For Wage Growth, You Need Education in Real Terms – Not Nominal Terms

Pay pressure – FT.com.

See Pikety for the conditions for reducing inequality.  Anyway, I tried to point this out.  Here is what I wrote.

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The cause of the stagnation in the US should be clear to anyone who looks.

It is the businessification and corruption of one of a democracy’s most important institutions – higher education.

This corruption rains down on all of education – and thus on all of society.

Here is how it works.

At many “elite” schools, like the one where I taught, the main focus on students is based on catering to their wants – that is, a great social life with little educational “stress” – instead of meeting their educational “needs”,  But these “elite” schools don’t just dumb down education for their students. They pass the favor along. Here is how.

At my “elite” school, a professor got a large “national need” grant to produce American PhD’s in math. This professor awarded PhD’s to candidates who did not even know calculus well!  (See my blog inside-higher-ed for this story and others.)

Many PhD’s like his teach at regional schools. Here is a not uncommon incident at such a school. A professor who taught a first year course, said that after five years, he could always tell when the homework was wrong, but still didn’t always understand what was wrong. (See my blog for this story.) How can anyone expect high school teachers to have the tools they need to do a good job?

Jefferson saw that no democracy can survive without good education. We better see what is happening before it is too late.”