What We’re Getting Wrong About the Educational Income Gap

Today the New York Times points to a recent study suggesting that lots of people are qualified for jobs which would pay them way more than they’re making now. That’s probably true, and I don’t have any beef with it. However, the study’s abstract starts out like this:

The demand for a skilled workforce is increasing even faster than the supply of workers with college degrees – the result: rising wage inequality by education levels, and firms facing a skills gap.

This has been on my mind for a while, but I’ve never bothered writing about it before now. The thing is, there’s no question that college grads make a lot more money than high school grads. But whenever I look at income data, that gap isn’t getting any bigger—at least not at the level of high school and bachelors degrees. (PhDs are a different case.) Here’s a chart showing income growth since the end of the Great Recession:

Over the past decade, the income of women with BAs has gone up 9.6 percent, while women with high school diplomas have increased 8.2 percent. Among men, BAs increased 8.2 percent while high school grads increased 6.5 percent. (This is all adjusted for inflation, of course.)

The income of college grads has increased more than the income of high school grads, but only by the tiniest amount. I’ve zoomed in the chart so you can see the gaps, but at any normal scale there’s virtually no difference. The gap has widened slightly more than one percentage point since the end of the recession. If you go back two decades, it looks much the same.

And yet we keep saying that the educational income gap is rising out of control. Why? As near as I can tell, it’s because this was true in the 1990s and no one has bothered to adjust what they say about it since then. What am I missing here?

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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