Education won't cure poverty, in one chart

[KamaAina]

http://www.vox.com/2015/3/30/8308607/education-poverty

Highly educated people are less likely to be poor than less-educated people. That's true today, it was true decades ago, and it's not especially surprising. What is a bit surprising is what's shown in this chart from Melissa Boteach and Shawn Fremstad of the Center for American Progress — poor Americans are much better-educated today than they were a generation ago:

There are a lot of problems with the official poverty metric, so don't sweat the details of this too much. The point, however, is that you can't count on improving educational outcomes alone to cure poverty. We've made dramatically more progress in improving high school graduation rates and college attendance rates than we've made in raising the market incomes of workers at the bottom of the income pyramid. And the 2013 data in part shows that recessions continue to be punishing, poverty-inducing experiences for Americans with all kinds of educational credentials.

edit: Aw, dammit! The software ate the link to the chart again!

[Yavin4]

1. No need for a chart. Just see your local Graduate Teaching Assistant

They make an average $31,000. These are PhDs !!!

[Adrahil]

10. I think you mean adjuncts...

GTA's, by definition, don't have their PhD's, but are in the process of getting them.

Adjuncts, OTOH, are incredibly abused. Low pay, long hours, and no benefits. It's unbelievable.

[el_bryanto]

2. The reason the well educated do better is that they generally start out several rungs up the ladder

In my opinion.

Bryant

[HubertHeaver]

3. But when the ladder breaks,

they fall into the heap with the rest of us.

[Adrahil]

11. Generally true, but not always...

I'm the first in my family to go to college, and the first to break out of the working class.

But it is true that the vast majority of those I went to college with were from a higher economic class than I was.

[GeorgeGist]

4. I suspect the oligarchs.

[KamaAina]

5. Note where the bottom line, so to speak, starts to tail off

1980 = St. Raygun. There were signs of it in the '70s, but it starts to become the yawning gulf we see today under Raygun.

[Salviati]

7. It is not possible for this chart to be posted too many times

This is the root cause of many of the problems we are experiencing today.

[woo me with science]

8. Important chart. Thank you.

[Adrahil]

12. I'd like a to a this plot compared to union membership...

I bet they corroborate pretty closely.

[lumberjack_jeff]

6. Agree. Rising levels of education create rising levels of productivity.

That productivity creates profit that goes only to capital, which bears no share of the burden of that education.

It's a sucker's game.

[Igel]

9. Education's correlated with a lot of things.

Some of which affect poverty directly (primarily by increasing social mobility--then it's not "I have more education" but "I have a greater amount of education for my cohort&quot , some of which affect health, etc., etc.

It's increasingly looking like it's a package deal.

[Orrex]

13. I would think that the wealthy are more likely to obtain better education

Rather than education leading to improved financial security, it seems likely that financial security raises the likelihood of a good education.

Chicken<--->Egg