EVERYTHING IS
JUST FINE EDUCATION-WISE IN AMERICA?
That economic consequence just aint fair. Welcome to America where the Top-20% GET MOST OF THE WEALTH! And the Bottom 20% get nada ... !
So, what's a country to do? First and foremost, one must start at the bottom. That is, education that starts in primary-schooling. The second level is Post-secondary Education.
I'm no expert in the matter, but here is one:
OECD Education at a Glance - where America is looking pretty good compared to some other countries.
KEY FINDINGS
• The U.S. ranks 14th in the world in the percentage of 25-34 year-olds with higher education (42%).
• The odds that a young person in the U.S. will be in higher education if his or her parents do not have an upper secondary education are just 29% -- one of the lowest levels among OECD countries.
• The U.S ranks 28th in the percentage of 4-year-olds in early childhood education, with a 69% enrolment rate.
• Across all OECD countries, 30% of the expenditure on higher education comes from private sources, while in the U.S., 62% does.
• Teachers in the U.S. spend between 1 050 and 1 100 hours a year teaching – much more than in almost every country.
OK! for the above! Not bad at all! But family provisioning of tuition-costs are not going to help those families below or at or just-above the Poverty Threshold in the US.
So, what-to-do for the 11% of the population (data from
here) that live below the Poverty Threshold ($26K annual compensation for a family of 4)? This data-figure is about 10% lower than in the past due to economic improvement. But, such improvement is something in any economy that "comes and goes"!
(Except for the DoD which seems miraculously to keep the same level of high-expenditure!)
My Point is simple: We are transferring some but not enough of our secondary-school achievers into a post-secondary training/education program. Which is of two kinds:
*Basic Work Training (construction, piloting, cooking, etc.)
*Post-secondary education (Two-year, Four-year and beyond)
How much was invested by both the government and non-Federal spending in Colleges/Universities? From the "datalab"
here:
In 2018, higher education institutions received a total of $1.068 trillion in revenue from federal and non-federal funding sources. Investments from the federal government were $149 billion of the total, representing 3.6% of federal spending. This money flowed into colleges and universities through three main vehicles: federal student aid, grants, and contracts. In our analysis we focused on data from nonprofit institutions that offer a program of two years or more.
Wow! Nearly 150 biga-bucks but only 3.6% of 'federal-spending" - and
that aint nearly enough for a priority germane to continued adequate highly-educated workforce that is a New Necessity for America.
No, we gotta do better than that! And we can, but for the moment (and it seems since WW2) we love to go to war so a great deal of available funding is for the DoD. And I say,
"That's enough! We have other far more important objectives for government subvention".
Namely, post-secondary education in a US that has become since the 1990s
heavily Services-orientated for which Tertiary-Level diplomas are a great necessity. Manufacturing having mostly skedaddled to China and Central South America!
Show me how I got that above all-wrong, all-wrong, all-wrong ... !