(Press-News.org) LAWRENCE -- Providing two years of free community college to qualifying students is expected to be a hot topic during the 2016 presidential campaign.
President Barack Obama introduced the plan earlier this year, aimed at boosting educational attainment and workforce opportunities of thousands of students -- especially those from low-income families. Support for expanded education is not the purview of one party, however; President George W. Bush also frequently referenced the significance of two-year colleges. Tennessee and Oregon are offering free community college to qualifying students.
A University of Kansas researcher has found -- as part of a recent study published in the journal Social Forces -- that educational expansion worked once before in creating better jobs and upgrading the opportunities of the American workforce.
Emily Rauscher, a KU assistant professor of sociology, examined state-level data from 1850 to 1930, when states began instituting compulsory schooling laws requiring students to attend school up to a certain age. She found that compulsory schooling laws significantly increased school attendance rates, especially among lower-class children, and also shifted the occupational distribution toward skilled and non-manual occupations.
"These findings suggest that building a more educated workforce helped create more skilled jobs and raised the occupational distribution," Rauscher said.
Even though the findings of her study centered on data that is decades old, it could provide useful insights today regarding economic development and the potential benefits of creating a skilled workforce, she said. As states adopted compulsory schooling laws, those most affected were students of lower socio-economic status, whose parents worked in mostly non-skilled and manual labor jobs.
Access to more education gave these students broader opportunities to pursue careers that weren't limited to non-skilled and manual labor. Importantly, Rauscher noted that the benefits were not limited to the students affected by the laws. The types of jobs available changed for everyone.
In their book "The Race between Education and Technology," economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz point out that education in the early 20th century helped promote innovation but also generated new technologies that favored non-skilled occupations and shifted the occupational distribution away from skilled occupations.
This is still a concern now, Rauscher said, as technology in some cases cuts into manufacturing jobs in the United States. Communities with lower socio-economic status or lower levels of education tend to suffer the most from this type of change.
"If we could help kids of lower socioeconomic status and non-white kids get at least to community college, then that would be beneficial for everyone," Rauscher said. "It would be beneficial for them, and it would be beneficial for society too in creating better jobs."
Rauscher pointed out that the reason for these benefits is unclear. She said the students who benefitted from compulsory schooling laws could have created new businesses or entered existing companies with ideas that would create and produce more skilled jobs for others.
Alternatively, students who attended school were likely more prepared to enter the work force as they learned how to behave on the job and other soft skills that are necessary for a productive employee.
Sociologists today, such as Robert Putnam, author of the book "Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis," grapple with economic inequality and maintain it is more difficult than it was 50 years ago for children of lower socio-economic status to move up the ladder.
Rauscher, whose study measured effects at the state rather than individual level, said her findings suggest a structural or large-scale change in education policy could benefit students at the bottom of the economic ladder.
A blanket federal compulsory education law mandating that all U.S. students attend school until age 18 or a proposal similar to a community college mandate could make a difference, she said.
"I would hope that you could have similar benefits today from that type of policy because it could help address the concern that it's harder to move up the social ladder," Rauscher said. "By creating more good jobs - or opportunities near the top of distribution - that would at least give more possibilities for people to move up."
INFORMATION:
MADISON, Wis. - Ten thousand years ago, a golden grain got naked, brought people together and grew to become one of the top agricultural commodities on the planet.
Now, University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers have found that just a single letter change in the genetic script of corn's ancestor, teosinte, helped make it all possible.
Publishing in the journal Genetics this month, UW-Madison professor John Doebley and a team of researchers describe how, during the domestication of corn, a single nucleotide change in the teosinte glume architectural gene (tga1) stripped ...
WASHINGTON (July 27, 2015) - The improved survival rate of HIV patients in sub-Saharan Africa due to effective treatment programs is increasing the ability of researchers in Africa to study the impacts of cardiovascular disease in HIV patients, according to a guest editor page published today in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
According to guest editor Pravin Manga, M.B.B.C.H., Ph.D., of the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, some countries in sub-Saharan Africa, like South Africa, have created highly active antiretroviral treatment programs ...
