Why You Can’t Solve Income Inequality by Sending People to College
3rd April 2015
Getting a college degree is valuable, according to calculations by a group of economists including former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers. If more people went to college, they’d be much better off. It’s just hard to imagine how helping more high school graduates to earn college degrees could substantially undo the massive increase in inequality of the past several decades, which is largely a result of skyrocketing earnings among the very rich. Indeed, the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans now claim nearly as large a share of national income as they did on the eve of the Great Depression.
“I am all for improving education,” Summers told Wonkblog earlier this month. “But to suggest that improving education is the solution to inequality is, I think, an evasion.”
Summers and his collaborators, the Upjohn Institute’s Brad Hershbein and Melissa S. Kearney of the University of Maryland, calculated what would happen if they could wave their magic wands and give a college education to about 6.8 million American men who don’t already have one. Relatively speaking, that’s an enormous increase — about the same proportion as the increase in the overall share of the population with a college degree since 1979.