Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers
&quot;<i>middle-class life to those without a college degree</i>&quot;<p>Anytime you start delving into what has changed for a subset of people, over decades, the most important piece of the puzzle is decided ding who qualifies for the subset.<p>I mean concepts like &quot;middle class&quot; or &quot;without a college degree.&quot;<p>A lot more people get degrees, in 2018. Does the graduates&#x2F;nongraduates segment still represent a comparable group of people?<p>Human capital theory that recommended this explosion in tertiary education assumes&#x2F;d it does. College makes you more productive. Make everyone go, get productive and earn more.<p>It turned out, college was partly a proxy for class. What college grad earnings in the 60s was actually saying is that upper-middle class kids grow into upper-middle class adults.<p>...at least partially.<p>I certainly agree that a lot of cities are too expensive for the average person. But, I don&#x27;t think that you can take education in 1960 and 2018 and treat the populations as similar.<p>I&#x27;m also dubious about college as a proxy for skill, in the skilled labour sense. A lot of college is very general education, with even less focus on marketable skills than high school.