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A higher education on how to get ahead

I spent last weekend wandering the hallowed halls and slippery walkways of one of the planet's best known brand names.

By Robert Trigaux, Times Business Editor
Published February 24, 2008

I spent last weekend wandering the hallowed halls and slippery walkways of one of the planet's best known brand names.

Google? No way. Coca-Cola? Nope. McDonald's? Not a chance.

Try Harvard. As in the campus of Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass. Love its aura or hate its elitism, there's no school of higher learning in the country that comes close to its brand clout. Harvard was already 209 years old in 1845, the year Florida became a state.

I like how Stanley Katz, director of the Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies - at rival Princeton University, no less - described Harvard in a 2005 USA Today story. Harvard, he said, is "the Gucci of higher education, the most selective place."

This is not some saccharin homage to Harvard. I was there tagging along with about 20 students, teachers and parents of St. Petersburg High School's debate team on its annual chilly pilgrimage to participate in a major debate tournament on Harvard's campus. Students from 23 states and more than 100 high schools competed in some high-end verbal jousting.

It was impressive and uplifting to watch. The next generation has a lot on the ball.

But I am concerned not enough deserving young people will get the genuine chance to really show what they can do. The issue crystallized this past week when the Economic Mobility Project published its latest look at the role of education in realizing the American Dream.

Education matters. Big time. Certainly in Florida, where the combined endowments of every college and budget-strapped public university in the entire state does not begin to approach that of Harvard.

Across every income group, Americans are more likely to surpass their parents' income if they earn a college degree. The gap between a high school degree and a college degree was more than $29,000 in 2005.

No surprises there. But the economic mobility study, part of a Pew Charitable Trusts project, reminds us how big a role family background plays in the success of the next generation.

Example: 84 percent of Americans born in the bottom fifth of economic earners and who earn a college degree move up at least one rung on the economic ladder. An impressive 19 percent make it to the top fifth.

Yet of those born in the top fifth of earners who gain a college degree, 54 percent remain there as adults. And of those born in the top fifth who do not earn a college degree, 23 percent still manage to stay at the top - that's more than the college grads who started at the bottom.

The implications, according to Ron Haskins, a senior fellow at Brookings Institution and former Bush White House adviser who wrote this section of the study, is that economic mobility - the ability to rise up the economic ladder thanks to education - is likely to decline in the future.

My son now suffers the high school senior's rite of passage of waiting for college rejections and acceptances. But at least he's one of the lucky ones to get a shot at a college education.

Robert Trigaux can be reached at trigaux@sptimes.com  or 727 893-8405.

[Last modified February 22, 2008, 22:55:29]