Terrible American education costs us $900 billion a year
WSJ:
Increased years of education boost economic growth -- but only if students' cognitive skills, as measured by math and science tests, are improved as a result, a new study says.At .67% of American GDP which our lousy education system costs us, that comes to about $880 billion a year, or $6.2 trillion since the 2000 recommendations. That's what public schools, teacher's unions, and politicians cost us, which works out to $3000 a year for every man, woman, child, and illegal alien in the U.S. (Some of us will be paying a bit more than others, I reckon.)
The study, released in this spring's issue of Education Next, an education-policy journal, concluded that if the U.S. performed on par with the world's leaders in science and math, it would add about two-thirds of a percentage point to the gross domestic product, or the total value of goods and services produced in a nation, every year.
Those findings diverge from other research that links economic growth to the number of years of students' education. The problem with that research, say study authors Eric Hanushek, a Stanford University professor, and Ludger Woessmann of the University of Munich, is that it assumes that a year of schooling in a country like Ghana, for example, is equivalent to a year in the U.S. Instead, it is more important to emphasize "what people know, not how long people have sat in the classroom," Mr. Hanushek said. [...]
Nearly two decades ago, the National Governors Association called for U.S. students to sharply improve in math and science by 2000. If the U.S. had managed to achieve the goal, and joined world leaders like Finland, Hong Kong and South Korea, GDP would be two percentage points higher today and 4.5 points higher in 2015, the study calculated. "Had we figured out some way to improve our schools, or do what we could to improve the learning of our students, we would be a lot better off today," said Mr. Hanushek.
Strange as it may seem, until now, as the article states, economists had just assumed that one year of education was as good as any other, or as the study's lead author put it, "it assumes that a year of schooling in a country like Ghana, for example, is equivalent to a year in the U.S. Instead, it is more important to emphasize "what people know, not how long people have sat in the classroom". One would have thought that that could have been figured out quite a while ago.
America: the dumb nation that managed to become prosperous. How we succeeded in that is another story.
posted by Dennis Mangan @ 9:36 AM
6 comments
6 Comments:
Hold on, what's the history of all this? A long stretch of the great years of American economic growth occurred when your schools and universities were probably pretty weak by the standards of the world's best. By contrast, in the years after WWII the research schools in your best universities have been widely admired. But I don't suppose that the world has ever been in awe of your High Schools. I'd guess that your economy has done very well much of the time in spite of the standards in much of education. With one exception; I have the impression that your success in teaching the elementary skills - reading, writing and arithmetic - was the equal of that in other advanced countries. "was"; I don't know about "is", but then the collapse of standards in British education since the 60s means that I have no right to cast aspersions at you chaps.
"But I don't suppose that the world has ever been in awe of your High Schools. I'd guess that your economy has done very well much of the time in spite of the standards in much of education."
Completely agree. At the highest levels, education is excellent here, at the lower, not so much. My feeling is that America has prospered despite all this because we're more free market oriented, less of a caste structure, and because of our relative isolation, which means fewer destructive foreign invasions than in Europe. But that's changing, unfortunately.
To some extent it is incorrect to state that the cost of education is $900BN in the US, since a good proportion of that is wasted because many in the left want to burden us with the cost of stuff that has no benefit.
However, in any event, it is likely that that money would be wasted by whichever group managed to capture government.
This valuable statistical analysis of how factors correlated to growth suggested that education expenditure did not well correlate but found a surprisingly sttrong relationship betwen growth & adult male education.
http://brianmicklethwait.signal100.com/podcast/HabitsofHighlyEffectiveCountries.pdf
This could mean that an awful lot of education expenditure is not economicly productive (not quite the same as "wasted"0 but that adult males are doing it to improve their econmicly valuable skills & are highly motivated to succeed.
The US has enjoyed prosperity and global influence due to a combination of factors: A high IQ population surrounded by populations that provided little technological or military competition (in this sense the US is unique in all of the world), abundant natural resources, a low population density and a relatively tight labor supply, a (until the mid-sixties) racially homogenuous population, and two massive oceans largely isolating the US from the carnage of the Twentieth Century's wars that tore Europe and Asia asunder.
Over the last few decades, literally all of these relative advantages have been significantly weathered down, and they continue to wear away. Meanwhile, the relationship between per-student expenditures, teacher salaries, and classroom size is virtually non-existent. Demographics are by far the best predictor of NAEP performance, not at all surprisingly.
Might as well ask americans to increase their average IQ without allowing them to consider it's genetic component.
Two words:
Lynn
Vanhanen
b
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