makes something like $50k. and so because this “father” the girl NEVER KNEW made 50k, she qualified for NO AID. [there was a way to qualify – he had to sign a piece of paper stating that he did not and will not support her. he REFUSED. because he was afraid if he did so, his ex-wife would sic the courts on him for all those years of non-payment of child support]. and so this bright, funny, studious girl who scored a 1580 on her SAT ended up working at a phone sex place to try and save up enough money to take even ONE class.
this is insanity. if they’re going to take into account a parent’s income [and WHY do they do that? at 18 a person is legally an adult; why are parents being EXPECTED to do this, by law almost? yes, many parents WANT too – but…] why don’t they take EVERYTHING into account? like “sure, my dad make $60k a year, but he supports 2 households on that, because my mom lives on alimony and child support, there’s 3 of us here, and he has a new wife, and he’s got 4 kids with her”
or even “yes, technically my mother makes 30k a year, but there are 3 of us, and a huge mortage payment, and my younger brother has [disability that means LOTS of LARGE bills] and so there isn’t extra”
there’s no SCOPE to it – just “how much do your parents make” with no corresponding “how much do they spend”. so … yeah.