Back to Work - Bill Clinton [42]
The college graduation rate is really important, because even though many new graduates are struggling to find jobs in this economy, the unemployment rate for college graduates is 4.5 percent, half the national average, and the rate for those with professional and other postgraduate degrees is around 2 percent.
Of course, the problems of poor children begin well before they start school and stay with them after they do. According to the Children’s Defense Fund’s 2011 report on the state of America’s children, the number of children living in poverty has increased by four million since 2000, after declining for the last seven years of my presidency. By 2009, 15.6 million children were receiving food stamps, 65 percent more than ten years earlier. The number of homeless children in our schools increased 41 percent in just two years between the start of the school years 2006 and 2008, before the financial crisis. In 2010, in New York City alone, more than forty thousand schoolchildren didn’t have a permanent home, more than three times as many as in 2006. With poor children already underperforming in our schools, the fact that a large majority of states are planning to cut spending in both K–12 education and basic services will only compound the challenges these kids face in trying to educate themselves and work their way into the middle class.
Stagnant wages, relatively lower college graduation rates, and limited job growth have also hurt our international rankings in an area we think of as essential to America’s character: social and economic mobility. According to the latest survey, several countries have surpassed us in this category too. Two recent studies, one by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a group of the world’s wealthiest countries, and the other by two University of California scholars, conclude that slower economic growth and the increased concentration of the benefits of that growth among people who are already wealthy have reduced income and occupational mobility, a fancy term for a young person’s chances of getting a better job with higher pay than his or her parents had. In other words, the chances of living the American Dream are not as good in a society with slow job growth, stagnant wages, and rising inequality.
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Both studies say these trends have been under way for some time, one using the mid-1970s, the other the early 1980s as a starting point. The studies both rank Canada, Sweden, and Norway higher than the United States in terms of job mobility, with the United Kingdom, France, Italy, and Germany (which emphasizes world-class vocational training rather than universal access to college) ranking about the same as us.
In terms of income mobility, both studies agree that the chances of earning more than your parents are greater in Canada, Finland, Sweden, and Norway than in the United States, with the United Kingdom about even with us. The OECD study says there is also more income mobility in Denmark, Australia, Germany, France, and Spain (the study was made before its recent troubles), ranking the United States tenth in an area we are accustomed to believe is a fundamental part of what it means to be an American.
It is heartening that people all over the world want to pursue their own version of the American Dream but troubling that others are doing a better job than we are of providing it to their people.
Both mobility studies conclude that the success of the nations doing better than we are is due to government policies that equalize opportunities and prepare their people to seize them.
Of course, economic mobility also depends on the availability of good jobs. In the twenty-first century, the ability of a nation to create those jobs is determined in part by the quality of its infrastructure and its information technology networks. How are we doing in those areas?
The next two charts give us an idea. The first is the World Economic Forum’s assessment of the overall quality of a nation’s infrastructure, including roads,