Non-marital births by education level as part of the growing class divide

Declining marriage rates and non-marital births are only a problem for those without college degrees. (Assuming you believe this is a problem, of course.) Here’s the stark data.

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CHARLES MURRAY has been harshly criticized for writing about this trend in his latest book,  Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, but it seems the New York Times has also not been shy about reporting how education and race correlate with non-marital births.

Large racial differences remain: 73 percent of black children are born outside marriage, compared with 53 percent of Latinos and 29 percent of whites. And educational differences are growing. About 92 percent of college-educated women are married when they give birth, compared with 62 percent of women with some post-secondary schooling and 43 percent of women with a high school diploma or less, according to Child Trends.… Others noted that if they married, their official household income would rise, which could cost them government benefits like food stamps and child care…. Reviewing the academic literature, Susan L. Brown of Bowling Green State University recently found that children born to married couples, on average, “experience better education, social, cognitive and behavioral outcomes.”

Just talking about these issues of class, education, and race sometimes leads to charges of racism.  Curiously, the NY Times chose not to allow comments on their stories referenced in this post.  Maybe they were afraid the topic would generate excessive inflammatory rhetoric.

UPDATE:   One single mom is upset that the liberal elite have joined conservatives in moralizing about fatherless children.

More Single Moms. So What.  -  The New York Times condescends to single moms.
This proud single mother and NYU journalism professor, who is definitely not “too poor to marry,” is insulted by a New York Times article on the 53 percent illegitimate-birth rate among females under 30, which she thinks covertly telegraphs the message that unwed moms can’t in fact do it all… Marriage, Roiphe reveals triumphantly, “does not ensure eternal love, or even eternal security.” Now we know.

Young Mothers Describe Marriage’s Fading Allure – NYTimes, 2/18/12

Five myths about white people – Washington Post, 2/10/12

Related:  College-educated women marry at higher rates

In a tough economy, graduates of top colleges available as personal assistants

Personal assistants with impressive credentials are more available due to the tough job market for college graduates.  This is according to Jill Glist, who opened Lambert Services in 2006.

“The current economy gives us access to amazingly qualified people who are interested and available to work,” she said.

What are their qualifications?

Lambent Services employees are an elite group of intelligent, motivated, and personable individuals and top university graduates who help make clients’ lives run more smoothly.

How nice.  What do these assistants do?  They can handle the minutiae of our lives, helping us deal with the most mundane of tasks.  What are some example?

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According to their bios, many of the professional assistants have degrees from top universities.  Here is a sampling of  information about them, including college majors and highlighted skills.

• Harvard cum laude, Folklore & Mythology – calendar management and travel planning
• NYU, Political Science – event planning and calendar management
• Tufts, Drama & English – writing/editorial and home maintenance
• California College of the Arts, Fine Arts & Crafts – interior design and organization
• UC San Diego, Visual Arts Media – writing/editing and Internet research

Their services don’t come cheap, with hourly rates ranging from $35 to $55.  I don’t think this is a bad deal for the assistants.  They’re probably gaining good (and interesting) experience, earning some money in a down economy with the potential to make personal connections that could lead to more meaty jobs.  But I keep thinking that many of them didn’t need a $250,000 college degree to get to this place.

UPDATE:  Welcome Instapundit readers!  I invite you to check out more of my posts using the categories on the sidebar, in particular the higher education bubble.

A liberal arts education is good and central planning is bad

To the critics of “frivolous” humanities majors and advocates who want our government to push for more STEM college graduates, Virginian Postrel responds that a liberal arts education is good and central planning is bad.

The critics miss the enormous diversity of both sides of the labor market. They tend to be grim materialists, who equate economic value with functional practicality. In reality, however, a tremendous amount of economic value arises from pleasure and meaning – the stuff of art, literature, psychology and anthropology. These qualities, built into goods and services, increasingly provide the work for all those computer programmers. And there are many categories of jobs, from public relations to interaction design to retailing, where insights and skills from these supposedly frivolous fields can be quite valuable. The critics seem to have never heard of marketing or video games, Starbucks or Nike, or that company in Cupertino,California, the rest of us are always going on about. Technical skills are valuable in part because of the “soft” professions that complement them.

Chemists Struggle Too

The commentators excoriating today’s students for studying the wrong subjects are pursuing certainty where none exists. Like the health fanatics convinced that every case of cancer must be caused by smoking or a bad diet, they want to believe that good people, people like them, will always have good jobs and that today’s unemployed college grads are suffering because they were self-indulgent or stupid. But plenty of organic chemists can testify that the mere fact that you pursued a technical career that was practical two or three decades ago doesn’t mean you have job security today.…

The skills that still matter are the habits of mind I honed in the classroom: how to analyze texts carefully, how to craft and evaluate arguments, and how to apply microeconomic reasoning, along with basic literacy in accounting and statistics. My biggest regret isn’t that I didn’t learn Fortran, but that I didn’t study Dante.

