I listened to BBC radio during lunch today, and this story made me cry: Risking life to go to school. So if you are feeling up for hearing about the things that some kids have to go through just to attend school, check it out…. Be sure to listen to the audio half-way down the page, which has children in Bristol, England, and Kabul, Afghanistan, talking to each other about the importance of education and what they must risk to go to school.
In the United States at least, people with a post-secondary degree tend to earn more than people without one. For instance, looking at the statistics for people aged 25-34 in 2007, the median annual income for high-school graduates was about $25,000, while people with an Associates (2-year) degree earned $31,000, and those with a Bachelor’s (4-year) degree earned nearly $41,000. Since earning these degrees has such a positive affect on income, it should be good news for women that, as Mark Perry recently noted in his blog, women are now receiving more post-secondary degrees than men, even at the doctoral level.
However, if you look at the situation in more detail, using the US Department of Education statistics for the 2006-2007 graduation year (for bachelors, masters, and doctoral degrees), you’ll find that higher education may not be as women-dominated as the overall statistics would indicate:
Looking at the income statistics for men and women separately (again, in the 25-34 age group for 2007, so as to discount any left-over problems from previous decades), we can see that the median income for all women is $27,000 per year, while for men it is about $33,500, in spite of the fact that a higher percentage of women have post-secondary degrees. In fact, men in this age group with 4-year degrees are earning about $47,000, while women earn $36,000. This is likely due to the difference in the subject area of the degrees noted above — salaries for engineers are certainly higher than those for teachers.
So, I am not sure that the fact that women are earning more college degrees than men translates into anything very meaningful.
I recently read an interesting book by James Tooley called The Beautiful Tree: A Personal Journey Into How the World’s Poorest People Are Educating Themselves, published by the Cato Institute.
This book describes how the governments of many countries in the developing world are failing to educate their children, because their government-run schools are basically worthless. The author described seeing many schools where only a small fraction of the teachers even arrived at the school on any given day, and an even smaller fraction were engaged in meaningful teaching activities (he also did careful studies that documented these problems, as well as poor educational outcomes); this system was made possible by wide-spread government corruption. Perhaps it is no surprise that everyone involved is apparently aware of the issues at the government schools, from the children and their parents, to government officials at all levels, to the international aid agencies and foreign governments that continue to give money for education to the government agencies that are running the schools. So of course, middle- and upper-class families living there send their children to for-profit private schools.
But the real surprise in this book was that Tooley found that many extremely poor people in these countries were also sending their children to for-profit private schools — low-cost schools run by entrepreneurs of similar backgrounds to the poor families, living in the same neighborhoods (rural areas or urban slums). And although these poor private schools tended to have dismal facilities by our standards (poor lighting, poor sanitation, etc.), this was more than balanced by much greater level of accountability than the government-run schools, as parents would immediately withdraw their children (and their tuition money) from poorly-performing schools. Tooley also documented, through careful study, that these low-cost private schools (so low in cost as to be affordable by workers at the very bottom of the social scale) had much better educational outcomes than the nearby government-run schools.
After reading this book, I was left wondering (as Tooley certainly intended) why international aid organizations and US and other governments would continue to pour money into corrupt and ineffective government-run educational programs in these countries. Tooley suggested instead that we direct our aid money in two directions that seemed worthwhile to me. First, he suggested setting up scholarship funds for poor children’s tuition in the low-cost private schools. The cost of such tuition per student is very low, in US dollars or European currencies, and the return in educational provision is high. Tooley has apparently already been involved in setting up one organization that provides such scholarships. Second, the major barrier for educational entrepreneurs in setting up or improving their schools is the lack of financing — banks will not or cannot lend to them, in spite of their financial soundness. So, the idea would be to set up micro-credit institutions dedicated to funding such educational ventures. I haven’t been able to find any projects of this nature that are in progress, but definitely the ideas of micro-credit are well developed in general, and maybe someone will start one up soon. We’ll have to wait and see.
On February 11th, 2008, over 1000 people from over 70 countries, all of whom now live in the state of Washington, visited Olympia (our state capitol) for the second annual Refugee and Immigrant Legislative Day. I decided to take a day off work and attend. Here are some observations from the day:
The city that I live in (Shoreline, a suburb just north of Seattle) closed two elementary schools this year, and the city of Seattle has also been talking about closing schools, in both cases because the number of children enrolled in school has declined. Yet the population of both Seattle and Shoreline must be increasing, as houses are replaced by condo buildings and apartments, so I had been somewhat confused about this… Until someone yesterday pointed out the (in retrospect) fairly obvious reason: housing in the nearby suburbs and the city of Seattle is getting more and more expensive. So people in my situation (two good jobs, no kids) can still afford to buy houses, but families with school children are having to move farther north or south, to find housing they can afford. So we are closing elementary schools in my part of town, and Kent (a farther-out suburb) has been building new ones. Food for thought…
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