[lbo-talk] More "school reform" nonsense

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Tue May 25 14:49:00 PDT 2010


On May 25, 2010, at 2:30 PM, Eric Beck wrote:


> That probably felt nice to say, but is it true? I haven't looked at
> the numbers in awhile, but hasn't the time generally said to coincide
> with neoliberalism also had a sizable increase in the percentage of
> people attending college, and haven't the number of people attaining
> advanced degrees exploded in the last 30 years or so, particularly the
> number of women and minorities?

Dunno about the advanced degree, but the class skew in bachelors' has increased. See graph for full history:

<http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/College.html> These costs are keeping students from poorer families out of college. Thanks to the invaluable work of Tom Mortenson, publisher of Postsecondary Education Opportunity, we’ve got an excellent handle on how this has played out over time. Overall, 17% of Americans had a bachelor’s degree by age 24 in 1970. By 2008, that had risen strongly, to 29%. But, as the graphs on the top of p. 5 show, this increase has been driven mainly by the children of the well-off. The share of kids from the bottom 25% of the income distribution getting a degree by 24 rose from 6% to 9%; for the top 25%, it rose from 55% to 95%. Looked at another way (as the graph on the right does), the offspring of the bottom quarter accounted for 12% of bachelor’s achieved by age 24 in 1970; that fell to 9% of the total in 2008. The share accounted for by the top quarter rose from 52% to 54% over the same period.



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