Why Don’t Americans Have Enough Skills? The Answer Is Inequality

Editor’s note: This piece originally appeared at Forbes. Josh Freedman is a policy analyst with New America’s Economic Growth Program.

Last week, the OECD released a mammoth new survey of the basic skills of the working-age population in advanced industrialized nations. As many articles have noted, the report shows that the United States ranks 16 out of 23 countries in basic literacy and 21 out of 23 in math. While commentators have used the report to lament the state of higher education in the United States, a deeper look reveals a different culprit.

The problem is an unequal system starting at the very bottom. At every step of the way, our education and labor market institutions solidify and expand, rather than redress, the inequality. We pay our highest-skilled and most-educated workers the highest premiums because they have the skills and education that are mostly available to those who already have higher skills and more education. At the same time, we have a huge share of the working-age population without important skills. As a result, inequality has become the defining feature not only of our social and political institutions but clearly of our skill base as well.

Read the rest of the piece at Forbes.