>Also, how much of the gap is due to the high school graduate falling
>behind, and how much from the college wage rate moving ahead?
$$$$$ Recent Trends in Wages, Incomes, and Wealth in the United States
by John Schmitt, Lawrence Mishel, and Jared Bernstein
...B. Real Wages By Education Level
Since much of the discussion of rising wage inequality during the 1980s and 1990s has focused on the role of formal education as a proxy for workers' broader "skill" levels, we present wage data by education level in Tables 2A, 2B, and 2C. Again, much of the story is familiar. Wages for less-educated workers (see Table 2A), whether male (see Table 2B) or female (see Table 2C) have all declined in the 1980s and the 1990s. Discussions of wage trends over the last two decades, however, have not fully addressed another important feature of the data in the tables. The real wage declines extend far beyond those workers with the lowest level of formal education (less-than-high-school-educated workers), who account for about 15% of the total workforce. *Real wages have also fallen for the 40% or so of the U.S. workforce with a terminal high school degree and the 20% or so of the workforce with one-to-three years towards a four-year college degree. Even the real wages of workers with a four-year college degree (but no further education) -- about a 15% of the workforce -- have seen real wage increases at (in the case of women) or below (in the case of men) the average increase in productivity over the period.* The only education group that has done consistently well over the last two decades are those with advanced degrees (just over 5% of the workforce). 4
Using the education breakdown, the real wage pattern in the year-to-year data in the 1990s differs somewhat from that in the overall distribution. In the overall distribution, wage increases during the 1990s were largest at the bottom. By education level, where all the average wage levels are well above the 10th percentile wage, wages grew slowest at the bottom of the educational distribution and most quickly at the middle and the top. Even in the boom year of 1997, the real wages of less-than-high-school-educated workers, for example, did not change. Over the same period, real wages increases rose for all better-educated workers (high-school, 1.7%; some college, 2.1%; college, 2.9%; and, college plus, 1.1%)....
[emphasis added]
at http://www.csls.ca/new/rtw.html $$$$$
Yoshie