I have on several occasions made reference to the fact that
only 35% or so of Americans twenty -five and older have four year college
degrees. The discussion in the public
space about the resentment of Republican base voters at what they [correctly]
perceive as elitist condescension towards them focuses on the difference between
elite colleges and universities -- the Ivy League, et al. -- and the rest of the two thousand four year colleges and
universities in America, ignoring the fact that for two-thirds of adult
Americans, Ball State or the satellite branches of the State University of
Missouri are equally "elite."
But it occurred to me that the gap between the public
discourse and reality is probably a good deal larger than that, so I did a
little Googling to check, coming up with a useful link to the always
reliable U. S. Census Bureau.
The percentage of the population twenty-five or older with
college degrees has been rising steadily since I went to Harvard in 1950, at
which time it was roughly five percent.
Now it is, I think, reasonable to assume that relatively few people get
college degrees after the age of twenty -five.
There are some, of course, but when we are talking about percentages of
a population of three hundred million and more, they do not much alter the
overall statistics. It follows that from
the percentage of those twenty-five or older twenty years ago, we can infer the
percentage forty-five or older today, and so forth. [I trust this is obvious.] What do we find when we consult the table?
Only 23.3% of Americans forty-five or older have college
degrees -- not one in four. More than
three-fourths do not, and therefore are and always have been excluded from the
very wide range of good jobs that require a college degree: doctor, lawyer, professor, corporate executive,
FBI agent, high school teacher, elementary school teacher, Walmart store
manager, and so forth. By the way, the figure
for White Americans forty-five or older is 24.2%, less than a percentage point
more.
I think these few statistics, all by themselves, tell us a
good deal about the reasons for the deep anger and resentment of so large a
portion of the Republican base.
I think my response is going to be way more nerdy than you would like but here goes.
ReplyDeleteWhile I think as "a back of an envelope calculation" using educational attainment rates twenty years ago for those 25+ as a proxy for current educational attainment of 45+ I bristled when I read that. So, I used the CPS ASEC (March 2015) survey (this is the same data source as your linked data above) and looked at the educational attainment of those 45+ directly. The number is 30.1% so I think it is very different than the 23% of your approximation. This number is in line with other published numbers in recent years.
While there are several factors that could make your method less accurate (net in-migration of college educated, lower mortality of college educated, etc.) the main issue is that there is a significant number of people completing degrees after 25. I am not immediately finding great data on this but this Gallup article gets at it somewhat: http://www.gallup.com/poll/179783/graduating-college-later-life-doesn-hamper-income.aspx
I do not mean to quibble with the general point but college education is increasingly happening later in life and in "non-traditional" ways.