Scientific experiments with the herpes virus strain that causes Marek's disease in poultry have confirmed, for the first time, the highly controversial theory that some types of vaccines allow for the evolution and survival of increasingly virulent versions of a virus, putting unvaccinated individuals at greater risk of severe illness. The research has important implications for food-chain security and food-chain economics, as well as for other diseases that affect humans and agricultural animals.
The new research, which will be published in the Open Access journal PLOS ...
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIF. - July 27, 2015 - Use of mechanical thrombectomy on qualifying stroke patients could result in major savings to the healthcare economy in the United Kingdom (U.K.) and other western countries with a similar healthcare structure, according to a new study presented at the Society of NeuroInterventional Surgery 12th Annual Meeting in San Francisco.
The study, Developing an Interventional Stroke Service: Improving Clinical Outcomes and Reducing Cost and Delivering Great Cost Savings Benefits to Health Economy, conducted at the University Hospital of ...
Postpartum depression is a debilitating disorder that affects nearly 20 percent of new mothers, putting their infants at increased risk for poor behavioral, cognitive and social development.
Researchers know that the hormone oxytocin, which plays a positive role in healthy birth, maternal bonding, relationships, lower stress levels, mood and emotional regulation, also is associated with postpartum depression when a mother has lower levels of the hormone.
A University of Virginia researcher and a team from several institutions in the United States and England have now ...
For children with a common middle-ear problem, a simple procedure with a nasal balloon can reduce the impact of hearing loss and avoid unnecessary and ineffective use of antibiotics, according to a randomized controlled trial published in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal).
It is very common for young children to develop otitis media with effusion, also known as "glue ear," in which the middle ear fills with thick fluid that can affect hearing development. There are frequently no symptoms, and parents often seek medical help only when hearing difficulties occur.
"Unfortunately, ...
BOSTON - Delirium is an acute state of confusion that often affects older adults following surgery or serious illness. Now a study led by researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) confirms that inflammation - an immune response that develops when the body attempts to protect itself from harmful stimuli -- plays a role in the onset of delirium.
Published in The Journals of Gerontology, Series A: Biological Sciences and Medical Sciences, the new study found that older patients with delirium had significantly elevated levels of the inflammatory marker ...
GAINESVILLE, Fla. -- The rapid spread of a common and deadly brain tumor has been slowed down significantly in a mouse model by cutting off the way some cancer cells communicate, according to a team of researchers that includes UF Health faculty.
The technique improved the survival time for patients with glioblastoma by 50 percent when tested in a mouse model, said Loic P. Deleyrolle, Ph.D., a research assistant professor of neurosurgery in the UF College of Medicine.
Researchers focused on disrupting the cell-to-cell communication that allows cancer stem cells to spread. ...
AUSTIN, Texas - Psychologists at The University of Texas at Austin found that children flexibly choose when to imitate and when to innovate the behavior of others, demonstrating that children are precocious social learners.
"There's nothing children are more interested in than other people," said UT Austin psychologist Cristine Legare. "Acquiring the skills and practices of their social groups is the fundamental task of childhood."
In order to function within their social groups, children have to learn both technical skills with instrumental goals, such as using a fork ...
A new tool called DeepBind uses deep learning to analyze how proteins bind to DNA and RNA, allowing it to detect mutations that could disrupt cellular processes and cause disease.
CIFAR Senior Fellow Brendan Frey (University of Toronto), supervising lead authors Babak Alipanahi and Andrew Delong, developed the method using deep learning -- a machine learning technique pioneered by CIFAR fellows in the Neural Computation & Adaptive Perception program and now used by companies such as Google and Facebook.
Hundreds of thousands of proteins in human cells attach themselves ...
