Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers
"middle-class life to those without a college degree"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.I mean concepts like "middle class" or "without a college degree."A lot more people get degrees, in 2018. Does the graduates/nongraduates segment still represent a comparable group of people?Human capital theory that recommended this explosion in tertiary education assumes/d it does. College makes you more productive. Make everyone go, get productive and earn more.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....at least partially.I certainly agree that a lot of cities are too expensive for the average person. But, I don't think that you can take education in 1960 and 2018 and treat the populations as similar.I'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.