Heard one of the reporters on the John Batchelor show last night. He made the point that unless you are "super-educated", your shot at getting a good job is nil.
http://www.reuters.com/subjects/income-inequality An excerpt: Falling behind the rich Just to stay even, poorer Americans need to obtain better credentials. But that points to another rich-poor divide in the United States. Educators call it the scholastic "achievement gap." It has been around forever, but it's getting wider. Lower-class children are getting better educations than before. But richer kids are outpacing their gains, which in turn is stoking the widening income gap. Across the country, a Stanford University study found last year, the achievement gap between rich and poor students on standardized tests is 30 to 40 percent wider than it was a quarter-century ago. Because excellent students are more likely to grow rich, the authors argued, income inequality risks becoming more entrenched. "Now, we're in a situation where we need to educate everyone at the level of the elite in the past," said Paul Reville, Massachusetts secretary of education. "We don't have a system to do that." It's an academic arms race, and it can be seen in the sharply contrasting fortunes of Weston, a booming Boston suburb, and the blue-collar community of Gardner, where a 20-foot-tall chair sits on Elm Street as a monument to the town's past as a furniture-manufacturing hub. The percentage of Gardner children bound for four-year colleges has held steady at about half in the past decade, and median incomes have tumbled as furniture makers headed south or overseas. Gardner High School graduate Curtis Dorval dropped out of the University of Massachusetts this year after his father, a Walmart worker, ran short of money. He's working at a Walmart now, too, and then heading off to the military. In Weston, hedge-fund managers are tearing down modest homes to build mansions. Per-capita incomes have leaped 161 percent in the past two decades, and the high school is sending 96 percent of its graduates to universities. Tanner Skenderian, president of the class of 2012, is now at Harvard; in her graduation speech, she told her classmates to "reach for the moon." _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
