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Is education a civil rights issue?

The economics of high school diploma just does not add up. . K-12 education, all by itself, delivers a student to the bottom of the labor market; its value depends almost entirely on whether it has been used to obtain a college or professional degree. Considering that only about 1/3 of all Americans manage to get a college degree, the value of a high school diploma fluctuates widely: from negative (forgone income and meager future earnings) to significant positive value (if used to obtain higher education, especially graduate and professional degrees).

And what about the college degree? According to the U.S. Census Bureau, having completed a bachelor’s degree increases one’s lifetime income by $ 600,000. Following this logic, a college student makes $150,000 (in future earnings) per year just by being a student. Even considering the skyrocketing cost of higher education, this is not a bad investment. I am not denying that more educated labor power has more value and therefore costs more to employers. Yet the student’s own labor during the years of primary and secondary education is not taken into consideration when labor power is purchased. In other words, thought educated labor power has much more value than uneducated labor power, the difference is larger than the income figures may suggest.

Let us assume for a moment that the “Learn now—get paid later” theory that the U.S. Federal government assumes to be true is valid. Even then, however, education may not benefit students that much, if at all. A high school graduate makes $ 821,000 during her lifetime (the Census bureau assumes average 40 years of work between ages of 25 and 65). The 13 years of schooling can be then assumed directly factored in. We should really spread the amount of earnings over 53 years of work life. Just by doing that we can see that the real average yearly income of a high school graduate is $15,490. Even the Statistic Brief tells us that the income of high school graduates actually dropped during the twenty years from 1974 to 1994 if adjusted for inflation. One needs a college education now to maintain the same standard of living that one’s parents could afford with a high school diploma. In 1973, only 30% of high school graduates enrolled in college, but by 1993, 41% did ([i]). In other words, people need to work longer hours to earn the same amount of money, if only we assume that learning is real, value-producing work. Americans have some of longest workweeks in the world ([ii]), but on top of that, consider two facts. First, women who massively entered the workforce in previous decades dramatically increased the total workweek of an American family ([iii]). A two-income family works twice as much as a one-income family of the 50-s. Second, by shifting towards universal 13-year education, Americans now put significantly more hidden school hours into their total working time.

With all the good intentions, proclaiming education a civil right misses the point: for lower socioeconomic classes a high school diploma not leading to college or leading to a low-paid profession, is not as much of a right as a chore, an obligation. We all benefit from a lot of people having a high school diploma, because it lifts the entire workforce. However, for each individual student, it is more like a tax paid in form of free labor. If we want kids to learn, we should pay them to do it. Proclaiming schooling to be a civil right won’t do much to help.

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