Education – General

Access to Health Care Doesn’t Eliminate Health Disadvantage of Poor Education

/ The Old Crank

Report Cover: Health Care Necessary But Not SufficientInteresting new brief from the VCU Center on Society and Health on the relationship between education and health. Most would find it unsurprising that people with less education tend to have poorer health outcomes. But does improved access to health care remove this disparity? Or as, they put it in this brief, “[w]ill health care reform make high school dropouts as healthy as college graduates?”

It won’t. According to this report, while access to health care has a bigger impact on people with limited education than for those with more education, access to health care isn’t enough to overcome the educational disadvantages associated with poor health: “People with fewer years of education have worse health than those with more education—even when they have the same access to health care.”

The authors go on to recommend that the adverse health consequences associated with a limited education “will require other policies that target factors outside of health care.”

College Attainment and Skills

/ The Old Crank

This article on the literacy skills of Canadian college graduates is another reminder that unless the PIAAC literacy assessment was fundamentally flawed, educational attainment isn’t a particularly reliable proxy for skills these days.

“You Don’t Have to Be Some Great Reader”

/ The Old Crank

From today’s edition of POLITICO’s Morning Education:

HILLARY CLINTON REVISITS EARLY ED: Hillary Clinton told the Home Instruction for Parents of Preschool Youngsters last night that she would like to see the number of families the program serves “grow exponentially” in the coming years. Clinton spoke at the organization’s annual awards dinner. She touted the benefits of early education and the Clinton Foundation’s “Too Small to Fail” initiative, which encourages parents to read and talk to their children. A mother told Clinton recently that she couldn’t read very well. “I said ‘You’re talking to a 6-month-old. Just hold the book, tell a story, point to pictures,'” Clinton said. “You don’t have to be some great reader.’ (my emphasis)

I understand the well-intentioned point here: all parents, whatever their literacy level, can and should talk with their kids and introduce them to books and other printed materials. Which is fine, but the fact is, a parent’s poor literacy really can have a huge negative impact on the literacy development of their children.(See here, here, and especially here, for example). We should encourage individual parents with poor literacy skills to introduce books to their kids as best they can, but that doesn’t mean that parents with low literacy skills isn’t a problem. Suggesting otherwise will lead to unwise policy choices.

As Employment Numbers Improve, Part-time and Community College Enrollment Goes Down

/ The Old Crank

Ben Cassleman, writing for FiveThirtyEight, notes the drop in college enrollment among recent high-school graduates and argues that the decline is driven by the improving job market:

The drop in college attendance among recent high school graduates appears concentrated among groups most likely to be deciding between going to school and joining the labor force: Part-time and community college enrollments saw the sharpest decline.

UPDATE: 4/25/14: I took a look at the actual BLS report this morning, and I think it’s worth noting that the new data actually reverses the trend: the college enrollment rate for recent high school graduates in October 2013 (65.9%) was actually only very slightly down from October 2012 (66.2%). Cassleman acknowledges this in his article, but doesn’t think it’s that important since “enrollment rates remain above their pre-recession levels by most measures.” But it seems to me one could argue that the story in the most recent data is that the college enrollment decline over the last few years actually appears to have leveled off in 2013, even as employment prospects improved (at least a little bit) during the same period.