I wanted to bring this post at Foreign Affairs by Nicholas Eberstadt and Evan Abramsky to your attention. Its basic point is that the United States is lagging behind many other countries in terms of educating its people which it documents. One particular passage particularly caught my eye:
The emerging economies that will challenge or surpass Western nations in the decades ahead are now achieving higher levels of educational attainment than most advanced Western economies did in the early postwar era. For example, 16 percent of 24- to 64-year-olds in Mexico are college educated—roughly twice the U.S. rate in 1950—and in Turkey, the share of this age cohort with some higher education is 22 percent, close to Germany’s share at unification in 1990.
What made me think in that passage was that the percentage of the working age population in Mexico with “some higher education” is higher than the percentage of Hispanics in the United States who also have “some higher education”.
There are all sorts of ways of explaining that, some more benign than others. For one thing I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if an increasing percentage of younger people in Mexico are pursuing college educations. For another something more like an “apples to apples” comparison would be the percentage of Guatemalan immigrants in Mexico who have some higher education.
The less benign explanation is that those coming here might not be drawn from the ranks of those with higher education and might be a lot more interested in working and supporting themselves and their families than they are in going to college. Also consider “cholo culture” which is of some significance among Hispanics.
Something else the article made me reflect on was that there are more people in India with college educations than there are people in the United States. Importing people with college educations from India is not a winning proposition for the United States, particularly considering that so many of the jobs being created here don’t actually require higher education.
The title of this post is taken from a highly influential essay written about 60 years ago during the height of the “space race”.
