Privately educated still take most top jobs

Although, this article is highlighting a report on British education system & the resultant employment prospects from the private institutions of that education system, this can easily be extended to everywhere around the world.

Private schools, colleges, & universities in US & Canada are similarly regarded as producing highly talented individuals, who then are employed in top jobs. Although, there are no private universities in Canada, yet, but the cost of education in public universities is skyrocketing, & obtaining that education is becoming a luxury for many. The pricier the degree, the more respect it earns from the industry.

It's the same case in developing countries, like Nigeria, South Africa, Brazil, India, Pakistan, etc. Private education system has merely become the profit-making tool for a few industrialists. Public education system has been eroded or the industry sector doesn't favour the graduates of those. Graduates of private education system are highly regarded in the industry, & even there, the more expensive the degree (i.e. IBA & LUMS), the more respect the grad earns, & hence, obtaining that top spot in the industry becomes that much easier.

Of course, this disparity will continue on, even if the private education system starts taking in students on the basis of merit. The reason being that the graduates of these top private schools have strong alumni networks in the top tiers of industry, who pull their fellow graduates up, while leaving behind the graduates of public education system. This "networking" will continue on. Coupled this networking issue in the developed world with the not-so-strong financial situation of the immigrants there, & you can see that immigrants & their children do not make it to the top tiers of the industry in the developed world.

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https://www.rt.com/uk/333491-private-education-top-jobs/

Individuals educated at private schools continue to land the majority of top jobs in leading fields, including law, politics, journalism and the arts ... .

Results published by the Sutton Trust ... show that while the previous decade has shown “small signs” of narrowing inequality levels, often more than 70% of top jobs are given to those who were privately educated.

Only 7% of British youngsters attend private school, but the study showed that 74% of judges and 71% of high ranking military officers attended fee-paying schools.

In journalism, 51% of top print writers were privately educated, as well as 61% of doctors.

Respectively, only 12% of military chiefs were educated in comprehensive schools, and 22% of doctors attended grammar schools. Only one-fifth of leading journalists had a state education.

In politics the gap has narrowed, the report found, with 32% of MPs having attended a private school. But when examining the Tory cabinet, some 50% of the ministers went to independent schools, compared to 13% in Labour’s shadow cabinet.

The report also examined the prevalence of Oxford and Cambridge universities among top ranking positions, and found that alumni from the famous academic institutions were more likely to take high positions.

In law, Oxbridge graduates make up 74% of the top positions, with 54% of journalists having also attended the two universities.

Some 47% of the Conservative cabinet also attended Oxford or Cambridge, more than 10% higher than the shadow cabinet, which features 32% Oxbridge graduates.

The arts is also not exempt from the privately educated/Oxbridge bubble, with award-winning actors and actresses 50% more likely to have had a private education than pop stars. A total of 42% of BAFTA winners were awarded to fee-paying school attendees.

Sir Peter Lampl, chair of the Sutton Trust, said the report showed a need for more social mobility.

“Our research shows that your chances of reaching the top in so many areas of British life are very much greater if you went to an independent school.

“As well as academic achievement, an independent education tends to develop essential skills such as confidence, articulacy and teamwork, which are vital to career success.

“The key to improving social mobility at the top is to open up independent schools to all pupils based on merit not money... as well as support for highly able students in state schools.”

"The Long Shadow": Race, Class and Privilege in Baltimore (4/5)

This discussion is good enough that I don't have to say much. This should be an eye-opening discussion for those people who think racism & discrimination no longer exist in 21st century North America or anywhere else in the developed world. Racism & discrimination in every sphere of life is alive, & being vigorously practiced, all over the West / Global North / developed world.

As per the discussion, social mobility is restricted, or at least, severely handicapped, due to this discrimination, & the general public incorrectly thinks that African-Americans, or every non-white / non-Caucasian, is poor or destitute because he / she is lazy or does not know how to find jobs. It's not that black & white.

Non-whites / non-Caucasians are hard-working & studious, & want to find gainful employment, but they are being restricted from doing such. But they & their families need that money, too, so they get involved in criminal endeavours, for which, society treats them very harshly. Severe punishment is not going to make the problem of people turning towards crimes, but eliminating the root cause will solve that problem, & the root cause is racism & discrimination in the society.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FBcnrDf_l0

JAISAL NOOR, TRNN PRODUCER: Out of the 790 Baltimore children you surveyed in 1982, 33 moved from low-income to high-income brackets. What was different about them? ...

KARL ALEXANDER, JOHN DEWEY PROF. OF SOCIOLOGY, JOHNS HOPKINS UNIV.: Well, let me say, just to clarify, that's not income. The way we classify their families and themselves as young adults, it's socioeconomic standing, which is a combination of income, occupational status, and level of education. So it's all three of those things combined. And that movement up, what we do is we classify families as low, medium, and high in terms of their socioeconomic standing, and we do that for the parents and we do it for the children. And then we cross-classify the two so we can see how many children went from low to high, how many children went from high to low, and so forth.

And so, yes, we find that just 33 of the children who grew up in lower socioeconomic status families made it into the higher realm as adults. The number of children who started out in favorable family circumstances and dropped to the lowest level, there's just nine of them. So there is upward mobility, there's downward mobility, but that's relatively infrequent ... .

So there's children who moved up from the lowest, from the bottom category to the highest of our classification. That was 9.5% ... . The ones who dropped down from high to low was just 6.3% of the group that started out high fell to the lowest category. ... But that 9.5% moving from low to high is contrasted with 41% who started low and stayed low, so when there's a fourfold difference in the likelihood of moving up from lower origins to the high destinations. The 6.5% who started out high and dropped low, that's against 50% who started high and stayed high. So that's more than almost a tenfold difference.

So ... that actually does a good job of kind of capturing the whole experience globally over the span of years, 'cause it anchors children in where they started in life in terms of their family conditions and then compares it to where they wound up in life in terms of their own conditions as young adults. And the predominant tendency is to stay where you started. Some people move up, some people drop down, but a predominant tendency is to stay where you started. And that's what really the "long shadow" imagery is intended to convey. Economists that look at these mobility patterns, they call it stickiness at the extreme. You know, you're kind of stuck where you started out.

