"Making the perfect the enemy of the good."

[JHan]

95. I mentioned the 2015 fed reserve study, it's worth reading...adding to that tho..

In many of the responses to you in this thread there is objection to either/or arguments. Compromise is the antithesis of the dualistic approach of Either/Or.

I'm not a policy expert, just a layman trying to make sense of the trends:

These links are a good overview of the study in question.

This link also provides supplementary data from other research looking into tuition costs https://www.forbes.com/sites/akelly/2015/10/08/does-federal-student-aid-cause-tuition-increases-it-certainly-enables-them/

Vox also looked at the study , and there's some refutation of the claims being made . I particularly like the analogy of car loans and car prices. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2015/8/12/9130157/financial-aid-tuition-bennett-hypothesis

This covers the pesky business of fees, another layer of expense :https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/01/how-university-costs-keep-rising-despite-tuition-freezes/512036/

But my skepticism has more to do with the idea that degrees are a magical solution to income disparity.

From Income Inequality and Education Richard Breen,Inkwan Chung ( University of Oxford & Yale University ) https://www.sociologicalscience.com/download/volume-2/august/SocSci_v2_454to477.pdf

From the abstract :

" Many commentators have seen the growing gap in earnings and income between those with a college education and those without as a major cause of increasing inequality in the United States and elsewhere. In this article we investigate the extent to which increasing the educational attainment of the US population might ameliorate inequality. We use data from NLSY79 and carry out a three-level decomposition of total inequality into within-person, between-person and between- education parts. We find that the between-education contribution to inequality is small, even when we consider only adjusted inequality that omits the within-person component. We carry out a number of simulations to gauge the likely impact on inequality of changes in the distribution of education and of a narrowing of the differences in average incomes between those with different levels of education. We find that any feasible educational policy is likely to have only a minor impact on income inequality."

Take note of figure 3 on pg 13 which this section references:

Figure 3 illustrates why education accounts for relatively little inequality. These kernel density plots show the distributions of respondents’ mean income (aver- aged over the entire period of roughly 20 years) according to education. While it is immediately evident that the densities for higher educational categories lie further to the right, it is equally apparent that there is substantial overlap between categories. In the older cohort, for example, almost 23 percent of respondents in the college category have an average income less than the median for respondents in the high school category. In the younger cohort the figure is 13 percent, reflecting the impression in Figure 3 that the overlap in income is less among those born 1962–4.

It might be objected that education explains only a small share of inequality because the educational groupings we are using are not sufficiently discriminating: the category “college” for example, puts together graduates from different colleges and from different majors and also includes people with post-graduate degrees. Perhaps if we had a finer categorization of education we could explain more; some of the within-education inequality would then become between-education inequality. We repeated our analyses with six categories of education: “less than high school” “GED” “high school diploma” “some college” “completed college” and “advanced degree (MA, PhD or professional qualification)” This had little impact on the share of inequality explained by education.

For example, if we consider only the results for the entire period, the original four categories of education accounted for 0.044/(0.044 + 0.122) = 26.5 percent of total adjusted (for within-person volatility) inequality in the older cohort and 27.4 percent in the younger cohort. Using the six categories these percentages change to 27 percent and 27.8 percent. The additional contributions from the use of the finer categorization to between-group inequality in each of the sub-periods are similarly very small."

Which is why I questioned the sense of a high school graduate taking themselves out of the market for 4 years, to pursue an unproductive degree according to market demands, for the purpose of netting an above-median wage only to then be disappointed.

And my focus on k-12 is the direct link it has on generational wealth: poor education in formative years puts you out of the loop permanently. Literacy and numeracy rates are alarming enough in a country that is the richest and most powerful in the world.