Category: Education

If you’ve read any think pieces about higher education recently, you are familiar with the accepted narrative by now. Back in the day — which usually means the 1970s or thereabouts — college was accessible to all and therefore an engine of social mobility and egalitarianism. But now things have changed. Higher tuition, student debt,… Continue reading Higher education is more class diverse than it used to be

The Federal Reserve released another report on household debt in the past week or so. The report’s detailing of student debt trends has received considerable attention, including from the New York Times. Since our society loves to tell this hilarious story about our institutions of higher education being factories of egalitarianism and social mobility, this… Continue reading Latest Fed report on student debt

Suppose that the following things are basically true: Good jobs go to those who have the most credentials, be that degrees, experience, or otherwise. The supply of good jobs in our economy is scarce and basically not growing. The number of people amassing credentials to compete for those jobs is growing. If these are true,… Continue reading Why are unpaid internships on the rise?

In my prior post, I do some back-of-the-envelope math to conclude that free higher education would direct as much as 40 times more money to rich kids than to poor kids. The point of the post is to insist — as has been my basic beat from the beginning — that there are serious distributive… Continue reading What is the proper way to finance higher education?

So we know that rich kids go to college at significantly higher rates than poor kids and that rich kids pay significantly more than poor kids at any given university because of price discrimination. So here’s a fun question: if we made college free, how much more money would go to rich kids than to… Continue reading How unequal would free college actually be?