World News: Rich Get Richer and The Poor More Invisible?

Two tweets came up nearly back to back in my world news list today. The first from England: The rich get richer in UK index of the wealthiest people. Followed shortly thereupon by this headline from Canada: No Anti-Poverty Measures in 2015 budget Minister Joe Oliver avoids any mention of poverty.

It's Not That College Graduates are Doing Better, It's that Non-Grads are Doing Worse

Thought provoking post over at Scatterplot today on "the increasing penalty for not going to college." It argues that we are framing discussions about going to college in a misleading way.

Perhaps worse yet, I think this framing – and especially the “increasing returns to a college degree” frame – suggests the wrong trend. Increasing returns to college sounds like a situation where the base wage for a high school graduate has been flat, while the wages of the college-educated have increased. Instead, what we see is the wages for those with high school degrees falling while wages for the college educated have stagnated. The Pew Research Center published a report that frames this story nicely as The Rising Cost of Not Going to College. This chart shows how all of the increase in the college-non college gap for young adults (25-32) since 1986 comes from declines at the bottom. To sum up: The “increasing returns to college” story makes attending college sound like a reward for a good choice, not a structured fact about unequal educational access, and it suggests a world in which college incomes are rising and non-college incomes are falling, rather than a world where the bottom is falling out. “The increasing penalty for not going to college” is a bit clunky, but (to my ear) solves those problems.