How did the people move up who did make it out? ... the stories are so different one from the other it's hard to generalize. But some did it by being successful in school, ... , the way your parents probably told you to do it and the way my parents taught me to do it, ... , stay the course, study hard, come to school prepared, and do what your teachers tell you, and you'll be successful. Some of them did that. ... We have others who have moved up by being entrepreneurial, doing well without the advantages of a college degree. ...

So the paths to moving up--now, there are different ways you can do this, and many of our study participants have been quite resourceful and energetic and entrepreneurial and have managed to rise above. But, again, the predominant tendency, the pattern, is to not move up. If you start out in a disadvantaged family, the likelihood is that you're going to be in a disadvantaged family yourself as a young adult. So there's movement up, but there's also stability, and the stability in terms of your position in the stratification, hierarchy ... . Stability is the norm. Most people stay where they start. And the ones who break out and are successful, we applaud them, and it's great to see that, but you'd like to have it from more than just 9.5%. You'd like it to be ... 100% if you could. But short of that, you know, something. You'd like to see greater opportunities for children to get ahead in life who start out kind of behind.

NOOR: ... So, recently Paul Ryan, he said that inner-city men are lazy; and that's why they're not successful, that's why they don't have jobs: they don't want to get jobs. And what has happened since you started this study is that you've had under the Reagan administration a massive amount of cuts in social spending, cuts in social security and welfare in the Clinton years, and the escalation of the war on drugs, mass incarceration. What is your response to Paul Ryan? What are your thoughts? And this is also a common idea throughout society.

ALEXANDER: Yeah, no, it is a common idea. It's widely held. And I think it's just--it's certainly too superficial, and it might be just out-and-out wrong. Certainly as a blanket statement, broadly applicable, it's certainly wrong. We certainly don't see this in the experiences of our group. They try to get ahead by getting additional education, and there are just obstacles that stand in their way, so they're unsuccessful. They try to find jobs, but they don't have family members or neighbors or ins with the boss that can help them get into the door.
...

... I think, as a social social concern, I think much attention is focused on the limited opportunities for African Americans. But it's absolutely wrong about all inner-city people, 'cause one of the things that our book establishes is that the whites of lower background have are much more successful in terms of finding stable and well-paying employment, good-paying employment, much more successful than African-American counterparts and the women of either--, black and white.

... it's clear that they, African-American men in particular, lag behind, and it's challenging for them. And then their challenges kind of trickle down to affect women who are trying to establish lives and take care of families, many of them on their own. The national literature says that African-American men are more likely to apply for jobs than are white men when they need them and are eager to find employment. That much is clear.

It's also clear that the stain of a criminal justice record is a greater impediment for African-American men [than] for white men. We see that in our research, but it's also seen nationally.

So I think there's a relevant history here that we haven't even touched upon. But it has to do with the way opportunities open up in the kind of blue-collar workforce. And it goes back to the World War II industrial era, industrial boom. So what it wasn't too long ago, I think, that Baltimore was the economic engine or powerhouse of the Maryland economy. It's easy to forget, but--because we've been mired in these difficult times for decades now, but in the World War II era, when during the height of the war mobilization--Beth Steel, for example, was the largest steel mill in the world, with 35,000 workers, and now it's being sold off for scrap. That was a time--some of the literature refers to this as the moment of the blue-collar elite, where you could find steady work and high-paying work on the assembly lines, in the steel mills, on the docks. So there was a lot of good, steady work to be found.

But Baltimore was highly segregated during that time, and most of that good, steady work was available to blue-collar whites and not blue-collar African Americans, who were relegated to the least-promising kind of employment. They did all the dirty work and the nonskilled laboring work. And so we're talking three generations back. We're talking about the--our study, youngsters' grandparents.

Also there were restrictive residential covenants. So the white working-class in Baltimore were substantially isolated in residential enclaves. If you know the area locally, the first thing you think about when you--what comes to mind when you think about whites in Baltimore are the upscale neighborhoods that are exclusive--the Roland Parks, the Guilfords, the Homelands. But in point of fact, there are working-class, white working-class neighborhoods scattered throughout the city that also are long-standing and very much insulated by residential segregation--Curtis Bay, Brooklyn, and there's over on the west side (near the B&O Railroad Museum) Pigtown, Sandtown, low-income working-class, white working-class neighborhoods that are insulated in terms of being racially segregated.

So you put these two things together in a historic perspective, you've got really a booming industry of high-skill, high-pay blue-collar work and whites having access, greater access to that kind of employment, and you have segregated residential neighborhoods, where people, blacks and whites, don't mix and mingle. They didn't back then, and they don't do much better today. White parents who have social networks through those in the workplace or in the neighborhood, a lot of employment in the non-college workforce is word-of-mouth, ... recommendation from a friend or a cousin or a neighbor that can help open doors. And working-class whites are much better able to provide those opportunities for their children than are African Americans, than are working-class African-American parents.

So what happens is, in the historic context, you see--in the book, we quote a sociologist by the name of Eduardo Bonilla-Silva. He's a sociologist at Duke University. And here's the quote. It says, the racial practices and mechanisms that have kept blacks subordinated have changed from overtly and eminently racist to covert and indirectly racist.

So I think this history is where the overtly and eminently racist practices come into play that excluded African-Americans from high-wage work, blue-collar work, and that excluded them from neighborhoods where they could develop social contacts that would be helpful to their children. That's 50 years ago. But if you fast-forward to today, you still have these same isolated neighborhoods, and you still have word-of-mouth hiring for these kinds of--on the construction sites and whatnot. And so white parents are better able to help their children get this kind of work. And they do it. They do it.

I'm going to kind of in a very roundabout way get back to your Paul Ryan quote. The white guys are working hard and doing rather well, inner-city white guys working hard and doing rather well. Because they have these network advantages through their parents, relatives, and friends, they can get into this kind of work. And they grew up with it. ... if your father was an auto mechanic, you're helping him. If he's an electrician, a small-jobber, you're on the job with him. So you get worked in that way. African Americans by and large don't have those opportunities and that access.

But the African Americans that we know through our project are also highly motivated and willing to work hard. But they have more impediments, maybe more barriers in the way that keep them from finding, realizing the same kinds of success that the lower income background whites realize. And so I'm very dismissive of that kind of attitude about inner-city young people, African-American or white or/and white. It just doesn't ring true. It doesn't resonate with what we've seen in the experiences of our children growing up, and it doesn't resonate in terms of what I know of the broader literature that speaks to these very same kinds of issues.

