
Source: IMF e-Library
In the present-day USA, young people are told they have no economic future unless they have college educations. Unless their parents are relatively affluent, the only way they can afford tuition is to go into debt—debt that literally can follow them all their lives.
Many of the top jobs in management, academia and government are only open to graduates of prestigious colleges. So the educational system reinforces inequality.
Thomas Piketty, in his new book Capital and Ideology, shows that this pattern exists across the Western world, including his native France.
It wasn’t always this way, he noted. During the decades following the Second World War, the progressive and socialist political parties opened up higher education to working people in a way that hadn’t been done before.
Many of the beneficiaries of these programs became leaders of the moderately progressive and socialist parties. They became what Piketty called the Brahmin Left, an educational elite, which, according to him, lost touch with the wage earners without college degrees. He said in an interview:
If you look at education policies, in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, there was a relatively egalitarian platform of investing in primary and secondary education for all and bringing everyone to the end of secondary school. Gradually, in the 1980s and 1990s there was the rise of higher education, but this egalitarian platform has been abandoned in some cases.
There is a lot of hypocrisy in terms of access to universities. I show in the book that if you look at a country like the United States, there is data now available on the relationship between parental income and access to education that shows if your parents are poor, you still have a 25% chance to enter higher education, but when your parents are rich, you have a 95% chance.
Actually, this is understating the impact on equality of opportunity because of course the universities that those with rich parents have access to are not the same as the universities that those with poor parents have access to.
If you look at the amount of education investment, you find that even in a supposedly more egalitarian public system like France, the picture is unequal.