Published in 1920, this report presents an index for measuring the effectiveness of state school systems by the amount of education received by the children and the expenditures made to purchase this education. The purpose of the index is to make it possible for state school systems to measure their progress from year to year and to compare their attainments with those of their neighbors.
LEONARD P. AYRES was director of the Division of Education at the Russell Sage Foundation.
This volume was published as part of The Pittsburgh Survey, edited by Paul Underwood Kellogg.
MARGARET F. BYINGTON was associate director of the Charity Organization Department of the Russell Sage Foundation.
A look into the rising cost of education, Trends of School Costs was published in 1920. It analyzes the different aspects at play in the cost of public school education, including the relationship between growing attendance rates and cost. Of prime importance are trends in teachers' salaries, compared to the cost of living and the salaries of other workers. Future pricing trends are predicted.
W. RANDOLPH BURGUESS, Department of Education, Russell Sage Foundation
Today, as at the turn of the twentieth century, there is strong public debate about the costs and benefits of immigration. The recent economic literature has analyzed the short-term effects of immigrants on the employment and wages of native-born workers and the fiscal impacts for host communities. Economists Nathan Nunn, Nancy Qian and Sandra Sequeira will study the very long-run impacts of immigration by asking how outcomes today are associated with the average immigrant population share in 1860-1920.
The benefits associated with acquiring increased years of schooling, especially a college degree, are well-established. A prominent benefit is increased social mobility. But the opportunities for completing a college education are not equally distributed. Gaps in college entry and graduation have widened between students from low- and high-income families over recent decades. Less affluent students are also less likely to attend higher quality institutions, even when they have skills and abilities equal to those of more affluent students.
Disparities in educational achievement and attainment between low- and high-income students have grown over the last four decades—an era of rising economic inequality. Some evidence has linked increased inequality and disparities in educational outcomes, but the mechanisms by which this occurs are much less clear.
Data from the Census Bureau show that the returns to a college education have increased over time and that by 2012, the gap in median annual earnings between households with a college degree and those with a high-school diploma was nearly $60,000. Despite this, increases in post-secondary attainment appear to have flat-lined, with low-income students particularly affected.
It has been well-documented that economic inequality has increased since the 1970s. The rise in income inequality is characterized by several different trends; these include an overall widening of the wage distribution during the 1980s, rising wage polarization since the early 1990s, and a substantial increase in the earnings share of the top 1%. Earnings have also become more unstable since the 1970s.
There has been significant controversy about the effects of globalization in general and offshoring in particular. Proponents argue that it contributes to economic growth; critics, that it increases inequality by lowering the relative employment and wages of less-skilled workers.
Despite the narrowing of the gender gap in education in developed and to a certain extent in developing countries, and the fact that women account for nearly forty-seven percent of the global labor-force, women’s under-representation in the corporate, financial and legal sectors, especially at the top levels, has been widely documented. However, empirical evidence has mainly focused on gender inequality in labor-force participation and earnings.