“The Long Shadow”: Race, Class and Privilege in Baltimore (2/5)

A brief discussion on a social study looking at how racism holds back African-Americans in one city, Baltimore, in regards of education & employment, against their Caucasian / White counterparts. People all over the world think that there's no, or minimal, discrimination in Europe & North America in the areas of employment & education, & merit rules the day. But, this & several other studies will confirm that racism & discrimination very much exist & affects the minorities very much so.

Now, we have to keep in mind that this study is looking at the racism effect on African-Americans & Caucasians / Whites; people whose religious beliefs & social attitudes might not differ so much & the only difference between them will be the colour of their skin. Now, what if we factor in the religious beliefs? Those religious beliefs will show up in the subjects' names, familial & social connections, social attitudes, & perhaps, their outlook (facial hair, dressing style etc.). Per my own observations & experiences, these factors adversely affect the individual & make his / her climb up the social & corporate ladder that much harder.

That's why, 2nd-generation immigrants (children of immigrants) usually shun the habits of their immigrant parents & adopt their host countries' customs & cultures. This adoption helps them in gaining acceptance in the social & corporate arena & seemingly makes their life that much easier. Children who stick to their parental cultures keep suffering. Other people in their family & friend circle start pointing out that how people they know are getting ahead without acknowledging some simple facts that how those children who are getting ahead have forsaken the cultural & religious practices of their immigrant parents, & have adopted their host country's customs & cultures.

The simple reason the general public wants to believe that there's no racism is that it's much easier to lay the blame of a Muslim teenager rebelling against the society with a gun or an African-American man being homeless & broke on their own abilities & competencies, instead of how hard it is to succeed in life when the cards are stacked against you from the time of your birth, simply because of the colour of your skin, or your religious belief, or your family's networks.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8BPTpSQCYY

KARL ALEXANDER, JOHN DEWEY PROF. OF SOCIOLOGY, JOHNS HOPKINS UNIV.: 40%of high school dropout rate overall. We all would want better than that for our children, much better. One of the interesting things, because there's a lot of discussion of high school drop out is that that's the end of the story. But 60% of the study youngsters who left school without high school degrees eventually get some kind of high school certification, and most of them do the GED degree, which is an alternative certification, but by the standards of federal government accounting that's high school completion. 10% who dropped out return to high school and finish with regular diplomas.

So what started out as a 40% high school degree at age 28 is down to 25%, which is still really very high, but it's not 40%. So these kids who leave school, many of them realize that this wasn't a very good decision and they regret it and they try to do something about it. When we talked at age 28 to everyone, 80% of the total panel said that they intended to get additional education, 80% at age 28. It was 85% among high school dropouts. We call them permanent high school dropouts because by age 28 they didn't have a GED or a high school diploma. ... it really is quite impressive to see how the success ethos that school is the way to get ahead has permeated through even a very disadvantaged population of urban youth. So these kids want to succeed in life, they want to do well, and they understand, many of them, that school can be the path out, up and out. But there are just so many barriers that stand in the way that for many of them, they're not able to see it through.

JAISAL NOOR, TRNN PRODUCER: And there is a racial disparity in high school dropouts between white and black, who found work even though they were high school dropouts.

ALEXANDER: Yes, there ... is a racial disparity, but it's not the one that you might anticipate. So one of the interesting opportunities that we had here, because we did start out with a very diverse sample within the framework of the Baltimore City Public Schools system is that we have a large presence of low-income white children. And there's a vast literature on the problems of the urban poor and concentrated poverty in our big cities, but you very rarely see low-income whites as part of that picture, as part of that story. And that's regrettable, because there are low-income whites in Baltimore and there are low-income white neighborhoods in Baltimore. There have been all along, and there still are. But very rarely do you see them brought into the conversation about the challenges of the urban poor and whatnot.

So we were fortunate in being able to include a large group of these youngsters in our study, and we monitored their experiences over time as well. And what we find is that the lower-income whites, white children, white males specifically, of disadvantaged family background have the highest dropout rate, non-completion. At age 28, their average years of schooling is about 10.2. So the typical lower-income white male growing up is a permanent high school dropout in terms of the way--our coverage of it.

Now, the others--and the comparisons we make are lower income against higher income, or lower socioeconomic standing against higher socioeconomic standing growing up, African American and white, and male and female, men and women. And when I say that the white males of disadvantaged family background have the lowest high school completion rate, had the highest high school dropout rate, I'm not saying that the others are going gangbusters. In fact, for the other three groups, they're all eleven-point-something years. So for all four--lower-income white men, white women, African-American men, and African-American women--at age 28, the typical youngster out of that group, all four of those groups, has not finished high school. But white men, if you look at the numbers, are least successful of all. ... in terms of using the educational system as the vehicle for moving up in life, 'cause they've got the lowest levels of formal schooling on average. ... .

But then to turn the page, ... they are most successful in the world work--so least successful educationally and most successful in the world of work, and across a whole host of particulars when you look at it: they're more likely to have worked full-time; they find jobs fast, more quickly, and they're ready to move on to the next job; their earnings are higher; and they have a very distinctive pattern of successful vocational development--from adolescence on, their employment experience is much better than that of African-American men of like background, and much better also than women of like background, both African-American and white. So these white guys don't use schooling as the vehicle for doing well in life, but they do have employment opportunities that aren't as readily available to the others who grew up in the same kind of circumstances.
...

... what we find, which is really tremendously striking is that at age 28, 45% of these guys are working in the high-skill, high-wage jobs in manufacturing and in the construction trades, 45% are working as either electricians, plumbers, welders, things of that sort. But the kinds of jobs that used to be the backbone of the old Baltimore industrial economy and everyone says that they're gone with deindustrialization ... , but if you look around, people are still building buildings, they're still doing a road repairs to the highways. If you need to upgrade your electricity at home, you call an electrician, or if you need a new hot water heater installed, you call a plumber. So there are people who are still doing this kind of work and working in these trades. And what we see is that it's white men of lower-income background who have the greatest access to these kinds of jobs, 45% of white men. 15% of African-American men are working in this same sector, the way we classify it. ... so the white advantage, just in terms of penetrating into this sector of employment, is threefold advantage. But on top of that, the white men who are working in the sector, their earnings are twice that of African-American men, roughly $44,000 against ... $22,000.

