Inequalities

Tag: education

  • The Immense Benefit of Applying to One More College – A Natural Experiment

    A college degree is more than a wall ornament – it represents immense financial benefits for graduates. These rewards have become even more apparent during the long financial downturn, which have seen widening wage and employment gaps between college graduates and those with only a high school degree. Studies also illustrate that getting students to…

  • Did Labour’s social policies fail or succeed 1997-2010?

    It’s impossible to begin telling a story without knowing the ending. So after 13 years in office (1997-2010), it is only now possible to write the story of New Labour’s social policy record – what they aimed to do, what they spent, and what it achieved – and this is just what a team of…

  • British and U.S. Inequality Over the Lifecourse: An Important New Report

    Ben and I both attended the Social Change Harvard-Manchester Initiative (SCHMi) summer institute in 2010, a joint program between the University of Manchester and Harvard. A core group of SCHMi researchers just released a report, authored by Rourke O’Brien (also of the SCHMi summer class of 2010), entitled Inequality, Instability, and Mobility in Family Life.…

  • Solving the High School Graduation Puzzle

    Going back at least as far as the landmark 1966 Coleman Report, social scientists and policymakers have debated how much educational achievement gaps reflect the influence of families and social norms on the one hand, and differences in the quality of schools in disadvantaged areas, on the other hand. As Richard Murnane describes in a…

  • When do charter schools work?

    Are KIPP schools the solution to what ails the poorest, most disadvantaged urban students? The KIPP educational paradigm rests on a few core principles (“the Five Pillars”) – High Expectations, Choice and Commitment, More Time, Power to Lead, and Focus on Results. Students at KIPP schools work in highly structured learning environments for much longer…

  • Life Expectancy in the U.S. is Getting Shorter for the Least Educated

    The late 20th century brought landmark public health movements to the United States, like the control of tobacco, and medical breakthroughs in the treatment of heart disease and cancer. Life expectancy surged overall, but today the lower educated are still stuck in a different era. From a new paper in Health Affairs (behind a paywall):…

  • Should the government promote marriages among the disadvantaged?

    Perhaps the most socially divisive question in post welfare reform America has been whether the federal government should encourage unmarried parents to wed. The Bush administration plowed hundreds of millions of dollars into its Healthy Marriage Initiative, a program that the Obama administration has actually continued to fund (albeit with much less fanfare). In a…

  • Does College Make You Liberal?

    “President Obama once said he wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob… There are good decent men and women who go out and work hard every day and put their skills to test that aren’t taught by some liberal college professor to try to indoctrinate them. Oh, I understand why he…

  • Health Behaviors Do Not Explain the Growing Education-Mortality Gradient

    The gap in premature mortality between high and low educated people in the United States has grown considerably over the last few decades, even as life expectancy has increased overall. A common explanation is the changing distribution of risk factors: if the less educated are relatively slow to experience declines in mortality, it must be…

  • New York City Wants to Solve Poverty, Will it Work?

    Anti-poverty successes are celebrated nationally, but how quickly we forget the failures. Does anybody remember the New York City conditional cash transfer program for poor families, Opportunity NYC? The program, which supporters hoped would help to change the behaviors of poor families and curb the transmission of poverty from parents to children, was quietly shelved…