SCHOOL IS FOR SOCIAL MOBILITY

Education is the solution to this lack of mobility, the pandemic also revealed a
potential path forward by galvanizing support for education funding at levels rarely
seen before. With the right level of investment, education can not only provide more
pathways out of poverty for individuals, but also restore the equality of opportunity
that is supposed to lie at America’s core.

I found that students who were randomly assigned to higher-quality classrooms

earned substantially more 20 years later, about $320,000 over their lifetimes. And
it’s not only the early grades that matter; research suggests the quality of education
in later grades may be even more important for long-term outcomes, as children’s
brains don’t lock in key neural pathways for advanced reasoning skills until well into
their teenage years.

Education changes lives in ways that go far beyond economic gains. The
data show clearly that children who get better schooling
are healthier and happier adults, more civically engaged and less likely to
commit crimes. Schools not only teach students academic skills but also
noncognitive skills, like grit and teamwork, which are increasingly important for
generating social mobility. Even the friendships that students form at school can be
life-altering forces for social mobility, because children who grow up in more socially
connected communities are much more likely to rise up out of poverty.

Conversely, limited social mobility hurts not just these children but all of
society. We are leaving a vast amount of untapped talent on the table by
investing unequally in our children, and it’s at all of our expense.

the evidence is clear that teachers are critical; my co-authors and I found
that, when better teachers arrive at a school, the students in their classrooms earn
around $50,000 more over each of their lifetimes. This adds up to $1.25 million for a
class of 25 in just a single year of teaching. Children also benefit from longer
school days, greater access to special education and less aggressive
cutoffs for holding students back a grade.

Given this rich body of evidence, why doesn’t our K-12 system already
propel more low-income students to success? A big reason continues to be
inadequate funding. Because schools raise a large share of revenue through local
property taxes, high-income students often attend well-resourced schools while low-
income students attend schools with more limited resources. Even with additional
resources, schools often do not invest in proven reforms like the ones

The Covid pandemic highlighted and magnified the deep inequities in

our education system. Many high-income students were able to limit their
learning losses, but on average, low-income students stayed remote longer and lost
more ground for each week of remote school.
SCHOOL IS FOR WASTING TIME AND MONEY
I have deep doubts about the intellectual and social value of schooling. My
argument in a nutshell: First, everyone leaves school eventually. Second,
most of what you learn in school doesn’t matter after graduation. Third,
human beings soon forget knowledge they rarely use.

Strangely, these very doubts imply that the educational costs of the coronavirus
pandemic are already behind us. Some researchers found that being in Zoom school
was about equivalent to not being in school at all. Others simply found that test
scores rose much less than they normally would.

But given my doubts about the value of school, I figure that most of the
learning students lost in Zoom school is learning they would have lost by
early adulthood even if schools had remained open. My claim is not that in
the long run remote learning is almost as good as in-person learning. My claim is
that in the long run in-person learning is almost as bad as remote learning.

College graduates know about what you’d expect high school graduates to know; high
school graduates know about what you’d expect dropouts to know; dropouts know
next to nothing. This doesn’t mean that these students never knew more; it just
means that only a tiny fraction of what they learn durably stays in their heads.

This is especially clear for subjects beyond the three R’s — reading,
writing and arithmetic.

Schools have been trying to overcome reading, writing and math deficits among
underperforming students for decades. Boosting their performance in the short run
is quite doable. The recurring problem is fade-out; the effects of interventions
diminish or disappear over time.

I freely admit that my dim assessment of American education is a

minority view among my fellow economists, who offer piles of evidence
that education has a big effect on what adults earn. They’re basically
right about that, but that’s no excuse for ignoring the piles of evidence
that education has little effect on what adults know.

Namely: School is lucrative primarily because it certifies, or signals,

employability. Most education isn’t job training; it’s a passport to the real training,
which happens on the job. That’s why graduation pays individuals so well. You don’t
learn much in your last few weeks of school, but completion persuades
employers to trust you. And that’s why credential proliferation pays
countries so poorly.

When schools shuttered, they stopped performing their sole undeniably valuable
function: providing day care. In-person schooling allows parents to work full-time
without distraction. In-person schooling allows parents to take care of infants and
elders. In-person schooling allows parents to finish their household chores. And in-
person schooling allows parents to relax.
If we set aside wishful thinking and calmly reflect on what happened to education
during Covid, we learn two valuable lessons. First, schools before Covid gave
taxpayers a bad deal, taking lavish funding while imparting little long-
term knowledge. Second, schools during Covid gave taxpayers an even
worse deal, enjoying massive emergency funding while refusing to
provide at least day care in exchange.

The opposite goes for private schools. Do they actually boost test scores?
The evidence is mixed. But when parents wanted day care in a pandemic,
private schools delivered. School vouchers — funding students instead of
systems — are therefore another credible way to give us better value for
our money. School choice doesn’t just protect families against future closures; it
protects families against whatever goes wrong with education next.
IS COLLEGE WORTH IT?
Why Is College Worth It? 3 Reasons to Consider

Not only do you gain valuable life experience and make lifelong
connections, but a college degree also offers the following advantages:

1. College Graduates Earn More Than Non-Graduates

Despite the rising cost of post-secondary education, a college degree still

pays off for the majority of graduates. On average, those with a
bachelor’s degree earn significantly more than their peers with only a
high school diploma. Over the course of their careers, college graduates can earn
hundreds of thousands more than those who don’t attend college.