A little bit more than double. And that's at age 28 in terms of 2006, 2007 dollars. So these guys not only have better access to this high-skill, high-wage work in the blue-collar economy, but ... their positions that they find themselves in are much more--they pay a lot more than the positions African-Americans of like background find themselves in.

This is actually longstanding in Baltimore. We see it in the experiences of our study group, but there was a report that was published in the early '60s that looked at the earnings, using Social Security data, ... of the automobile mechanic graduates to Baltimore vocational and technical high schools back in the day. Actually, it was Mergenthaler and Carver. They were segregated at the time. And the white graduates, the white auto mechanics graduates four or five years afterwards were making twice what the African-American graduates were making in the same program, auto mechanics. So this is a longstanding pattern.

And so there is another--there's a second option for how to establish yourself in life and achieve a reasonably comfortable standard of living.
...

... I say men because it is particularly men. There aren't many women, white or are African-American, who are working in these kinds of jobs. When you look at the sex composition of the employments of our study youngsters, there is a high-degree of sex segregation, and it's very traditional. The women are concentrated, African-American and white, in the traditional pink-collar sectors.
...

That's service and clerical work--with some sales, but service and clerical. Service and clerical employment makes up 60-70% of lower-income women's--in terms of family background. ... And they pay less. ... So women and men substantially are finding themselves at different places in the labor market, and men are in more lucrative positions than women.

And that actually--it's interesting. We see the same thing for those who were from more favorable family backgrounds, and most of whom attended college, and many had completed college, but it's at the upper end of the employment hierarchy. So those women are concentrated in the professional fields. And you could name them as well as I, probably, 'cause they are gendered. It's teaching, nursing, social work, the helping professions. Men of like background are more likely to be in executive or managerial positions or to be in the high-level technical positions of today's postindustrial economy. And those jobs pay more than the helping-profession jobs that women access. So we see men being advantaged in terms of employment opportunities--.
...

So what we describe in the book is this pattern where white men of modest background are advantaged in terms of their employment experience over everybody else. Why that happens is a larger question. And there's a historical backdrop to it. There are--in the long shadow, we think there really are two--it's a story about two kinds of family privilege. And the flipside of family privilege is family disadvantage. But there's middle-class family privilege in terms of helping children do well in school. And that's what we see. Children of parents who themselves were college-educated, who have middle-class jobs and whatnot, their children are doing just fine.
...

... this pattern of differential success in school, it's not particular to what we see in Baltimore. It's we see it nationally as well that children from advantaged families are more successful in terms of family income, parental levels of education, and so forth. So that's one success narrative.

This other success narrative involves blue-collar attainment, and where--parents can be helpful there, too, but in a not quite as obvious way, 'cause we know about middle-class parents. Middle-class parents can do all kinds of things to help their children do well in school. They buy expensive educational toys, they do enrichment experiences, and so forth. Blue-colar parents, it's not so obvious, until you step back and think about it, how they can to help their children be successful. And the way it plays out in the experiences of our study group is that blue-collar parents can help open doors to good steady employment through social networks. When we asked at age 22 our study participants how they found the work, white men of modest background much more often said through family and friends, and African-Americans much more often said through themselves. And if you're on your own and you're not well connected, that makes it--that's not an easy thing to do, to find your way to a good opportunity. ... It is white privilege, working-class white privilege specifically.

Another facet of that is we have--the white high school dropouts at age 22, 80% of them were working. ... African-American male high school dropouts at age 22, 40% of them were working. So whites just have these employment advantages all along the way. And what we find is, if you look at those groups specifically, between age 22 at age 28, 5% of the whites acquire a criminal record along the way. I think it's 45% of the African-Americans acquire a criminal record along the way. So they have limited job opportunities, and they're trying to figure out a way to get by, and they get in trouble.

"Fast Food Jobs" by Steve Breen

Steve Breen, San Diego Union Tribune, San Diego, CA, US

What's the point of college?

This whole piece from New Yorker is a fantastic one. It's quite a long one, so I will keep my blog post on it rather short.

What I like to say here is that I've been saying what this article is saying for, at least, a year or so. Education nowadays doesn't have the same respect or weight as it used to carry about 5 decades ago. For instance, I met an 18-year-old about 6 months ago who said to me that he is learning to be a salesperson, right after graduating from high school, & have no intention to go to post-secondary school, because business education is learned best out in the field than in a class. So, in essence, he will save thousands upon thousands of dollars in education & will ultimately come out ahead because he will have hands-on work experience coupled with a valuable network. (I couldn't reply since my own experiences are not so great).

Everyone, from Canada to Chile to Egypt to South Africa to Spain to Russia to Australia to Saudi Arabia, loves to talk about how education is essential for everyone, regardless to gender, skin colour, language, religion etc. And, in an ideal & utopian world, it definitely will be ... but, we are not living in an ideal & utopian world. Education has become a business in itself. It has become so expensive to even get a 4-year bachelor's degree that families & students take out thousands of student loans to earn that degree.

But after graduation a serious question needs to be asked is that degree, for which I just paid thousands of dollars (or whatever other currency), worth anything? Personally, my 2 degrees, a Bachelor's in Accounting & an MBA, for which I paid about 100,000 Canadian dollars (excluding my time & effort) in total, & 2 certificates (Six Sigma & Project Management) have earned me a job as a cashier in a local superstore. So, for me, my education was definitely not worth it. I would have been better off by not getting an education & spent my time working in retail, for instance. That decade in education would've saved me some hard cold cash & I would've been a supervisor, or even a manager, of a store by now. The article does point out this fact that how highly educated graduates, even STEM graduates (science, tech, engineering, & mathematics), are working in measly jobs, perhaps, due to technological advancements.

So, education is important but we need to look at its worth. The article states examples of colleges & universities, & a lot of statistics & studies, in trying to answer the primary question of the worth of education. Eventually, it asks what is the purpose of colleges & universities, since their graduates, which are constantly increasing in number, are not really earning that much, & their wages are actually falling. This seems counterintuitive since education is supposed to increase your worth, & not decrease it in the labour market.

