The Decline of Education

Here’s part of an interesting discussion with Alex Tabarrok and Russ Roberts:

What’s wrong with our education system? Let’s talk about K-12. Here’s two remarkable facts, which have just blown me away. Right now, in the United States, people 55-64 years old, they are more likely to have had a high school education than 25-34 year olds. Just a little bit, but they are more likely.

So, you look everywhere in the world and what do you see? You see younger people having more education than older people. Not true in the United States. That is a shocking claim. Incredible. And the reason is that the drop-out rate has increased? Exactly. So, the high school dropout rate has increased. Now, 25% of males in the United States drop out of high school. And that’s increased since the 1960s, even as the prospects for a high school dropout have gotten much worse.

We’ve seen an increase, 21st century–25% of males not graduating high school. That’s mind-boggling. Why? One of the underlying facts relating to education, which is has stayed true, which is that the more education you get on average–and I’m going to talk about why on average can be very misleading–high school graduates do better than high school dropouts; people with some college do better than high school graduates; people graduating from college do better than people with some college; people with graduate degrees do better than college grads. And the differences are large. Particularly if you compare a college graduate to a high school dropout, there is an enormous difference. So, normally we would say: Well, this problem kind of solves itself. There’s a natural incentive to stay in school, and I wouldn’t worry about it. Why should we be worrying about it? It doesn’t seem to be working. Why isn’t it working and what could be done? I think there’s a few problems. One is the quality of teachers I think has actually gone down. So I think that’s a problem.

Posted by on December 26th, 2011 at 6:43 pm


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