The most valuable skill anyone can learn in college is how to learn efficiently — how to figure out what you don’t know and build on what you do know to adapt to new situations and new problems. Liberal-arts advocates like this argument, but it applies to any field. In the three decades since we graduated, my college friend David Bernstein has gone from computing the speed at which signals travel through silicon chips to being an entrepreneur whose work includes specifying, designing and developing a consumer-oriented smart-phone app.

When he was an undergraduate, he wrote in an e-mail, his professors “stressed that they weren’t there to teach us a soon-to-be obsolete skill or two about a specific language or operating system … but rather the foundations of the field, for example: characteristics of languages and operating systems, how one deals with complex projects and works with others, what is actually computable, the analysis of algorithms, and the mathematical and theoretical foundations of the field, to pick just a few among many. That education has held me in good stead and I’ve often pitied the folks who try to compete during a lifetime of constant technological change without it.” Whether you learn how to learn is more a question of how fundamental and rigorous your education is than of what specific subject you study.

The argument that public policy should herd students into Stem fields is as wrong-headed as the notion that industrial policy should drive investment into manufacturing or “green” industries. It’s just the old technocratic central planning impulse in a new guise. It misses the complexity and diversity of occupations in a modern economy, forgets the dispersed knowledge of aptitudes, preferences and job requirements that makes labor markets work, and ignores the profound uncertainty about what skills will be valuable not just next year but decades in the future.

Reynolds’ Law explains why we should not subsidize college for all

“Subsidizing the markers of status doesn’t produce the character traits that result in that status; it undermines them.”

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Glenn Reynolds explains why taxpayer-subsidized college education (and home ownership) for all is not a good use of our money.

The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle-class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we’ll have more middle-class people. But homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them.

Megan Mcardle expresses a similar sentiment.

 “it’s all too common for well-meaning middle class people to think that if the poor just had the same stuff we do, they wouldn’t be poor any more (where ‘stuff’ includes anything from a college education to a marriage license to a home). But this is not true. . . . If poor people did the stuff that middle class people do, it’s possible–maybe probable–that they wouldn’t be poor. But this is much harder than it sounds.”

In a previous post I noted that it is not the college degree in and of itself that causes college-educated women to marry at higher rates.

Related articles

• Definition of middle class is muddled (costofcollege.wordpress.com)

College-educated women marry at higher rates

I have to admit the fact that college-educated women marry at higher rates enters my mind when I think of my own children.

Educated women are still the marrying kind because they know intuitively what research concludes: children are more likely to succeed in school, go to college, and get good jobs if they grow up with their two married parents. Prepping your kids for a competitive knowledge economy is a time-consuming, devotional task; no wonder it works better with a steady, focused twosome.

An alarming statistic (to me) is that over 40% of American children are born to unmarried mothers, but the picture is very different for college-educated mothers.

… The latest Census shows that percentage of college educated women who have children outside of marriage is only about 6%. That’s an increase from previous years, but a very small one.

Is it any wonder that middle- and upper-class parents are so intent on ensuring their children snare a diploma from a ‘good’ college?  We think of it as the entry ticket to a happy family life.  However, the evolving landscape in higher education, including soaring costs and the possibility that traditional colleges may lose their monopoly on career credentialing, portends changes in how we’ll guide our children’s educational path in the years to come.  How soon will real changes come and what form will they take?  I wish I knew.

Of course, related to all this is the important point that correlation does not always indicate causation.

A new college consumer report card or just another mandate?

Part of me finds this proposed college consumer report card very appealing and part finds it to be just another government mandate that will end up providing minimal value at high cost.

Should each college be required to post–one-click from its homepage–externally audited consumer information for prospective students? The data might include: the percentage of freshmen that graduate in four years, the progress they make in reading and critical thinking, the employment rate and earnings for recent graduates by degree, and (as the Occupiers would approve) the actual four-year cost of school, including cash and loan financial aid, broken down by family income and assets.

On the other hand, prospective students and families are already buried in information about colleges. They have independently written college guides, and more statistics, facts, and opinions are a mere Google-search away. Is mandating a college report card just one more governmental intrusion that will, like privacy disclosure laws, create a mountain of paper and bureaucrats scrambling to fulfill the requirement while improving few students’ lives?

Ultimately, I vote no to another mandate like this.  All this information is available, although sometimes difficult to find.  I see an opportunity for an enterprising company to organize this type of information in a way that’s easier for families to use.