A theory the article puts forward is that degrees & certificates perhaps try to signal to potential employers the competency of the candidate. Potential employers are thus merely using the degrees as a filter in the hiring process. Perhaps, that is why, "branding" of a university comes into play. Since, everyone around you is getting a degree, if you want to stand out from the crowd, you need to "buy" a degree from a so-called "prestigious" school. Then, it becomes an arms race, & it is only helping educational institutes & financial services companies (i.e. banks) in making huge profits.

Unfortunately, the article stops short of giving a definite reason why this is happening that education is not paying off for many, nowadays. One reason it gives, with which I do agree, is that this blind corporate race of cost-cutting is increasing more tech solutions implementation with fewer graduates being hired to train for future management positions.

One other reason I would give for education not paying off in modern times is the absence of meritocracy. We all like to think that education improves the personal financial bottom line, but we forget, that it will happen only when the labour market is merit based, which it is not. We all have heard of that accursed word, "networking," which merely implies that your education & qualifications matter less if you know the right people in the right places. Nowadays, employers get so many resumes / CVs / bio-datas, which are all essentially similar, too, that instead of sifting through all of them to find that perfect candidate, employers simply ask the people around them to recommend them a candidate.

This disease of "networking" is very common in developing countries because, due to their large population, & in their push for more education, everyone has a similar educational base. But networking is relatively new in Western countries because up until a few years ago, your education still played a major part what job & earning potential you ended up with in your life. It was somewhat of a meritocracy. But not anymore. Networking disrupts a level playing field, since, your education & qualifications are useless in the face of "how many influential people are your / family's friends".

Anyway, my blog post has become a long one & I would prefer it that you read the article, which is still quite informative & thought-provoking. We all like to think that education is essential to succeed in life but we forget that the world is an unfair place, & in the near future, your education will matter less & your connections will matter more.

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http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/09/07/college-calculus

If there is one thing most Americans have been able to agree on over the years, it is that getting an education, particularly a college education, is a key to human betterment & prosperity. ... Already, the cost of higher education has become a big issue in the 2016 Presidential campaign. ...

Promoters of higher education have long emphasized its role in meeting civic needs. The Puritans who established Harvard were concerned about a shortage of clergy; during the Progressive Era, John Dewey insisted that a proper education would make people better citizens, with enlarged moral imaginations. Recently, as wage stagnation & rising inequality have emerged as serious problems, the economic arguments for higher education have come to the fore. “Earning a post-secondary degree or credential is no longer just a pathway to opportunity for a talented few,” the White House Web site states. “Rather, it is a prerequisite for the growing jobs of the new economy.” Commentators & academic economists have claimed that college doesn’t merely help individuals get higher-paying jobs; it raises wages throughout the economy & helps ameliorate rising inequality. In an influential 2008 book, “The Race Between Education and Technology,” the Harvard economists Claudia Goldin & Lawrence F. Katz argued that technological progress has dramatically increased the demand for skilled workers, & that, in recent decades, the American educational system has failed to meet the challenge by supplying enough graduates who can carry out the tasks that a high-tech economy requires. “Not so long ago, the American economy grew rapidly and wages grew in tandem, with education playing a large, positive role in both,” they wrote in a subsequent paper. “The challenge now is to revitalize education-based mobility.”

The “message from the media, from the business community, and even from many parts of the government has been that a college degree is more important than ever in order to have a good career,” Peter Cappelli, a professor of management at Wharton, notes in his informative & refreshingly skeptical new book, “Will College Pay Off?” (PublicAffairs). “As a result, families feel even more pressure to send their kids to college. This is at a time when more families find those costs to be a serious burden.” During recent decades, tuition & other charges have risen sharply—many colleges charge more than 50,000 dollars a year in tuition & fees. Even if you factor in the expansion of financial aid, Cappelli reports, “students in the United States pay about four times more than their peers in countries elsewhere.”

Despite the increasing costs — & the claims about a shortage of college graduates — the number of people attending & graduating from four-year educational institutions keeps going up. In the 2000-01 academic year, American colleges awarded almost 1.3 million bachelor’s degrees. A decade later, the figure had jumped nearly 40%, to more than 1.7 million. About 70% of all high-school graduates now go on to college, & half of all Americans between the ages of 25 & 34 have a college degree. That’s a big change. In 1980, only 1 in 6 Americans 25 & older were college graduates. 50 years ago, it was fewer than 1 in 10. To cater to all the new students, colleges keep expanding & adding courses, many of them vocationally inclined. At Kansas State, undergraduates can major in Bakery Science & Management or Wildlife & Outdoor Enterprise Management. They can minor in Unmanned Aircraft Systems or Pet Food Science. Oklahoma State offers a degree in Fire Protection & Safety Engineering & Technology. At Utica College, you can major in Economic Crime Detection.

In the fast-growing for-profit college sector, which now accounts for more than 10% of all students, vocational degrees are the norm. DeVry University — which last year taught more than 60,000 students, at more than 75 campuses — offers majors in everything from multimedia design & development to health-care administration. On its Web site, DeVry boasts, “In 2013, 90% of DeVry University associate and bachelor’s degree grads actively seeking employment had careers in their field within six months of graduation.” That sounds impressive — until you notice that the figure includes those graduates who had jobs in their field before graduation. (Many DeVry students are working adults who attend college part-time to further their careers.) Nor is the phrase “in their field” clearly defined. “Would you be okay rolling the dice on a degree in communications based on information like that?” Cappelli writes. He notes that research by the nonprofit National Association of Colleges & Employers found that, in the same year, just 6.5% of graduates with communications degrees were offered jobs in the field. It may be unfair to single out DeVry, which is one of the more reputable for-profit education providers. But the example illustrates Cappelli’s larger point: many of the claims that are made about higher education don’t stand up to scrutiny.

“It is certainly true that college has been life changing for most people and a tremendous financial investment for many of them,” Cappelli writes. “It is also true that for some people, it has been financially crippling. . . .The world of college education is different now than it was a generation ago, when many of the people driving policy decisions on education went to college, and the theoretical ideas about why college should pay off do not comport well with the reality.”

