Sabina “Toujours”
Low-Wage Workers Have Far More Education than They Did in 1968, Yet They Make Far Less
The minimum wage is 23 percent less than its peak inflation-adjusted value in 1968. This is despite productivity (how much output can be produced in an average hour of work in the economy) more than doubling in that time period. The low-wage workforce has surely contributed to this rise in economy-wide productivity, since as a group they have far more education now than they did then. For the workforce overall, 37 percent in 1968 had not completed high school (or received a GED), which was true for only 9 percent in 2012 (the latest year with comparable data). We can drill down to examine low-wage workers, which we are defining for this analysis as those earning in the bottom fifth of the wage distribution.
“Low-Wage Workers Have Far More Education than They Did in 1968, Yet They Make Far Less,” Lawrence Mishel, January 23, 2014, Economic Policy Institute
As it turns out, unless you have policy people making sure that wages keep going up, policy people will make sure that they keep going down, even if you are more educated.
Naked Greed
The blunt fact is that the SAT has never been a good predictor of academic achievement in college. High school grades adjusted to account for the curriculum and academic programs in the high school from which a student graduates are. The essential mechanism of the SAT, the multiple choice test question, is a bizarre relic of long outdated twentieth century social scientific assumptions and strategies. As every adult recognizes, knowing something or how to do something in real life is never defined by being able to choose a “right” answer from a set of possible answers (some of them intentionally misleading) put forward by faceless test designers who are rarely eminent experts. No scientist, engineer, writer, psychologist, artist, or physician—and certainly no scholar, and therefore no serious university faculty member—pursues his or her vocation by getting right answers from a set of prescribed alternatives that trivialize complexity and ambiguity.
“College President: SAT Is Part Hoax, Part Fraud,” Leon Botstein
Someone just pointed out that the emperor is naked.
The Runaways “Cherry Bomb”