There is a cost to not educating young people.
The evidence is around us and all over the world.
This from The Atlantic Monthly:
If you want to feel optimistic about the state of things for unemployed, disengaged, and dissatisfied youths in America, here's a way. Spin a globe. Stop it with your finger. If you touch land, the overwhelming odds are that the young people in that country are doing much worse.
There are 1.2 billion people between 15 and 24 in the world, according to the International Youth Foundation's new Opportunity for Action paper. Although many of their prospects are rising, they are emerging from conditions of widespread poverty and lack of access to the most important means of economic mobility: education. In the Middle East and North Africa, youth unemployment has been stuck above 20 percent for the last two decades. And in the parts of the world where youth unemployment has been low, such as south and east Asia, young people are overwhelmingly employed in the agriculture sector, which leaves them vulnerable to poverty.
The report is a crackerjack box of interesting facts -- e.g.: the probability that a 15-year-old Russian male will die before he is 60 is higher than 40 percent, the highest in Europe; among women 15 to 24 years old, only 15 percent are working in the Middle East -- but some of the most surprising stats are the closest to home.
The IYF authors focus on the so-called "NEETs" in the United States and Europe. NEET stands for those Not Engaged in Employment/education, or Training. A 2012 U.S. study put the social cost per NEET youth at $37,450, when you factored in lost earnings, public health spending, and other factors. That brings the total cost of 6.7 million NEET American youths to $4.75 trillion, equal to nearly a third of GDP, or half of U.S. public debt.
Statistics like this are a good reminder that, even though college tuition is famously outpacing median incomes, there is still something more expensive than going to school. Very often, that is not going to school.
The NEET study's final number might be too high. It also might be too low. I can't say. But it's far from the only report identifying a astronomical cost to not going to college.
-- The typical income gap between the a college graduate and the a high school dropout has never been higher. Today, college grads earn 80 percent more than people who don't go to high school.
-- A 2009 McKinsey report estimated that if we raised our education performance to the level of Korea, we could improve the US economy by more than $2 trillion. (We could, in other words, add the GDP of Italy to our economy with education reform.)
-- Yet another study from NBER estimated that the benefit of a good teacher over an average teacher could improve a student's future lifetime earnings by $400,000.
-- Finally, a study from the Hamilton Project found that $100,000 spent on college at age 18 would yield a higher lifetime return than an equal investment in corporate bonds, U.S. government debt, or hot company stocks.
College has its skeptics, and the skeptics make good points. Does a four-year university make sense for every student? Probably not. Is the modern on-site college education necessarily the ideal means to deliver training after high school? Maybe not. Vocational training and community colleges deserve a place in this discussion. And we happen to be living through a quiet revolution in higher education.
Here are three quick examples. First, beginning this year, students at MITx can take free online courses offered by MIT and receive a credential for a price far less than tuition if they demonstrate mastery in the subject. Second, the University of Southern California is experimenting with online classrooms that connect students across the country in front of a single professor. Third, there's Western Governors University, a non-profit, private online university that's spearheading the movement toward "competency-based degrees" that reward what students can prove they know rather than how many hours or credits they amass.
Some of these experiments will fail, and some will scale. What's important is that they offer higher ed and retraining that is cheap, creative, and convenient. If we can win the marketing war in neighborhoods blighted by NEETs and deliver a post-high school education to some of those 7 million young people who have disengaged with education and work, we will be spending money to save money.
Take out that globe one more time and give it a spin. I challenge you to land on a region where education gains aren't translating to productivity and income gains. The highest-income countries have the highest rates of enrollment in secondary school and the smallest share of informal employment that is vulnerable to an economic downturn. There is a cost to not educating young people. The evidence is literally all around us.