No idea has had more influence on education policy than the notion that colleges teach their students specific, marketable skills, which they can use to get a good job. Economists refer to this as the “human capital” theory of education, & for the past 20 or 30 years it has gone largely unchallenged. If you’ve completed a two-year associate’s degree, you’ve got more “human capital” than a high-school graduate. And if you’ve completed a four-year bachelor’s degree you’ve got more “human capital” than someone who attended a community college. Once you enter the labor market, the theory says, you will be rewarded with a better job, brighter career prospects, & higher wages.

There’s no doubt that college graduates earn more money, on average, than people who don’t have a degree. And for many years the so-called “college wage premium” grew. In 1970, according to a recent study by researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, people with a bachelor’s degree earned about 60,000 dollars a year, on average, & people with a high-school diploma earned about 45,000 dollars. 35 years later, in 2005, the average earnings of college graduates had risen to more than 70,000 dollars, while high-school graduates had seen their earnings fall slightly. (All these figures are inflation-adjusted.) The fact that the college wage premium went up at a time when the supply of graduates was expanding significantly seemed to confirm the Goldin-Katz theory that technological change was creating an ever-increasing demand for workers with a lot of human capital.

During the past decade or so, however, a number of things have happened that don’t easily mesh with that theory. If college graduates remain in short supply, their wages should still be rising. But they aren’t. In 2001, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank in Washington, workers with undergraduate degrees (but not graduate degrees) earned, on average, $30.05 an hour; last year, they earned $29.55 an hour. Other sources show even more dramatic falls. “Between 2001 and 2013, the average wage of workers with a bachelor’s degree declined 10.3 percent, and the average wage of those with an associate’s degree declined 11.1 percent,” the New York Fed reported in its study. Wages have been falling most steeply of all among newly minted college graduates. And jobless rates have been rising. In 2007, 5.5% of college graduates under the age of 25 were out of work. Today, the figure is close to 9%. If getting a bachelor’s degree is meant to guarantee entry to an arena in which jobs are plentiful & wages rise steadily, the education system has been failing for some time.

And, while college graduates are still doing a lot better than nongraduates, some studies show that the earnings gap has stopped growing. The figures need careful parsing. If you lump college graduates in with people with advanced degrees, the picture looks brighter. But almost all the recent gains have gone to folks with graduate degrees. “The four-year-degree premium has remained flat over the past decade,” the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland reported. And one of the main reasons it went up in the first place wasn’t that college graduates were enjoying significantly higher wages. It was that the earnings of nongraduates were falling.

Many students & their families extend themselves to pay for a college education out of fear of falling into the low-wage economy. That’s perfectly understandable. But how sound an investment is it? One way to figure this out is to treat a college degree like a stock or a bond & compare the cost of obtaining one with the accumulated returns that it generates over the years. (In this case, the returns come in the form of wages over & above those earned by people who don’t hold degrees.) When the research firm PayScale did this a few years ago, it found that the average inflation-adjusted return on a college education is about 7%, which is a bit lower than the historical rate of return on the stock market. Cappelli cites this study along with one from the Hamilton Project, a Washington-based research group that came up with a much higher figure — about 15% — but by assuming, for example, that all college students graduate in 4 years. (In fact, the four-year graduation rate for full-time, first-degree students is less than 40%, & the six-year graduation rate is less than 60%.)

These types of studies, & there are lots of them, usually find that the financial benefits of getting a college degree are much larger than the financial costs. But Cappelli points out that for parents & students the average figures may not mean much, because they disguise enormous differences in outcomes from school to school. He cites a survey, carried out by PayScale for Businessweek in 2012, that showed that students who attend M.I.T., Caltech, & Harvey Mudd College enjoy an annual return of more than 10% on their “investment.” But the survey also found almost 200 colleges where students, on average, never fully recouped the costs of their education. “The big news about the payoff from college should be the incredible variation in it across colleges,” Cappelli writes. “Looking at the actual return on the costs of attending college, careful analyses suggest that the payoff from many college programs—as much as 1 in 4—is actually negative. Incredibly, the schools seem to add nothing to the market value of the students.”

So what purpose does college really serve for students & employers? Before the human-capital theory became so popular, there was another view of higher education—as, in part, a filter, or screening device, that sorted individuals according to their aptitudes & conveyed this information to businesses & other hiring institutions. By completing a four-year degree, students could signal to potential employers that they had a certain level of cognitive competence & could carry out assigned tasks & work in a group setting. But a college education didn’t necessarily imbue students with specific work skills that employers needed, or make them more productive.

Kenneth Arrow, one of the giants of twentieth-century economics, came up with this account, & if you take it seriously you can’t assume that it’s always a good thing to persuade more people to go to college. If almost everybody has a college degree, getting one doesn’t differentiate you from the pack. To get the job you want, you might have to go to a fancy (& expensive) college, or get a higher degree. Education turns into an arms race, which primarily benefits the arms manufacturers—in this case, colleges & universities.

The screening model isn’t very fashionable these days, partly because it seems perverse to suggest that education doesn’t boost productivity. But there’s quite a bit of evidence that seems to support Arrow’s theory. In recent years, more jobs have come to demand a college degree as an entry requirement, even though the demands of the jobs haven’t changed much. Some nursing positions are on the list, along with jobs for executive secretaries, salespeople, & distribution managers. According to one study, just 20% of executive assistants & insurance-claims clerks have college degrees but more than 45% of the job openings in the field require one. “This suggests that employers may be relying on a B.A. as a broad recruitment filter that may or may not correspond to specific capabilities needed to do the job,” the study concluded.

It is well established that students who go to elite colleges tend to earn more than graduates of less selective institutions. But is this because Harvard & Princeton do a better job of teaching valuable skills than other places, or because employers believe that they get more talented students to begin with? An exercise carried out by Lauren Rivera, of the Kellogg School of Management, at Northwestern, strongly suggests that it’s the latter. Rivera interviewed more than a hundred recruiters from investment banks, law firms, & management consulting firms, & she found that they recruited almost exclusively from the very top-ranked schools, & simply ignored most other applicants. The recruiters didn’t pay much attention to things like grades & majors. “It was not the content of education that elite employers valued but rather its prestige,” Rivera concluded.