Do Colleges Need a Consumer’s Report Card? – The Atlantic, 1/9/12

Related articles

• Net Price Calculator for all colleges mandated by October 29 (costofcollege.wordpress.com)

Getting smarter or grade inflation? – College grades have improved since 1960

With an increasing percentage of A’s being “earned” in college classrooms, are we to conclude that students are getting smarter?  Or are we experiencing grade inflation?  A new study by Stuart Rojstaczer and Christopher Healy that examines grades over 69 years suggests the latter, a finding consistent with results reported by the authors of Academically Adrift.

Findings/Results: Contemporary data indicate that, on average across a wide range of schools, A’s represent 43% of all letter grades, an increase of 28 percentage points since 1960 and 12 percentage points since 1988. D’s and F’s total typically less than 10% of all letter grades. Private colleges and universities give, on average, significantly more A’s and B’s combined than public institutions with equal student selectivity. Southern schools grade more harshly than those in other regions, and science and engineering-focused schools grade more stringently than those emphasizing the liberal arts. At schools with modest selectivity, grading is as generous as it was in the mid-1980s at highly selective schools. These prestigious schools have, in turn, continued to ramp up their grades. It is likely that at many selective and highly selective schools, undergraduate GPAs are now so saturated at the high end that they have little use as a motivator of students and as an evaluation tool for graduate and professional schools and employers.

Conclusions/Recommendations: As a result of instructors gradually lowering their standards, A has become the most common grade on American college campuses. Without regulation, or at least strong grading guidelines, grades at American institutions of higher learning likely will continue to have less and less meaning.

Increase in A’s correlates with two enrollment factors

In considering the possible causes of more A’s for college students, two opposing factors come to mind.  One is the overall increase in the percentage of high school graduates who enroll in college.  Expanding higher education opportunities for more youngsters has probably created a pool of students less academically prepared than those of recent generations, a reason often given for declining SAT scores but inconsistent with the increase in better grades.  Another competing factor is the higher proportion of women attending college.  From elementary grades to college, females earn higher grades than males do, so the increase in A’s could be related to this.

Higher overall percent attending college

More women attending college

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Related articles

• Eric Claire: Grade inflation, lack of effort hurts secondary education (tcpalm.com)

College for everyone? As long as you’re willing to pay for everyone’s ‘six-year bong party’

“We should be doing everything we can to put a college education within reach for every American,” President Barack Obama told a group of college students in Denver last week.

Michael Graham points out that a problem with the idea that “everyone should go to college” is that it follows that taxpayers must pay for “everyone”.  In effect, taxpayers  are paying, and he gives his own state as an example.

Every year Massachusetts taxpayers pour hundreds of millions of dollars into the University of Massachusetts system, subsidizing college costs for all. Add the $36 billion in federal Pell Grants and that giant sucking sound is the money going from your wallet to some kid’s six-year bong party known as “the college experience.”

He asks us to look around and seriously consider who these kids are.

… The kid behind the fast-food counter, the geek camped out at Best Buy waiting for the Call of Duty game, the girl popping her gum at the hair salon.

Would it really be the “best investment in America” to spend $100,000 of our money sending each one of them to college?

The answer is no. 

It’s bunk. About 50 percent of current college kids are just there because mom and dad don’t want to explain at the next cocktail party that Junior isn’t college material. These mediocre students clog our classrooms and drive up college costs. In the end, they’re still mediocre students with meaningless degrees who wind up working as the assistant manager at a TGI Fridays.

Who ends up getting screwed? The rest of the students who actually belong in college. Because demand is artificially high, so are college costs — up 8.3 percent in just the past year at public colleges.

The more worthy goal is to promote the preparation of all citizens to become productive members of society, but a four-year college degree is not the right solution for “everyone”.

What does a college degree really signify?

Glenn Reynolds puts it this way.

Right now, a college degree is an expensive signifier that its holder has a basic ability to show up on time (mostly), to follow instructions (reasonably well), and to deal with others in close quarters without committing serious felonies. In some fields, it may also indicate important background knowledge and skills, but most students will require further on-the-job training.

The “mostly” and “reasonably well” parts should be emphasized.

Another way to put it:

Guy managed to keep his partying under control for four years is what it tells us.

‘College graduates driving increase in bankruptcy filings’

The conventional wisdom is that a good education is a guarantee to a middle class lifestyle.  Maybe not so much anymore.

College graduates are the fastest-growing group of consumers who have filed for bankruptcy protection in the past five years, according to a new study by a financial nonprofit, which underscores the broad reach of the Great Recession.

The survey by the Institute for Financial Literacy, slated for release Tuesday, found that the percentage of debtors with a bachelor’s degree rose from 11.2 percent in 2006 to 13.6 percent in 2010. The group tracked similar but smaller increases in consumers with two-year associate and graduate degrees. Meanwhile, the percentage of debtors with a high school diploma or who did not finish college declined.

College loans cannot be expunged through bankruptcy except for very unusual circumstances.