3 comments:
I am a college student but I'm not sure I agree with this on certain points. I think it depends on what training you received in college and what field of study you went into whether or not you'll earn more money in life as a college graduate. It also depends where you go after college. If you try to find a job in an economically depressed area with mostly minimum-wage jobs, a college degree might prevent you from obtaining a job based on being considered "overqualified." An employer might look at your degree and decide you'll want higher pay. They can't afford you so you won't be hired even if you would settle for lower pay. Speaking from experience, the first time I graduated from college with a degree in English, I tried to get a job at the newspaper, the bookstore, the library, Wal-mart, McDonald's, and any place I could find that was hiring. Most of them said I was overqualified. Only a few places had already filled the positions. If I had went into Nursing, I might have stood a better chance of employment immediately following graduation and I would have made more money. I later decided to improve my chances of being hired as a teacher and majored in French (Teaching). If you work in the area I come from, Spanish is preferable. In fact, most job sites want Spanish translators and I've only encountered one that advertised for French. As far as teaching goes, I've found from speaking to former classmates you will increase your chances of being hired as a teacher if you have a double major since it's cheaper to hire somebody that knows how to teach Biology and Chemistry than to hire separate teachers, but you also have to have the personality for it. I'm not cut out to be a teacher. I still think education is useful since it is the one thing you can take with you anywhere. You may not keep your job or your house, but at least you can keep your knowledge and it may come in handy getting you a job and a house later on if you know how to use it properly. The one thing I think schools are lacking in right now is direction. In order to get decent paying jobs filled by people with the right kind of education, students need to be encouraged to build up their strengths and find occupations that will let those strengths shine. Most students do not know what jobs match their skills and personality and what training is required to get those jobs. Teachers can't always figure out a student's personality but they can tell what a student is good at based on grades and test scores. Even students who are bored and refuse to pay attention in class will do best in the subjects they like the most. If you can't encourage them to look into certain jobs or direct them towards jobs that require a college degree, they might end up with three degrees they're not using or more likely, they might not even go to college at all and consider it a waste of time and money. It would also help if we had more decent paying jobs available in our communities or jobs that required higher education, but that is something the educational system has no control over.
Even though I am a college student, there are a few points made in this particular article that I do not necessarily agree with. Everything mentioned in this particular reading, in my honest opinion, is completely dependent on how much college experience you have once it is all said and done, along with what you majored in, double majored in, etc, when talking salary once one graduates and takes on a full time job for the first time in their lives. If one spends all their efforts trying to find a job in an area with poor economy, poor living conditions, and one that is mainly composed of lower middle class to lower class families, there is most likely going to be nothing but minimum wage paying jobs and ones that a college graduate is not looking for. If one has a double major, however, regardless of where he/she searches for job opportunities, the probability of getting a desirable one will skyrocket, as employers will see right away that that particular individual is absolutely qualified as part of the job description right away. Even if one does not get this job when they may need it and/or if something goes wrong and they are let go, at least that individual still has all the knowledge necessary, along with the solid resume, to have a good chance of getting on at somewhere else desirable sometime soon. Pertaining to schools nowadays, the main component I honestly believe many of them are lacking is a good sense of direction. With this, decent paying jobs with people who contain the proper amount of education become a lot more available.
This leads to the fact that all students need that motivation and inspiration to encourage them to build on their strengths and try to improve their weaknesses to help create for a better future in the long run. although teachers sometimes cannot determine a student's overall personality based on their various moods in class, they can determine what kind of student each one is and what each one needs to work on most by the grades each receives on tests, papers, and other various assignments. This leads into discovering what students are most interested in, which helps lead to success in the long run by preventing boredom, falling asleep, and a lack of desire from occurring in the classroom. All in all, it would help tremendously if we as a country had a greater amount of better paying jobs available to the public, or even just jobs that required the aspect of a higher education. Unfortunately, and it is something that will most likely hold true for as long as most of us can foresee, the education system and various administrators across the country have absolutely no control over these changes being implemented, therefore resulting in what could get even worse in the years to come in terms of overall job opportunity and unemployment rate.
The one thing I think schools are lacking in right now is direction, and if this is not improved soon, the direction as a whole of our school systems could go down in a hurry. In order to get decent paying jobs filled by people with the right kind of education, students need to be encouraged to build up their strengths and find occupations that will let those strengths shine. Most students do not know what jobs match their skills and personality and what training is required to get those jobs. Teachers can't always figure out a student's personality but they can tell what a student is good at based on grades and test scores. Even students who are bored and refuse to pay attention in class will do best in the subjects they like the most. If you can't encourage them to look into certain jobs or direct them towards jobs that require a college degree, they might end up with three degrees they're not using or more likely, they might not even go to college at all and consider it a waste of time and money. It would also help if we had more decent paying jobs available in our communities or jobs that required higher education, but that is something the educational system has no control over. Although this is unfortunate, out school system can still be making a conscious effort to overcome issues such as these to help come together and accomplish a common goal. All effort helps, and if we continue making conscious efforts like we have in the past, anything is reachable for making for a greater, stronger learning environment for all students.
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