If higher education serves primarily as a sorting mechanism, that might help explain another disturbing development: the tendency of many college graduates to take jobs that don’t require college degrees. Practically everyone seems to know a well-educated young person who is working in a bar or a mundane clerical job, because he or she can’t find anything better. Doubtless, the Great Recession & its aftermath are partly to blame. But something deeper, & more lasting, also seems to be happening.

In the Goldin-Katz view of things, technological progress generates an ever-increasing need for highly educated, highly skilled workers. But, beginning in about 2000, for reasons that are still not fully understood, the pace of job creation in high-paying, highly skilled fields slowed significantly. To demonstrate this, 3 Canadian economists, Paul Beaudry, David A. Green, & Benjamin M. Sand, divided the US workforce into a hundred occupations, ranked by their average wages, & looked at how employment has changed in each category. Since 2000, the economists showed, the demand for highly educated workers declined, while job growth in low-paying occupations increased strongly. “High-skilled workers have moved down the occupational ladder and have begun to perform jobs traditionally performed by lower-skilled workers,” they concluded, thus “pushing low-skilled workers even further down the occupational ladder.”

Increasingly, the competition for jobs is taking place in areas of the labor market where college graduates didn’t previously tend to compete. As Beaudry, Green, & Sand put it, “having a B.A. is less about obtaining access to high paying managerial and technology jobs and more about beating out less educated workers for the Barista or clerical job.” Even many graduates in science, technology, engineering, & mathematics—the so-called STEM subjects, which receive so much official encouragement—are having a tough time getting the jobs they’d like. Cappelli reports that only about a fifth of recent graduates with STEM degrees got jobs that made use of that training. “The evidence for recent grads suggests clearly that there is no overall shortage of STEM grads,” he writes.

Why is this happening? The short answer is that nobody knows for sure. One theory is that corporate cost-cutting, having thinned the ranks of workers on the factory floor & in routine office jobs, is now targeting supervisors, managers, & other highly educated people. Another theory is that technological progress, after favoring highly educated workers for a long time, is now turning on them. With rapid advances in processing power, data analysis, voice recognition, & other forms of artificial intelligence, computers can perform tasks that were previously carried out by college graduates, such as analyzing trends, translating foreign-language documents, & filing tax returns. In “The Second Machine Age” (Norton), the M.I.T. professors Erik Brynjolfsson & Andrew McAfee sketch a future where computers will start replacing doctors, lawyers, & many other highly educated professionals. “As digital labor becomes more pervasive, capable, and powerful,” they write, “companies will be increasingly unwilling to pay people wages that they’ll accept, and that will allow them to maintain the standard of living to which they’ve been accustomed.”

Cappelli stresses the change in corporate hiring patterns. In the old days, Fortune 500 companies such as General Motors, Citigroup, & I.B.M. took on large numbers of college graduates & trained them for a lifetime at the company. But corporations now invest less in education & training, &, instead of promoting someone, or finding someone in the company to fill a specialized role, they tend to hire from outside. Grooming the next generation of leadership is much less of a concern. “What employers want from college graduates now is the same thing they want from applicants who have been out of school for years, and that is job skills and the ability to contribute now,” Cappelli writes. “That change is fundamental, and it is the reason that getting a good job out of college is now such a challenge.”

Obtaining a vocational degree or certificate is one strategy that many students employ to make themselves attractive to employers, &, on the face of it, this seems sensible. If you’d like to be a radiology technician, shouldn’t you get a B.A. in radiology? If you want to run a bakery, why not apply to Kansas State & sign up for that major in Bakery Science? But narrowly focussed degrees are risky. “If you graduate in a year when gambling is up and the casinos like your casino management degree, you probably have hit it big,” Cappelli writes. “If they aren’t hiring when you graduate, you may be even worse off getting a first job with that degree anywhere else precisely because it was so tuned to that group of employers.” During the dot-com era, enrollment in computer-science & information-technology programs rose sharply. After the bursting of the stock-market bubble, many of these graduates couldn’t find work. “Employers who say that we need more engineers or IT grads are not promising to hire them when they graduate in four years,” Cappelli notes. “Pushing kids into a field like health care because someone believes there is a need there now will not guarantee that they all get jobs &, if they do, that those jobs will be as good as workers in that field have now.”

So what’s the solution? Some people believe that online learning will provide a viable low-cost alternative to a live-in college education. ... Another approach is to direct more students & resources to two-year community colleges & other educational institutions that cost less than four-year colleges. President Obama recently called for all qualified high-school students to be guaranteed a place in community college, & for tuition fees to be eliminated. Such policies would reverse recent history. In a new book, “Learning by Doing: The Real Connection between Innovation, Wages, and Wealth” (Yale), James Bessen, a technology entrepreneur who also teaches at Boston University School of Law, points out that “the policy trend over the last decade has been to starve community colleges in order to feed four-year colleges, especially private research universities.” Some of the discrepancies are glaring. Richard Vedder, who teaches economics at Ohio University, calculated that in 2010 Princeton, which had an endowment of close to fifteen billion dollars, received state & federal benefits equivalent to roughly 50,000 dollars per student, whereas the nearby College of New Jersey got benefits of just 2,000 dollars per student. There are sound reasons for rewarding excellence & sponsoring institutions that do important scientific research. But is a twenty-five-to-one difference in government support really justified?

Perhaps the strongest argument for caring about higher education is that it can increase social mobility, regardless of whether the human-capital theory or the signalling theory is correct. A recent study by researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco showed that children who are born into households in the poorest fifth of the income distribution are 6 times as likely to reach the top fifth if they graduate from college. Providing access to college for more kids from deprived backgrounds helps nurture talents that might otherwise go to waste, & it’s the right thing to do. (Of course, if college attendance were practically universal, having a degree would send a weaker signal to employers.) But increasing the number of graduates seems unlikely to reverse the over-all decline of high-paying jobs, & it won’t resolve the income-inequality problem, either. As the economist Lawrence Summers & two colleagues showed in a recent simulation, even if we magically summoned up college degrees for a tenth of all the working-age American men who don’t have them—by historical standards, a big boost in college-graduation rates—we’d scarcely change the existing concentration of income at the very top of the earnings distribution, where C.E.O.s & hedge-fund managers live.

