I’ll have to interrupt my series on Medicaid, which was delayed by a computer problem at home, to call your attention to recent data from the American Community Survey. The data on educational attainment, written up in today’s Times, is in fact shocking. I say that as someone who has looked at similar data over long periods of time. It’s not so much the direction of the change, which corresponds with what I see on the street, but its scope and speed.
The share of the city’s population that is high-school and college-educated is soaring; the share that has not completed high school is plunging. This cannot be the result of the educational attainment of those who comes through the city’s schools: the state’s policy of making the life-chances of the city’s children even worse that it would otherwise be has thus far succeeded. Rather, it is a function of who is moving in and who is moving out or dying off. The former are better off than the latter, and the population turnover appears to be rapid.