EDUCATION AND SOCIAL INEQUALITY

WHAT REALLY ARE THE FUNCTIONS OF EDUCATION?

With cognitive labor rapidly supplanting physical labor, the theme of the times seems to be that if Americans are to successfully compete in the new economic world system then the quality and quantity of their education must be increased. Education is seen to be the great panacea by which inequality and poverty can be reduced, a national investment in human capital now that people costs comprise about two-thirds of the cost of any product (see causal models of education's role in status attainment). In addition, education has been viewed as the mechanism by which immigrants are "Americanized"--the very cauldron of the American "melting pot."

But there a number of latent, less idealistic functions of this institution. Mandatory schooling and child labor laws were enacted at the turn of the century not so much for the welfare of the young but for the benefit of other interests: to keep unruly urchins off urban streets and to provide an abeyance mechanism by which cheap young workers could be kept out of the labor market. In the late 1970s, John Meyer and Brian Rowan argued that the primary function of education is to sort people and to certify them in such a way as to reaffirm existent stratification orders. Schools are judged by the appropriateness of their structures and not by the knowledge product imparted, hence we measure "education" by counting the number of graduates, courses in the curriculum, and programs for special students (have you ever noticed the absence of studies correlating students' final high school standings with their adulthood outcomes, like income, job satisfaction, and number of divorces?)

Further, with the proliferation of McJobs in the service sector wherein work is "dumbed down," with the increasing numbers of over-educated and underemployed individuals in the labor force, and with Bureau of Labor Statistics projections of nursing aides and janitors being among the fastest growing occupations, doubts have been raised about education's true functions. And then there are the reportings of the General Accounting Office showing that it's tens of thousands of dollars cheaper for the government to send youngsters to the Ivy League than to imprison them!

So what is the educational payoff? Click here to see real hourly wages by education, using CPS education definitions 1992-96.

HOW EDUCATIONAL PERFORMANCE CORRELATES
WITH DIMENSIONS OF STRATIFICATION

• In Losing Our Future: How Minority Youth Are Being Left Behind by the Graduation Rate Crisis (2004), Gary Orfield and his colleagues at Harvard’s Urban Institute & Civil Rights Project, found only about one-half of minority students in the United States graduating from high school.  Among males, the figure is even lower: 43% of Blacks and 48% Hispanics graduated in 2001.
• implications of rising college costs: Click here to see percent of students obtaining college diploma by parents' income level according to Thomas G. Mortenson's "Postsecondary Education Opportunity" study
• Rand's Council for Aid to Education's 1997 report, "Breaking the Social Contract: The Fiscal Crisis in Higher Education"
• Jack Viteritti, "Stacking the Deck for the Poor: The New Politics of School Choice"
• exploitation of student athletes who earn millions for schools