A new report (link to the full report) studying post-secondary educational completion rates over time show that lower income entrants have improved completion rates by only 22% relative to those of upper incomes over the period 1960's to 1980's. Most of the increase in post secondary educational inequality has occurred among females.... less so for males.
AbstractWe describe changes over time in inequality in postsecondary education using nearly seventy years of data from the U.S. Census and the 1979 and 1997 National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth. We find growing gaps between children from high- and low-income families in college entry, persistence, and graduation. Rates of college completion increased by only four percentage points for low-income cohorts born around 1980 relative to cohorts born in the early 1960s, but by 18 percentage points for corresponding cohorts who grew up in high-income families. Among men, inequality in educational attainment has increased slightly since the early 1980s. But among women, inequality in educational attainment has risen sharply, driven by increases in the education of the daughters of high-income parents. Sex differences in educational attainment, which were small or nonexistent thirty years ago, are now substantial, with women outpacing men in every demographic group. The female advantage in educational attainment is largest in the top quartile of the income distribution. These sex differences present a formidable challenge to standard explanations for rising inequality in educational attainment.
The propaganda that our system provides equal opportunity doesn't hold any water in this case (and in all other cases as well). This is just another example of it (in educational inequality growth). What this study's result show is what all other studies of inequality increases show... it increases from one generation to the next... and is passed from one genertion to the next.
What this means though is that all the rhetoric and "action" take to improve "equal opportunity" is not only not working at all... and to the contrary has done almost nothing to mitigage the underlying problem... which is to say in other words that the rhetoric provided to make people feel better about themselves by providing "equal opportunity" is just that much more bullshit with no merit what-so-ever to support it. It's pretty much the same as the 'trickle-down' economic propaganda... those near the top get the vast majority of improvements, while those nearer the bottom get a pitance. Rising tides don't lift all boats by the same rise. In the real physical world a rising tide lifts all boats by the same amount... so the "rising tides..." economic propoganda is just a flat-out lie designed to make people believe in something that doesn't occur by design of those policies that purport to be "lifting all boats".
I guess people just like to (want to?) believe that fairy-tales have something to do with real life though, huh?