Education

From 2001 to 2013, college enrollment in the US increased rapidly. Young people delayed the full-time work portion of their lives, ostensibly to seek skills for an evolving set of jobs. Trends since 2014, however, suggest that the increase in education is not an entirely structural change. Over the past few years, a tighter labor market has been leading more young people to full-time work, suggesting that a weak labor market, rather than simply concern over a changing set of jobs, was pushing some young people to enroll from 2001 to 2013.

I’m a big fan of The Atlantic’s Alana Semuels, but wanted to provide some additional context for her piece on the gender gap in college education (Poor Girls are Leaving Their Brothers Behind). There’s no question that women are graduating from high schoo

With the costs of college tuition skyrocketing, the affordability of higher education is becoming a major issue in the 2016 presidential campaign. Some commentators have argued that the proper solution to rising costs is putting more money in the pockets of students. Specifically, they argue that colleges should expand their work-study programs so that students can get jobs and pay their tuition.

If students want to work full- or part-time jobs to pay for their textbooks, housing, tuition, etc., it would be unfair to deny them that opportunity. However, it should be noted that asking students to work their way through college is unlikely to have a large effect on college affordability, for one simple reason: most college students are already employed.

Women—and black women in particular—have seen significant improvements in high school completion rates since the turn of the century, almost cutting in half the black-white gap for women during that time, as I shared last month. But has that meant an incr

Dean Baker
Al Jazeera America, August 17, 2015

This post was originally published at Girl w/ Pen. Often, when we see improvements by all (be it in educational attainment, income, health, etc.), we overlook the fact that gender or racial gaps still persist or have even gotten worse. There has been much

UNICEF’s Office of Research-Innocenti recently released a report detailing the impact of the recession on children in rich countries in the EU and OECD. As might be expected, countries like Greece and Italy performed poorly across a variety of indicators, including child poverty, youth unemployment, and severe child material deprivation. One interesting comparison is that of France, which tends to be lumped among those whose workers are sometimes portrayed as lazy by outsiders. The French youth unemployment rates for those aged 15 to 24 in 2008 and 2013 were in fact higher than those of the U.S., though not as high as that of countries like Greece and Italy.

Nicole Woo
November 12, 2014, The Hill

In a recent post, I argued that Avery and Turner’s research, cited by The New York Times’ David Leonhardt, ignores the experiences of students of color. For a variety of reasons, such as labor market discrimination, workers’ outcomes diverge significantly based on race. Research from CEPR, for example, showed that in 2013, recent black college graduates had more than double the unemployment rate (12.4 percent) of recent college graduates in general (5.6 percent), and more than half (55.9 percent) worked in jobs that do not require a college degree. Against this background, simply looking at the average return to college does not cut it; the payoffs are smaller and less certain for some groups of students than the overall average suggests.

At the Upshot today, David Leonhardt asks if college is “worth it” and answers with a resounding “clearly,” citing data he obtained from the Economic Policy Institute. Leonhardt’s answer, however, raises a bigger question, which he leaves unexamined: if c