Want to know how to make lots of money? Wilbur Ross knows what to do: go to school.
Earlier this year, the billionaire investor said, “Education is how people get out of the ghetto and into, if not the One Percent, at least something close to it.”
The end. So simple.
So easy that you have to wonder why everyone doesn’t do it. Why don’t we all work hard to reach the top 1%?
Many have already tried. Over 73 million adults in this country have a college degree. Still, only about 2 million of them are in the One Percent. Most people don’t make even a fifth of what they’d need to make it into the top 1%.
Postgraduate degrees are the same way. About 38 million adults have a master’s, professional, or doctoral degree, and more than 37 million make less than the top 1%. Most aren’t even close. To be in the top 1%, you must make more than $393,000 a year. On average, a Ph.D. graduate makes less than $93,000 per year.
And it’s getting worse. After accounting for inflation, the wages of new college graduates entering the workforce today are 5% lower than what their predecessors made a decade ago. Over half of them can’t find full-time work, and half of those who do get a job aren’t using their degrees. Even people who finish law school only have a 50/50 chance of getting full-time legal jobs. Because of this, college graduates are the group in this country that is getting food stamps the fastest.
That is a long way from the good life Wilbur Ross told them they could have.
It’s easy to see why Ross would do this wrong thing. The average person in the 1% has more education than the average person in the 99%. Ross looks at the education of his fellow One Percenters and thinks that’s how they got to where they are. It’s like the old joke about the guy who was born on third base and thought he would hit a triple.
Ross’s own life is a perfect illustration. His dad went to Yale, which is one of the best schools in the world. He sent his son to Xavier High School in Manhattan, which prepares students for college and costs $14,450 per year to attend. Ross then went to Yale, which was not a big surprise, and his professor got him his first summer job on Wall Street.
Compare this story to the kind of childhood most Americans have.
Before they even step into a classroom, they are different. By age 3, kids from low-income families hear 30 million fewer words than their peers from higher-income families. Kids whose parents can afford to send them to good preschools are more likely to graduate from high school, half as likely to get arrested, and almost three times more likely to own a home as adults.
If they can get past these obstacles, children from low-income families go to schools with lower education ratings and spend less time there because they have to work or take care of family members. They also miss more school days because they get sick more often.
It’s a myth that parents with less money spend less time looking into schools or helping their kids learn at home. Studies of thousands of American families show that, despite what Wilbur Ross might say, poor parents care just as much about their kids’ education as rich parents do. Because they don’t know as much, they have a harder time figuring out how to use the education system. They also have less money to spend, and the difference in how much money is spent on “enrichment activities” has been growing for the past 40 years.
When it’s time to apply to college, these problems become painfully clear. Most high-achieving low-income students don’t even know how to apply to elite universities like Yale, so they don’t. No one gives them any support. No one tells them how to come up with the money. They see high tuition costs and the fact that more and more financial aid has been going to wealthy students over the past few years, so they choose lower-rated schools instead. If you take a rich kid and a poor kid with the same high grades and test scores in high school, the rich kid is twice as likely to go to an elite university because he comes from a wealthier family.
Even if the average American child manages to get past all of these problems, they still have a hard time getting into the One Percent. “Rich kids who don’t go to college are 2.5 times more likely to become rich than poor kids who do go to college,” says the Pew Economic Mobility Project. It turns out that education isn’t the only way to solve all problems.
Even so, Wilbur Ross is right about one thing. In the same interview, he said, “I think the focus should be on how to help the lower classes rise up.” “I think it’s disappointing that, despite all the talk, they’re not doing anything to fix the education system.”
It is possible for all Americans to have the same chances that Wilbur Ross did when he was young. We can pay for every kid to go to preschool. We can set up programs that send people to kids’ homes to read to them and help their parents make a healthy environment for them. We can raise the minimum wage and create more jobs for parents so that their kids don’t have to skip school to help pay the bills. We can give the same amount of money to both rich and poor school districts so that all students get the same quality of education. We can go back to when Pell grants and other forms of financial aid let kids go to the college of their choice without having to take out difficult student loans. And once they’re working, we can put money into research and development that makes use of their advanced degrees.
But each of these solutions requires Wilbur Ross and the other One Percenters to share some of their wealth with the other 99 Percenters. The only question is whether or not they really want to help solve the problem. Or do they use “education” as an excuse for unfair differences in opportunities that they don’t mind as long as it helps them?