(Community Matters) in The Atlantic: Can the Middle Class Be Saved? A compelling argument why parents should up their children’s expectation from going to college to going to an elite college and then to graduate school. It might not be long before most of those families with only a bachelors degree will struggle much like we previously saw many families without college educations. Engaging children in civic & religious organizations is also highly recommended by the data – and might be a counter influence making up for the lack of an elite school education.
And, this article reinforces an argument prevailing in the US that we must offer other paths for those who will not go to college, what the author and others call “career academies” designed to build specific work skills as well as apprenticeships.
Finally, it occurs to me that we should double down on social innovation around affordability – housing, childcare, education, wellness/healthcare and cultural programs – as a systemic response to the realities of globalization on our traditional middle class.
Excerpts: Three years after the crash of 2008, the rich and well educated are putting the recession behind them. The rest of America is stuck in neutral or reverse.
In March, the national unemployment rate was 12 percent for people with only a high-school diploma, 4.5 percent for college grads, and 2 percent for those with a professional degree.
As of 2010, the United States was the second-largest manufacturer in the world . . . . but, since 2000, U.S. manufacturing has shed about a third of its jobs.
In 1967, 97 percent of 30-to-50-year-old American men with only a high-school diploma were working; in 2010, just 76 percent were. The family lives of today’s moderately educated Americans,” which in the 1970s closely resembled those of college graduates, now “increasingly resemble those of high-school dropouts, too often burdened by financial stress, partner conflict, single parenting, and troubled children.”
although American prosperity is tied to globalization, something has nonetheless gone wrong with the way America’s economy has evolved in response to increasingly dense global connections. Multi-national corporations headquartered in the US accounted for nearly three-quarters of the nation’s private-sector R&D spending.America no longer enjoys the economic fruits of its innovations for as long as it used to.
For the professional middle class in particular, an uptick in innovation and a return to faster economic growth would solve many problems, and likely reignite income growth. While technology is eating into the work that some college graduates do, their general skills show little sign of losing value.
Career-academy students go on to earn a postsecondary credential at the same rate as other high-school students.
The rich have not become that way while living in a vacuum. Technological advance, freer trade, and wider markets—along with the policies that promote them—always benefit some people and harm others. Some of the policies that have most benefited the rich have little to do with greater competition or economic efficiency. Fortunes on Wall Street have grown so large in part because of implicit government protection against catastrophic losses, combined with the steady elimination of government measures to limit excessive risk-taking, from the 1980s right on through the crash of 2008.
Community Matters 