Not in my opinion it isn’t. And if I had young kids (which I do), I’d rather have them in the US in terms of job prospects. But I think we are off topic from important lessons learned.
I think that’s very smart. Being from an immigrant family with no connections (parents started from nothing in the US and ultimately didn’t make it all that high up the SES ladder), my thought process is the same. But I’m going to assume you and I still have an advantage we never thought much of: we came from stable 2-parent families who were there to provide for and support us (at least to an extent). What do you do as a society when a good chunk of your society doesn’t even have that?
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The potential upside for anyone is much higher in the US.
So sure, I can see why someone would want their kids in the US. But I have a feeling your kids aren’t poor and average.
Of course, immigrants are self-selected for high motivation, and often selected by immigration rules in favor of highly educated skilled workers and PhD students. They are not necessarily “average” compared to either their source countries or the US in this respect.
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Really, I can think of dozens. Let’s start with Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and so on. If I were doing research I’d dig further and check data sets. Bet I could find a lot.
The US actually managed massive wealth redistribution between the ‘30’s and the ‘70’s. How many Americans left?
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Ah, fair. All the Anglo countries that went through that period without WWII actually being fought on their land.
Also, in the case of Lebanon and Yugoslavia, I’m pretty certain war first broke out before there was redistribution of anything.
But it seems like you didn’t get my point, which is that eventually, redistribution occurs. The choice for elites then is whether that is done in a violent manner or not. A very destructive manner or not.
Has there been any country that has reached the US’s current level of inequality and peacefully sustained it for centuries?
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I think I’m going to let you go your own way in economic topics. I am like @Mumfromca in the sense that I have a masters in Economics and understand European history pretty well. I even lived through the war in the Balkans. Have worked in Rumania while getting my Masters and have visited Poland, former Czech and East Germany. I’ve also visited Venezuela before things got really crazy. I am not romantic about sharing and redistributing the wealth nor do I think that communism is a good solution for anyone.
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Again, going to have to let you look those things up. I will tell you that having been in Yugoslavia as it disintegrated gave me a front row seat. I think the most singular nation filled with inequality for centuries is England.
I would add, inequality often wasn’t the onus of revolution in the 20 Th. Century. It was primarily driven by variances in systems: The trigger for most was facism, Communism and their variants. No need to dig further into these being economic systems. I get it.
I posted some specific numbers earlier in the thread, but in general flagships have a large portion of wealthy students and a very small portion of truly lower income students. The portion wealthy students is often particularly high at selective flagships. For example, the previously referenced Chetty study found that 67% of University of Virginia students were from top quintile income, which was the same as Harvard. Only 2.8% of UVA were from bottom 20%, which was worse than Harvard.
The flagships with the widest distribution in the Chetty study varied, often for a wide variety of multifaceted reasons that go beyond just affordability and selectivity. For example, the flagship with the smallest portion of wealthy top 20% income kids that I am aware of was University of Maine, with 26% top quintile and 8% bottom qunitile. I suspect this lack of wealthy kids at Maine has more to with a good portion of younger kids wanting to get out of Maine than the cost. Maine has a larger percent seniors than any other state, and a high rate of young people leaving contributes to that.
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Extreme inequality in pre-USSR Russia probably made it a lot easier for communists to gain political support there.
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Much as I would love to talk about the multiple causes of the Russian Revolution, it’s off topic.
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It’s a really interesting landscape, and a lot depends on what kind of wealth and priorities exist in the state. In general I’ll say yes, my flagship U is a top-of-average flagship U, and that there’s more below than above. But there are important outliers.
