"One Market Under God, and Heaven Help Us All"

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Sun Jul 30 14:13:40 PDT 2000



>Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
>>economic value of college degrees (despite college premiums
>>relative to high-school diplomas) hasn't improved (see excerpts
>>from "Recent Trends in Wages, Incomes, and Wealth in the United
>>States" by John Schmitt, Lawrence Mishel, and Jared Bernstein I
>>posted)
>
>How can you say the economic value of a bachelor's degree hasn't
>improved when the college premium has expanded over the last 20
>years?
>
>Doug

The college premium only refers to the worth of a bachelor's degree relative to a high school diploma, though, and an undue emphasis on the college premium obscures how college-educated workers have been doing vis-a-vis capital (while highlighting the degree of stratification internal to the working class & probably misleading many to believe that "more education is an answer").

$$$$$ Recent Trends in Wages, Incomes, and Wealth in the United States

by John Schmitt, Lawrence Mishel, and Jared Bernstein

...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....

at http://www.csls.ca/new/rtw.html $$$$$

If real wage increases haven't kept up with productivity growth, college-educated workers have lost ground to capital on the class struggle front (while this loss may be possibly subjectively compensated in part by the feeling of superiority to non-college grads). Doesn't the ratio of profits to wages increase if labor productivity rises faster than the real wage?

Yoshie



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