2. The Majority of Jobs Require College Education

That’s no longer the case. Georgetown University predicts that 70% of all jobs
will require some college education by 2027. Without higher education on
your resume, it may be more difficult to find a high-paying job, and competition for
available opportunities will be fierce.

3. College Graduates Are More Likely to Have Health Insurance

College graduates are far more likely than high school graduates to have
employer-provided coverage, offsetting their healthcare costs. The
College Board found that 64% of workers with bachelor’s degrees and
70% of workers with advanced degrees had employer-provided coverage,
while employer plans covered just 52% of high school graduates.

3 Reasons Why College Is Not Worth It

1. You Likely Will Graduate With Student Loan Debt

Because college costs have increased so much, it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to cover
the entire cost out of your savings or earnings from a part-time job; instead, you’ll
probably have to use student loans to cover at least some of the expense. According
to The Institute for College Access and Success, 62% of 2019 college graduates left
school with student loan debt, with an average balance of $28,950.

Depending on your student loan repayment plan, you could be in debt for
10 to 30 years. Thanks to your minimum monthly payments, you may
feel pressure to put off other financial goals, like saving for retirement or
buying a home.

2. High-Paying Jobs Aren’t Guaranteed

While a college degree is often promoted as a path to prosperity, it can be tougher

than you’d expect on the job market.
Especially in light of the coronavirus pandemic—which caused tens of millions of
people to file unemployment claims in 2020—finding a well paying job after
graduation may be difficult. if you have hefty student loan debt that exceeds your
income, you may struggle to make ends meet.

3. It Can Take More Than Four Years to Graduate

58% of students who enrolled in college in 2012 earned a degree within

six years. The rest of the students were either still in school or dropped
out. For every additional year you’re in school, you rack up additional
expenses and likely will need to take on more student loan debt to pay for
your education. Taking six years or more to graduate can cause you to
leave school with even more debt, and it may be difficult to dig yourself
out.

Alternatives to College

Community College

Attending community college is substantially cheaper than attending a four-year

college or university.

At a community college, you can earn an associate’s degree or complete certificate

programs that lead to stable careers.

Trade School

Trade schools, vocational schools or technical colleges provide hands-on

training for different skilled careers. The programs tend to be much
shorter than college programs, with students graduating in six months to
two years.

The cost of attending a trade school is much less than attending four-year schools.

There is an increased demand for trained trade professionals, and you

can earn a comfortable income.
Unemployment Benefits and Actual
Unemployment
Here’s what is true: there’s respectable research — e.g., here — suggesting that
unemployment benefits make workers more choosy in the search process. It’s not
that workers decide to live a life of ease on a fraction of their previous
wage; it’s that they become more willing to take the risk of being
unemployed for an extra week while looking for a better job.

What this means, in turn, is that UI may raise the “full employment” level of
unemployment — the level at which labor shortages start to appear, wages start an
upward spiral, and inflation becomes a potential problem. Since the Fed raises
interest rates when it sees signs of inflation, there is a sense in which UI raises
unemployment on average over the business cycle.

But all of this is totally irrelevant to our current situation, where inflation is running
below target, the target is too low anyway, and the reason we have mass
unemployment is that there just isn’t enough demand, and hence there just aren’t
enough jobs, no matter how desperately people search for them.

One way to think about this is to say that unemployment benefits may,
perhaps, reduce the economy’s speed limit, if we think of speed as
inversely related to unemployment.

So pretty much the unemployment benefits does not increase unemployment it

increases the time it takes for somebody to find a job since they have the money now
to take their time while searching for a job.
A degree of mobility: Education
ADAM OZIMEK disagrees with my take on the value of college educations, and in
particular that:

wage premiums indicate that markets are certainly interested in having a larger pool
of university graduates from which to hire, and increasing that pool by shrinking the
pool of non-graduates would help meet that need while also striking a blow against
income inequality.

the wage premium of college graduates is reflective of two things:

innate ability, and the returns to a college education. Thus the gap by itself does not
distinguish between the demand for innate ability and the demand returns to
education.

college seems to actually generate value for attendees, and the college wage premium
is not simply reflective of innate ability or composition effects. traced recent growth
in wage inequality to a divergence in the relative supply of workers of various
educational attainments:

Skill-biased technological change has generated rapid secular growth in

the relative demand for more-educated workers for at least the past
century. But rapid increases in the supply of skills, stemming from rising
educational attainment of the workforce, more than kept pace with this growing
demand for most of the twentieth century and served to reduce educational wage
differentials and narrow the wage structure.

many college graduates, both employed and unemployed, wish that they could erase
their student loans in exchange for a hit on their credit score and having their
diploma torn up and being legally prevented from claiming any college attendance.

Meanwhile, the benefits to a college education accrue over the whole of an

individual's life, while a home's benefits are enjoyed only as long as the home is
occupied.

Moreover, the benefits to a college education are transportable. You take

your degree with you when you move or change jobs. The value of the
degree may change with location or occupation, but an investment in
higher education is unambiguously more conducive to mobility than an
investment in a home.

If students with college degrees are suffering from heavy debt loads, then perhaps the
answer isn't to send fewer kids to college but to change how education is funded.
Given the positive externalities associated with higher education, it might well be
worth offering much more generous subsidies to students getting a public
undergraduate education.

Emphasis mine. Making college more affordable is in everyone's interest.