I agree, but with regard to the expansion of educational access, I wasn't thinking only of tertiary education but also of high school education: "In 1948, only 33% of all adults had four years of high school education; by 1963, it had risen to 46%. (Today it's almost 80%.)" (at http://www.joesherlock.com/fifties11.html).
As for little change in college degree acquisition since the 1970s, here's a recent article in the New York Times:
***** The New York Times July 23, 2000, Sunday, Late Edition - Final SECTION: Section 4; Page 1; Column 1; Week in Review Desk HEADLINE: The Nation: The Classroom Ceiling; Making Sense of a Stubborn Education Gap
BYLINE: By LOUIS UCHITELLE
FOR all the curative powers of a booming economy, the overflowing prosperity of the last four years has failed to raise the second-class incomes of the one-third of American adults who have not gone beyond high school.
Just as near-universal high school education was one of the great achievements of 20th-century America, politicians and business leaders have long sought to lure more students to college, reasoning that the college-educated would earn more in a "new economy" that now more than ever rewards a bachelor's degree. College, they believed, could help close the gap between the economic haves and have nots. Yet the proportion of Americans who have only a high school diploma has barely budged for 30 years, through good times and bad.
Where many saw college as the answer, nearly everyone also counted on the booming economy as a way to narrow the income gap. Prosperity created a tight labor market that drove up wages, which have indeed risen faster than inflation for everyone. But as college graduates' earnings rose even more quickly, the wage gap widened, not shrank.
These stubborn education and income gaps are barely mentioned on the campaign trail. Politicians and policy makers speak mainly of sending more people to college, without recognizing that a steady third of adults 25 and older have only finished high school -- and that percentage does not seem likely to come down soon. For a host of reasons -- age, lack of tuition money, inadequate secondary schooling, reluctance to study, discouragement from family and friends -- college is not a viable option for a significant portion of the population.
The data suggest that neither a robust economy nor policies that try to push people through college can significantly narrow the income gap.
Harry J. Holzer, a labor economist and a visiting fellow at the Urban Institute, would improve the lot of the lower-paid through greater "institutional support" -- more government subsidies for health care, for example, better unemployment insurance, a broader earned income tax credit and larger subsidies for child care and housing. The Clinton administration endorses some of these steps, while Gov. George W. Bush emphasizes tax cuts that would leave low-income workers with more take-home pay. But college has become the favored approach, the one that business most applauds. Nearly $13 billion in federal funding has gone this year into college scholarships and tax credits for college tuition. Mr. Bush favors similar subsidies and so does Vice President Al Gore.
"There are people who do not go past high school, and that will always be the case," said Martin Bailey, chairman of President Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers. "Over time, however, the goal is to reduce that proportion, because in this new economy, a college education is increasingly important."
Half of the nation's 131.6 million jobs are classified by the Labor Department as not requiring a college education. Yet for many employers, high school diplomas are simply not enough.
"You need a bachelor's degree just to apply for the best jobs," said Stephen Rose, a senior economist at the Educational Testing Service. "That is as it should be for doctors, lawyers, scientists, engineers, computer specialists. But look at middle-level managers. In 1960, only 40 percent had a bachelor's degree and today it is 80 percent." Many such jobs don't necessarily require a B.A., he said.
Perhaps. But in the high-technology economy, employers say they value a college degree as evidence that a job applicant has learned to think and to master new ways of working, and is also sufficiently disciplined to work hard. The high school diploma no longer sends that message to employers.
Education has always raised incomes. For more than a century, the college educated have been at the top of the earnings pyramid, the masters of each new, complicated technology. High school prepared hundreds of millions of ordinary workers for the modern workplace and helped to lift their incomes, shrinking the gap between their pay and that of the college educated. But since 1980, that gap has widened again. The economic boom did narrow the earnings gap a bit in the mid-1990's, as employers competed to hire low-wage workers. But starting in 1997, the wages of college graduates pulled ahead, according to the Economic Policy Institute's latest figures.
HIGHER-LEVEL jobs for the college educated are among the fastest growing, the Labor Department reports -- those for computer analysts, engineers, upper level executives and secondary-school teachers. But lower-paying jobs that require only high school training are also among the fastest growing -- jobs for retail sales people, cashiers, truck drivers, office clerks and home health care aides.
Despite this demand, the wages of people with only a high school diploma -- rather solid in the days of unionized blue collar factory work -- have fallen steadily behind for 20 years, making college seem the only route to the $20.58 an hour that college graduates earned, on average, last year, according to the Economic Policy Institute. By comparison, the high school educated averaged only $11.83; adjusted for inflation, the earnings gap has risen nearly 70 percent since 1980.
The gap has widened partly because union strength has declined, and with it many of the higher-paying jobs once available to high school graduates. And the minimum wage, adjusted for inflation, is not as high today as it was in the late 1960's. "The deterioration of unions and the minimum wage probably explains up to one-third of the increase in the earnings gap in the past 20 years," Mr. Holzer said.
These financial pressures have indeed pushed more Americans into college. College graduates now represent nearly 25 percent of all adults, up from 17 percent in 1980. The proportion of workers with only a high school diploma has correspondingly fallen to 34 percent from 39 percent in 1988.
Yet if one-third of the population continues to balk at moving past high school, then one solution is to raise the quality of that education. More than 40 states are now requiring students to pass achievement exams at various stages of their schooling. In the attempt to raise standards, governments and school districts have stepped up spending to train teachers, reduce class size, improve courses, provide vocational training or apprenticeships, expand Head Start and link schools to the Internet.
THERE is a downside, however, to raising standards and then failing students who don't meet them. A system could emerge that is less forgiving than American public schools have traditionally been, less willing to give poor students a second or third or fourth chance, says Paul Attewell, a sociologist at the College of the City University of New York. "It has not happened yet, but in such a system you are likely to produce a large number of poor kids and minority kids who drop out," he said.
New York City, he added, may be a case in point: hundreds of young people failed qualifying exams but didn't show up for compulsory schooling this summer. Richard Murnane, an economist at Harvard's Graduate School of Education, acknowledges the risk. "That is a problem," he said, "but the alternative of graduating students without stronger skills will penalize them for a lifetime."
Chart: "College Is Not For Everyone" Education of the American Workforce, 1999
High School: 32% Some College: 22% Associates degree or higher: 37% Less than high school: 9% (Source: The Economic Policy Institute)(pg. 1)
Chart: "School's Out for Many" Although the percentage of Americans with little or no high-school education is shrinking, a stubborn third of the work force never goes beyond the diploma.
Graph shows the percentage of americans age 25 and over whose highest level of education was 4 years or less of elementary school, 5 to 8 years of elementary school, 1 to 3 years of high school, 4 years of high school, 1 to 3 years of college, and 4 or more years of college.
Charts show percentages from 1970 to 1998 (Sources: U.S. Census Bureau; Economic Policy Institute)(pg. 3)
Chart: "The Growing Divide" The college educated have always earned more than their peers who stopped at a high school diploma, but the wage gap has grown considerably since the 1980's.
Graphs show the percentage more earned by college graduates over those with only high-school degrees from 1973 to 1999. (Source: The Economic Policy Institute)(pg. 3) *****
Yoshie