14 DAY TRIAL // A new yet-unpublished scientific study, conducted by researcher Bruce Western, the director of the Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality and Social Policy at the Harvard University, shows that college education is still the key to wealth and prosperity in the United States, despite the fact that, over the years, the level of all educational institutions in the country has constantly decreased. He says that more and more families are struggling with paying the college tuition for their children, and that, if they don't receive help, America could see a drastic decline in both school attendance and overall level of education.
"The gap between the 'haves' and the 'have-nots' is widening for families with children in the United States. Inequality for these families has grown faster than the combined rates of inequality for all families and for men's hourly wages," Western says, adding that educational disparities have been one of the main causes why differences between families with children in college have increased by more than 60 percent over the last years.
"Families headed by college graduates by the 2000s were doing very much better than families headed by people who had just graduated high school," the researcher tells LiveScience in an interview. "I think that the same advice is even more true today. The economic and social advantages of a college degree have grown significantly. People with college degrees are more likely to live in two-parent households, and more likely to have a working spouse, and more likely to have a spouse in a well-paying job."
He adds that graduate schools also play an important role in people being able to find a decent job when they finish their studies, with all the benefits that derive from such a job. Western has expressed his hope for next year's freshmen classes, because the rate of enrollment has increased drastically from that of 2008. Harvard alone got 22,900 applications for next year's classes, and other major universities in the country have also been submerged in students' files.