There ought to be more societal and legislative investment in education and skills training for all in society, regardless of legal, criminal, immigrant, disability, economic and political status. With dishearteningly few exceptions, the United States has failed to reform education and access to job skills training. There have been many common themes in the readings in the social work program, and one of the most influential seems to be that a lack of investment and protections in education and job skills training establishes and perpetuates degradation and suffering. This trend directly and substantially contributes to the growing divide between impoverished and wealthy individuals, entities and communities.
Evident in places like Mississippi, where the combination of passionate resistance to integrating schools and a lack of investment in job-skills training employment opportunities, failure to prioritize equitable education and training for all is a long-standing tradition in many parts of the country. The communities that suffer the most are those that do not abolish policies that encourage the generational cycle that inevitably comes with a lack of equitable investment in educational and vocational resources. To be thorough, it would not be sufficient to simply abolish such policies. To effectively break such cycles of suffering, robust and well-researched policies that encourage economic and social investment in these resources must be established and appropriately enacted.
My understanding is that federal funding for career, technical, and adult education is about $3 billion each year, and funding for higher education, when you include tax expenditures and Pell grants and so forth, is about $40 billion. So, for every dollar we spend on the 35% of the population getting a university degree we're spending about 7.5¢ on the 35% of the population that needs vocational and technical training. Does that seem ridiculous to you? It does to me. I don't think states make up for it.
Certain populations are especially susceptible to this type of resource scarcity. Incarcerated people and black, brown and indigenous people are especially underserved in education and job training. This page, on www.equityinhighered.org, features a table that illustrates the educational attainment in the United States with the data organized by heritage, or “ethnicity and race”. Encouragingly, the article indicates that the levels of highest education acquired has increased between 2002 and 2022 (U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Survey, 2017).
Let me insert something I saw in the first chapter of that report. Back in 2002, about 26.7% of adults aged 25 or older had bachelor's degrees, master's degrees, professional degrees, or doctorates. Only 17.1% of Black adults had such degrees. In 2022, 37.6% of American adults 25 and older had bachelor's, master's, professional, and doctorate degrees, and for Black Americans the figure was 27.9%. Overall, by 2022 attainment of such degrees had increased to 141% of what it had been in 2002 (for all races and ethnicities), whereas for Black Americans the increase had been 163%.
Similarly, and often with implicating intersections - such as the correlation between heritage and incarceration – incarcerated people are arguably the most underserved population in the country in educational access. Figure 1 of this article on prisonpolicy.org compares data of highest education attainment between the general public, “age 25+”, and incarcerated populations. The disparity does not stop at education attainment, as many incarcerated people are plagued by legal, social and cultural persecution and exclusion and struggle to find gainful employment. Rarer still are the employment opportunities that offer skills training and upward mobility – a common theme among all people who are failed by dysfunctional education systems and job market.
That is a very interesting question: does the economy today provide more jobs with low chances for significant promotion and no ladder of skill and income growth? In the past, did the economy provide more jobs where a person with low skills and experience could start out with a low income, but expect to quickly get promotions and income increases to attain a dignified standard of living? So often the statistics on jobs and job growth only tell us median and mean earnings, hours worked, and total number of jobs. If a third of the positions in the job market are for low-wage jobs where a person in the occupation is unlikely to ever see significant promotion or job growth, that means something different compared to a situation where 20% of jobs are like that, or where 40% of jobs are like that.
Without sound, ethical and equitable policy and consistent and exhaustive economic investment in education and job skills training, the cycles of suffering will continue. There is so much more to learn and much to be done to encourage the health, prosperity and safety of the United States and much of it must be done at the foundation of society; inclusive education and economic equity.
I think the federal government ought to spend about $60 billion on higher education and perhaps $30 billion on career, technical, and adult education, as opposed to the approximately $40 billion and $3 billion it respectively spends today. I'm in favor of increasing the federal income tax on middle-income persons by about 4 percentage points and increasing the tax on wealthy households by about 8 percentage points, and I think such increases in tax revenue could cover universal health care, more secure old-age pensions, and increases in spending on education, housing, and mental health systems of care (I would reduce defense spending from over $1 trillion down to about $700 billion). In our particular state of Illinois I think expenditure on higher education needs to increase by nearly $2 billion, and we need to invest about $500 million more in vocational and career education. I'd increase taxes on upper income households from about 11% t0 7% (what they are now) to about 15%, keep people in the middle third of incomes taxed at about the rates they are paying now, and reduce taxes on people in the lower third of household incomes from about 14% (what they pay now) to 7%. I'd accomplish this by eliminating sales taxes (keeping taxes on fossil fuel products, tobacco, alcohol, and marijuana), and increasing the flat income tax from 4.95% to 9%, but increasing standard deductions for individuals and families by several thousands of dollars.
Sources cited below were read before and during the hour spent writing and editing this.
https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/education.html
U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Survey, 2017
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