Mass is a significant outlier because one of your main industries is prestige higher ed. Enough people actually care about high-quality education, and about the state’s rep in higher ed, that your K-12 is pretty fancy compared with the rest of the country’s. (I used to work in state-specific test prep, and Massachusetts is another (nicer) country, next to the rest of the US.) You’ve also got a lot of hella rich people with politics that lean hard to liberal. Yes, there’s a lot of poverty too, urban and rural, and some real disaster school districts, but in other states you see poverty without so many rich people. So while UMass gets a lot of looks down Cambridge noses, it’s also staffed by one of the best and readiest academic labor pools in the country, it’s relatively well-funded, and it’s attended by students who’ve gone through some of the better K-12 systems in the country. So it’s a relatively nice situation. The only thing is, your parents have to have brought you to Massachusetts when you were a kid, or you have to have enough money and strength to establish residency on your own without an education, and go through college a couple years older than your classmates.
$30K is high, but again, in a state like Mass (and there aren’t many), I’m guessing (don’t know) you’re also going to see decent fin aid for kids who don’t have money. What might hit them hard in the next few years, if the parents are divorced, is the FAFSA change that uses the income of the parent who provides more support, rather than the income of the custodial parent. If Dad’s a rich guy paying most of the college bill because the decree ordered proportional payments, plus maybe he’s still paying child support (I don’t know how it works in MA), now the kid’s entire fin aid is based on Dad’s income (and his wife’s), and not whatever Mom’s managing to pull together. My guess is you’ll see divorced custodial moms with inadequate savings taking out loans to meet their share of that $30K with less generous fin aid.
NY’s also an interesting story. They’ve gone hard in the free-tuition direction, the politics support university funding, the SUNY network is giant and a lot of the schools have major strengths, you still have vestiges of midcentury rigor in the form of Regents’ exams, but on the whole it’s still very much a struggling system. You sort of get the whole world there, it’s inexpensive enough that a lot of bright kids stay that might not otherwise, but if you asked me UMass or, I don’t know, Buffalo, even Stony Brook for non-science, I’d say UMass. But I think you also get NYC’s gravity-well effect: if you’re from the greater metro area, and that’s a lot of people, why would you leave the state for school? Where else exactly are you going to go that isn’t California? Arizona? You’ll spend 20 minutes in Phoenix and head back to Sky Harbor. So there’s additional reason to stay in-state that’s not directly related to ability to leave or the relative merits of schools out of state.
On the whole, though – yeah, in most states you don’t have very highly educated populations with major wealth concentrations, nor do the people vote as blue as they do in MA (or NY). You can tell where the money is by looking at which states send a lot of kids to public Us elsewhere, because they’ve been able to make their flagships seriously competitive and that’s cascaded down to other state Us. IL, CA, MI, increasingly WI and TX – the local well-prepped but not brilliant kids can’t get into the seats reserved for in-state, and they have money to go elsewhere. The ones without money go to community college or ____ State U. But OR, WA, ND, MN, TN, AR, MO, etc.? Even NC, which has a killer research operation going, but doesn’t have the tax/ed base to support a Mass-style university system? Yeah, you’re seeing flagships like mine with students like mine. Those universities have been well underfunded for decades, are deep in debt from trying to compete with private schools for OOS money, and are serving kids (and, increasingly, adults) whose also-neglected school districts are pretending to educate them. They don’t have money to consider going OOS, and they don’t have the stats for serious fin aid at privates, so they’re locked in. As this game rolls on, the education at these average flagships is also increasingly pretend, which administrators try to combat by pouring money into highly-ranked or “destination” programs…which is mostly a marketing move (the marketing’s much improved), they aren’t really spending serious money because they can’t. I mean a public U can’t compete with an institution whose alumni write $50M checks to individual departments.
Lately I see a lot of grad students here coming from southern non-UT-Austin flagships and sub-flagships, and they struggle for quite a while, because their universities haven’t even prepped them for grad-level ed here. Lot of anxiety, lot of defensive apologizing for not knowing anything, lot of self-doubt. If they stick around they usually get their feet under them by year 3, and a few years later are much more confident people. It’s not that they don’t have the ability; it’s the opportunity that’s been missing. Imagine if they and our homegrown students had been at a place all along that’s really cooking with gas.
