Brooks, Jobs, and Education

Public Education in Valencia Today
helena_perez_garcia / Foter / CC BY-NC-ND

After reading “The Temptation of Hillary” in today’s New York Times, I was about to post a comment on his most ridiculous statement: “If we could close the gap so that high-school-educated people had the skills of college-educated people, that would increase household income by $28,000 per year.”

But then I saw that in the Comments section, the editors’ pick highlighted at the top a comment that first quoted the same sentence and then reflected: “This proposition holds good only if the demand for ‘college-educated-skills’ also increases by the corresponding number in a corresponding time-frame! Is this a reasonable assumption?”

So I just “recommended” that comment and posted a comment on Facebook, which has elicited the following comments:

Justice St. Rain:

More education just increases competition for good jobs. It doesn’t create any. Demand creates jobs, and it takes income at the bottom to create demand. Simple as that. That is why “redistribution” is necessary, no matter what other factors you consider. Money hoarded at the top will never create demand, and without demand the money at the top will never be spent on new investments.

Valerie Winemiller:

And at the cost of a college education, the increase is eaten up in school loan payments for over a decade. So many holes in this argument I can’t start!

The myth of education as the panacea lives on. Alas.