By: Liz Dwyer GOOD, July 27, 2012 Will getting an education help
you achieve the American dream? College graduates still earn
twice what their peers with only a high school diploma earn, but
if you don’t have the educational and social opportunities you
need to actually get into college and graduate, your chances of
raking in a higher salary are pretty slim. Indeed, in an
appearance this week on The Daily Show to promote his new book
The Price of Inequality, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph
Stiglitz told Jon Stewart that the life chances of “a young
person born in the United States” are “more dependent on the
income and education of his parents” than in any other other
advanced country in the world. Although the 1 percent of
Americans who control 40 percent of the nation’s wealth have
access to better education opportunities, we still tell
ourselves that kids growing up in low income communities with
parents who don’t have an education can pull themselves up by
their bootstraps and end up as a Harvard gra