I should say I also see a lot of immigrant/first-gen-American students. Poor doesn’t start to describe it. They’re fine with that. I’m fine with that. What I’m not fine with is handing them the pretend education and no-connections an average state U can afford to present and then telling them to go compete in America. That’s not how it’s supposed to work.
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Enrollment at UMO has been declining for years, but they have managed to arrest that by offering in-state tuition rates to kids from New England (there is a huge billboard right off 93 near Boston advertising this fact). It’s among the smaller flagship universities, I believe, with a little less than 10,000 undergraduate students.
Thank you for this thoughtful response. I’ll admit I’m not all that well versed in terms of what Flagship State U’s offer other than the obvious prestige ones (Michigan, UVA, UNC, Berkley and the like). I know a bit about UMass simply because many kids from our HS go there and I have heard good things (a far cry from the days when it was referred to as Zoo Mass). I think most MA residents take for granted the quality of the K-12 program here - it does have its warts, but I feel my kids have gotten a good education, by and large.
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Divorced kids get %^^ six ways to Sunday. This is not news.
Most women go into a divorce without a clear understanding of their finances- both pre and post divorce. This is also not news. Which means the kids are likely to get $%^& again when it comes time to pay for college.
But was it better a generation ago when it was even harder for a woman to earn a living post-divorce, harder to divorce unless you could prove infidelity or abuse (and even then… judges liked to man-splain that if "you’d just get dinner on the table on time he wouldn’t have to hit you). Was it better back in the day when divorced women faced enormous social stigma and likely began her post-divorced life without even a credit card in her own name?
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You support the single parents and rewrite laws that punish them for having the temerity to raise children without a man in the house.
In countries where these supports and protections are part of normal life, single-parent households are not by definition poor and unstable households. Again, it’s fairly simple. I’ll never forget an Icelandic mum of my acquaintance who’d had it with being American wifey while her husband was on his fellowship here, dropped him, and went back home with the kids. I asked her if she wasn’t worried about how she’d manage, and she was utterly unconcerned. Fulltime high-quality creche and ed for the kids, part-time well-protected work for her, child stipend, done and dusted. She was right, too. And this was just after their massive crash.
We’ve done as well as we have here because after years of freelancing and dodging the daily punch in the face our laws wanted to give me, most of the time anyway, I became the proud holder of a very rare thing in America: a part-time professional job with excellent benefits, flexibility, and job protections. We’d have been in bad trouble otherwise. With it? No problem and all the stability you might wish.
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Respectfully, I don’t see anything wrong with getting a degree from any state university and going out to compete in America. Lot of people have done it with great success. And there are also many people who are born in the US with zero connections.
When we tell our kids that they need to go to a tiny group of schools in order to succeed or that it’s the fault of society that they weren’t born at the top we create a negative mindset. There’s a lot of can’t in that way of thinking. That’s a lot for a young person to carry around and still have time to move in a positive direction.
What would you say to all the people who attended a public U and did great things? What about all the teachers and nurses that public U’s have educated?
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First I’d sort them into three groups.
- Went to public Us before they were ravaged by the age of defunding.
- Are truly exceptional people and/or from rich/well-connected families.
- Everybody else.
Then I’d tell (1) and (2) to go get coffee while I talked to the real subjects of this conversation.
I know a lot of teachers and nurses educated at the very university where I work. The nurses are why I don’t go to the university hospital anymore unless I need fancy gear for testing, because we do have tons of fancy kit. But I’ve taught those nurses and worked with them, and I do not want to have to rely on random-nurse-educated-here while I’m unconscious. We pay out a lot of settlements for a reason. I actually just had a second-opinion films read done out of state for this very reason, and will be going back for a second go at the fancy kit here, then sending the films out of state again.
The local-U teachers at my daughter’s hs are still from the pre-ravaging times, when we had very good depts in their subjects. Her ed? Pretty choice. How will it be in 15 years at the same school, same pipeline? I’m not so optimistic.
Train your eye on the mass, not the exceptions, to see whether a system’s working well or not.
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