Assignment 4 (Cherri Chan, Tiffany Tsui, Ng Wei Qing)

Summary:

When education is combined with multidimensional job training, readiness, and a quality job search, it resulted in an increase in earnings and employment, and reduction of time spent on welfare. However, education is only a partial cure for poverty because of all the other recent changes in the labour market. At least half of income-inequality increase has taken place within groups of comparably educated people, and only minority of the highly-educated people are paid high wages. There is no meritocracy, where we can reliably count on people being fairly rewarded for their improved skills. Education improves the quality of workers but not the quality or the quantity of jobs, and the low rate of technological advance does not decrease the unemployment rate and increase the wages. At the same time, another problem is that our economy is still very much structured to produce lots of low-wage jobs, which will become the source of much job growth over the next decade. While we will be able to produce many more college graduates in the future, the quality and quantity of jobs that are for the less educated will not increase due to the economic status. As a result, education will not be able to alleviate poverty.

Reader's response:

I agree with the author that educations is only  part of the answer to poverty. Education itself is insufficient to eliminate poverty, it can only reduce poverty. Relying on just eduction alone can possibly result in many people not being able to find jobs despite having a eduction qualification as the quantity of jobs does not increase even though more people receiving education means that the quality of workers increases. In this case, the poor would still remain in poverty as they are enable to find jobs to earn money. Even with eduction, the poor still require their strength and status restored in order for them to reap the benefit of their education and escape poverty. While education is one factor to reduce poverty, economic growth, reducing inequality and restoring the strength and status of the poor is still needed to reduce poverty. Therefore, I agree with the author that eduction is only part of the answer to poverty.