College's Broken Message

The Road to Opportunity?

Generations of Americans have been told that college is the road to a better life, that without a degree you will likely find yourself trapped in a dead end job and miserable. The children of America are taught to visualize the future through the increasingly narrow lens of a college education. But we have the message all wrong for two reasons.

1. College Isn't Always Financially Rewarding

This is important. To any disillusioned lower or middle class high school student, please take in this message. College is extremely expensive and the costs just continue to rise! For some the expense pays off, but for many it does not. 

The rise in the cost of education has far outpaced the growth of income over the past half century. Every year our students pay more and more to become educated at the collegiate level. Most students have to take out loans to pay tuition while in school. Let's take a look.

Here is the equally bleak picture. This shows that just in the ten years between 2001 and 2011, student loan debt grew by 500%. 500%!!! Right now, the average college graduate is $29,900 in debt. That's a high end car, a down payment on a house, maybe even a year's worth of income. That does not even account for the four years you spent NOT earning any money because you were in school. Not to mention the addition expense for those who continue on to earn advanced degrees.

What's worse is that many students graduate from college and begin in their career paths realizing that they are completely unprepared for life after graduation. College does not always teach the skills and concepts needed to succeed in the professional world. Classroom learning is always different from life after graduation and many people graduate mired in debt and may begin to regret all of those years in a classroom.

2. Money Isn't the Point of Education

Based on point #1 you may think that I am someone who thinks only about the financial impacts of college on life, but this isn't true. What I find even more important is arguably a bit more subtle. Society tells us that money is the point of education, but it isn't. Education is the point of education. 

Studying art, philosophy, music, literature, history, psychology, sociology, archaeology, latin and / or anything else is not supposed to make you rich. It is supposed to teach you something about the world and allow you to develop a passion for something and a greater understanding of the society in which you live. 

If you find something that you love to study, go and learn about it, become an expert. Frame your life around something that you are passionate about. Do something because you love it, not because you think it will reward you with a fat paycheck. You will be much happier following your dreams than doing something just for the money. 

Education and money are two completely separate things, so please treat them as such. 

Summary

Really my point is that we are teaching our children the wrong thing. We should be teaching our kids to love learning and not dollar signs. Life is really about doing what you love and finding happiness and not becoming rich. If you think that those two things are always one in the same you may be in for a wake up call the day that you graduate. 

Income Matters More Than Race

Wealthy > White

This year many people are commemorating the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech. This speech had lofty goals and among them was making education more equal for Whites and African-Americans. At the time, race was the most important factor in determining whether or not a child would be successful in school. Now fifty years later, race is not as important as another factor: wealth.

Children in the poorest American families are now an average of four grade levels of knowledge behind children in the richest families. The racial gap stands still at around three years. This is a bit bittersweet because although the racial gap is no longer the main obstacle to children this is only so because wealth has become more of an obstacle. The racial gap has not moved far in the last half-century. Let's look at some of the main reasons that wealth has become such a hot issue in education.

Investing in Children

Children who come from wealthy families are now more able than ever before to get ahead of their peers. Disposable income has risen rapidly for the richest families over the past 40 years but has risen much more slowly for lower-income groups.

The extra money that richer parents now have has allowed them to spend more on early educational opportunities for their children. Many wealthy children can now afford private preschools, language classes and a host of extracurricular activities that other students cannot. At the same time, public schools have cut back funding and have been asked to do more with less. These factors together push wealthy children up while putting extra pressure on children from lower-income families. 

The gap also tends to self-perpetuate. As wealthy children increasingly outperform lower-income children they are more able to get into top tier universities and thus are more likely to land high-paying jobs. The wider the gap grows between the groups, the easier it is for the disparities to become even stronger.

School Achievement Gaps

Similarly, there are geographical divisions between where rich and poor families live. This impacts the quality of public education across the country. Poorer school districts often receive less property tax revenue and spend extra money recruiting and paying teachers. These districts often struggle with underfunding, outdated books and classroom overcrowding. Richer public schools often have the tax funds to ward off many of these issues. As students in poorer districts receive less funding, they do not have the resources to keep up with wealthier peers in neighboring school districts. 

That Prestigious Suburban School May Undermine Your Success

I tend to spend a lot of time envisioning the rise of cities and the decline of present day suburbia. But one topic that I have not discussed so far is the structure of the education system in urban areas as it compares to rural areas. Right now, suburban public schools nationwide far outperform urban schools and this is one reason that many families choose to live in the suburbs. Private schools are often located in cities and are a way for wealthy families to send their children to good schools but this further increases the cost burden of living in cities.

Urban school districts do tend to serve a variety of students from different income levels and ethnic groups. Because of the way that cities tend to exist today, many of these students that attend urban public schools come from lower income brackets and a higher percentage of students fall below the poverty line than students in suburban schools. Unfortunately there is a strong relationship between race, income level and academic performance. With higher percentages of students from lower socioeconomic groups, average academic performance tends to be lower in urban schools.

My overall point is that one must look past averages.

The public school system receives most of it's funding from a combination of tax dollars and government funds. Despite the fact that urban school districts tend to preform at lower levels than suburban schools, they also often receive more funding. Urban schools also tend to serve much greater numbers of students than do suburban schools. These factors together often mean that inner city schools can offer a greater variety of courses and programs to students than suburban schools. A common misconception about urban schools is that teachers are under-qualified. However, teachers in urban districts tend to receive higher salaries than those in suburban areas. Many highly skilled teachers choose to teach in cities for this reason.

But wait, does this mean that urban schools can actually be better than suburban schools? Yes.

Imagine that two high school students have similar academic abilities and both are high performers. One student goes to a suburban school and the other goes to an urban school. The student that goes to the suburban school may feel limited in the number of challenging courses that they can take. Since the school is so small it cannot offer a wide variety of electives and advanced placement classes. On the other hand, the student who attends an urban public high school feels more challenged because the school offers more opportunities. The suburban student graduates 3rd in a class of 100 students an the urban student graduates 5th in a class of 500. Both students worked hard and impressed college admissions departments, but the student from the urban school was accepted to colleges with higher rankings. In this scenario the student from the urban school had a better outcome.

While this may not be the average case, I believe that averages are misleading in the education world. It is challenging to objectively compare schools based on average results because the demographic prints of city schools are so different from schools in the suburbs. I feel that it is much more important and telling to compare the prospects of similar students.

Ultimately when deciding where to raise a family, school district statistics can be overwhelming and I feel that often these statistics have a large role in determining where children are raised. Despite the fact that it seems nearly counter-statistical, I feel that urban school districts may actually be able to serve students better than suburban schools in many cases.