New Study Debunks The Great Education Myth

By David Sirota
Posted on June 5, 2007, Printed on June 5, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/sirota/53171/

If you've read my writing, you probably know of my dislike for The Great Education Myth - the myth forwarded by politicians and power-worshiping pundits like Tom Friedman that says all America has to do is better its education system in order to solve our economic problems. If people just got more college degrees, the myth goes, somehow that will raise wages and improve health care benefits in the face of a trade policy that encourages companies to troll the world for slave labor. Along with a few other progressive economists and reporters, I've written a lot of posts and newspaper articles showing what a bunch of crap this myth really is - and now today, the Financial Times reports on a study that reinforces what we've been writing.

Here's the key excerpt:

"Earnings of the average U.S. worker with an undergraduate degree have not kept up with gains in productivity in recent decades, according to research by academics at MIT that challenges traditional explanations of why income inequality is rising...The average graduate failed to keep up with gains in economy-wide productivity, once those productivity gains are adjusted for the composition of the workforce...This casts doubt on the conventional argument that the solution to rising in-equality is to improve the standard of education across the workforce as a whole...The failure of workers even with undergraduate degrees to keep up with productivity is due to a change in labor market institutions and norms that reduced the bargaining power of most U.S. workers." (emphasis added)