Blog 3: Education No Guarantee for Success

In this article it talks about how in the current state of our economy education does not guarantee that you will be successful. It is still a well-known fact that if you get a college degree you generally make more in hourly wages than a person with just a high school diploma but the salaries for college graduates have not increased since 2000. Many of the salaries have actually dropped since then. “Employees with a four-year college degree earned about 75 percent more in hourly wages than high school graduates. Workers with postgraduate credentials earned 30 percent more than workers with a four-year degree. In 2011 the unemployment rate for college graduates 5.2 percent was less than half that for people with a high school diploma 11.1 percent.” With that being said a college degree does help but it does not guarantee anything. Many college graduates are working but they are not making the wages they deserve or their job doesn’t even require a degree.  Another problem that exists which has a huge influence on your income status is your parent’s income status.  “Only about one of six children born to parents in the bottom fifth of the income distribution remained there as adults if they obtained a college degree, the report concludes.  But by contrast, nearly half of the children of low-income parents who don’t complete college remain stuck on that bottom rung.” This is an issue because lots of families cannot afford to send their children to college but if they don’t their children probably won’t end up with a decent job.

This article really opened my eyes to the issue of college graduates obtaining jobs once they have completed school. I knew that many college students were not making the wages they should rightfully be making with their degrees, but I did not know that it was not expected for the jobs and income growth median to get back to the level it was at in 2000 until 2018. That is a huge generational gap decline. We need to find ways to generate more jobs in our economy so they wages can increase and we can get back to where we were in 2000 then further improve from there. 

http://www.nationaljournal.com/thenextamerica/education/education-no-guarantee-for-success-20120914