CCRC: Publication

CCRC Highlights Labor Implications of Educational Inequality at Teachers College Symposium

By: CCRC Staff Reporter — (November 01, 2005)

CCRC Director Thomas Bailey played a key role representing Teachers College faculty at a two day symposium October 24-25, 2005 to mark the opening of the Campaign for Educational Equity at, Teachers College, Columbia University. The center is committed to promoting equity in education and eliminating the current achievement gap that drastically limits opportunities for millions of students. Bailey served on an expert panel with economist Cecilia E. Rouse of Princeton University. Together their presentations illuminated the influence that educational inequality has on our nation’s labor market. Addressing more than one hundred education advocates, professors, policymakers, students and teachers, Bailey’s presentation addressed the Implications of Educational Inequality for the Future Workforce.

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Above: Dr. Bailey discusses high school completion and initial postsecondary enrollment.

Bailey provided context for the discussion with data that explained how postsecondary education reduces unemployment and increases individual earnings, as well as productivity in the workforce.

In the past, the US education system produced an educated workforce adequate to maintain a relatively high level of productivity growth, and its higher education system was considered the best in the world. This system has always been highly inequitable in the sense that educational achievement is closely related to race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. However, Bailey suggested that although educational inequality was once a problem primarily for those individuals who ended up with low levels of education, it will increasingly become a problem for everyone as this stands in the way of the US sustaining productivity growth and competing successfully in international markets.

“Over the last fifty years, the United States has been the clear international leader in the share of its population enrolled in higher education, but this dominance is weakening,” said Bailey. “The US has lost its lead in terms of the share of its young population that had completed college. In 2003, the share of the 25-34-year-old populations that had completed higher education in Sweden, Japan, Korea, New Zealand, Norway, Finland, and Canada exceeded that share in the US, and Australia, Spain, Ireland, France, Belgium were closing in” (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 2005).

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Above: Dr. Bailey and Dr. Rusell Rumberger, Professor, School of Education, University of California at Santa Barbara

Bailey explained further that increasing skill levels for employees in the US workforce will be difficult so long as education achievement gaps based on income, race, and ethnicity remain. Certainly the foundation for educational success and eventual college enrollment begins in the K-12 system, yet many students who manage to enroll in college are not prepared for the academic challenge. A comprehensive strategy to improve student outcomes will undoubtedly require a variety of measures including programs to facilitate the transition from high school to college, improvements in remediation, innovations in pedagogy, increased financial aid, and other types of student services.

He concluded that educational inequity will have a larger overall impact on the domestic economy as Hispanics and African Americans account for a larger share of the population and income is becoming more unequally distributed. Bailey added, “In our society, the extreme disparities in educational achievement based on income and race should be reason enough to raise the educational attainment of low-income and minority students. Increasingly, the country as a whole has an economic stake in overcoming these inequities.”

More information about Dr. Bailey’s presentation is available at: http://ccrc.tc.columbia.edu/Presentation.asp?uid=100