Our Broken Economy, in One Simple Chart
Folks on the coasts have been wondering how Donald Trump ever got elected President. Hillary was a severely flawed candidate, who ran a lousy campaign. But that’s not the whole story as The Wall Street Journal and others (including us a couple of times) have documented.
The bottom line: Middle- and lower-class Americans have seen their incomes stagnate, while the top 2.5% have benefited from a number of policies, including “free” trade, open borders, an easing of the post-Great Depression rules on financial activity. Still, this chart in The New York Times is stunning. It really does tell you all you need to know to understand why Trump became president.
Some Colleges Have More Students from the Top 1%
Than the Bottom 60. Find Yours.
Colleges often promote their role in helping poorer students rise in life, and their commitments to affordability. But some elite colleges have focused more on being affordable to low-income families than on expanding access. “Free tuition only helps if you can get in,” said Danny Yagan, an assistant professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, and one of the authors of the study.
The study provides the most comprehensive look at how well or how poorly colleges have built an economically diverse student body. The researchers tracked about 30 million students born between 1980 and 1991, linking anonymized tax returns to attendance records from nearly every college in the country.
These patterns are important because previous research has found that there are many highly qualified lower-income students who do not attend selective colleges – and because the low- and middle-income students who do attend top colleges fare almost as well as rich students.
Even though they face challenges that other students do not, lower-income students end up earning almost as much on average as affluent students who attend the same college. Read more here, also from The New York Times.