Being more realistic about the role that college degrees play would help families & politicians make better choices. It could also help us appreciate the actual merits of a traditional broad-based education, often called a liberal-arts education, rather than trying to reduce everything to an economic cost-benefit analysis. “To be clear, the idea is not that there will be a big financial payoff to a liberal arts degree,” Cappelli writes. “It is that there is no guarantee of a payoff from very practical, work-based degrees either, yet that is all those degrees promise. For liberal arts, the claim is different and seems more accurate, that it will enrich your life and provide lessons that extend beyond any individual job. There are centuries of experience providing support for that notion.”

"Right to work" by Jen Sorensen

 "Right to work" - Jen Sorensen, US

After being released, US prisoners find new struggles

It's quite common to look down upon people who are involved in small criminal activities but we often forget to peek "behind the curtain" why those people have become what they have become. They are not earning millions from causing pain to someone else. They are small time crooks.

Now, in North America, African-Americans & Natives are viewed as criminals by the general public, usually with the help of police & government's tough-on-crime stance.

Governments at all levels don't care in investing in the rehab of that person, & try to resolve the situation (reduce the crime rate) by trying to cure the symptom of the problem; imprison the perpetrator. Imprisoning these people usually hardens them into a bigger criminal than making them a better person. Governments don't invest in proper rehab of the person because it makes more money through imprisonment than spending money on rehab.

What's the proper rehab of the criminal or people who are involved in small-time criminal activities? Providing these people with education, housing, & employment opportunities. Creating laws where former convicts are properly re-integrated into the society.

Most people, who end up being labelled a "criminal", don't prefer criminal activities over non-criminal activities, at least, initially. But many people, and especially the ones who do fall into criminal activities, commit crimes because they need the money for their families. Basic needs of a human, like housing, education, & employment are all getting expensive or inaccessible.

Housing is getting expensive all over North America & Europe. Big cities like New York, Toronto, Vancouver, Los Angeles, Chicago, London, Paris, Karachi, Dubai, Shanghai, Beijing, Delhi, Mumbai & etc. are becoming expensive in housing. As we all know that incomes never go up as fast as expenses, so poor people are usually pushed out of the cities & into the suburbs or fringes of the city. If they lose their jobs because of the economy, for instance, then they end up being homeless (the numbers of homeless people have actually increased in cities like New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, Vancouver, & London in the past decade).

Education is becoming expensive everywhere. Tuition keeps rising. Poor people can't even afford to go to school, anymore. Only way to go to school is taking on debt but good-paying jobs after graduation are becoming scarce so many would-be students don't want to take on debt. If they do take on debt & fail to repay it because they lost their jobs or fall ill, then they can be imprisoned (at least in US), which will mark them as a criminal for life, & then they will have a hard time in securing a job or even a house after they are released. Plus, failing to repay the student loans also put the credit history of the students in jeopardy, which in turn, creates problems for them in securing housing.

Employment has become network-based. North American & European economies are in decline. Jobs are scarce. Whatever jobs are available, even junior-level jobs that they require such high qualifications in terms of education & work experience that most people are excluded from ever being hired for those jobs. If the job seeker doesn't have close friends & family members in influential positions in companies, then forget getting a job, at least one that will pay good enough to cover housing & living expenses.

So, a poor person has only one route to make enough money to take care of the expenses; earn the money in the wrong way (i.e. become a criminal). And if & when that person is caught, as a criminal, & after spending their required time in prison, they will have a much harder time in reintegrating back into society because society & laws will make it much harder for that person to integrate back into society with restrictive laws & wrong social perception of such poor people.
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http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-33542839

On the day of Obama's speech, J Jondhi Harrell came down from his apartment & walked over to a nearby corner to haul 22-year-old Jeremiah Ross inside the offices of the Center for Returning Citizens (TCRC). Harrell, the executive director of the centre, has been trying to persuade Ross to stop dealing drugs, or "trapping" & instead find a full time job & stable housing.

Harrell tries to entice Ross - a thin, handsome young man with big eyes & a web of tattoos crawling up his neck - with $100 moving jobs, & lets him use the computers in the front office. If he can get Ross to leave the street corner behind, Harrell says, it could be a major coup - Ross is a leader, lots of the neighbourhood kids look up to him.

But Ross recently finished a stint in prison, he has no high school diploma, & right now TCRC can't afford to pay him a living wage. So the streets continue to beckon.

"After me and my family got evicted, I'm out here," says Ross. "It's hard to find a job, so this all I know. This is the first thing I go to."
...

Nicetown is about a 15 minute car ride away from Philadelphia's Center City where Obama outlined his plans to reform the criminal justice system at the National Association for Advancement of Colored People's (NAACP) annual convention ... .

This speech came on the heels of his announcement that he is commuting the sentences of 46 nonviolent drug offenders who've been incarcerated in federal prison for many years. While everyone agrees it is an important moment, the word some Philadelphian advocates for the formerly incarcerated use to describe the president is "disappointing."

Obama spoke of an America founded on second chances - but many return to find that Pennsylvania law prevents them from getting licences to do certain types of work, prevents them from getting housing & sometimes bars them from entering their former neighbourhoods altogether. These types of laws are known as "collateral consequences," & according to a national website that tracks them, Pennsylvania has nearly 1,000 of these restrictions.

"It's become almost like a sport for the legislators to create all these barriers," says Angus Love, a lawyer with the Pennsylvania Institutional Law Project.

Germantown Avenue once teemed with black-owned businesses patronised by neighbourhood residents collecting good wages from nearby factories. Today, nearly half the people living in the 19140 zip code do not have a high school diploma. Most households bring in less than $30,000 (£19,000) a year & the glittering shops have shut down.

A huge number of the estimated 35,000 former inmates who return to Philadelphia each year from federal, state & county lockups head back to North Philadelphia neighbourhoods every year.

According to 2008 figures, it cost taxpayers $40 million to incarcerate men & women from Nicetown - the fifth highest rate in the city.

"In our community, mass incarceration I would say affects over 60% of the community," says Harrell. "You'd be hard pressed to walk down any street in any black neighbourhood in Philadelphia, and knock on 10 doors and find no one who is affected."

It's a neighbourhood that feels the full absence of "missing men," a term used by the New York Times to describe the large number of black men ages 25 to 54 who have disappeared from cities around the country due to either early death or incarceration.

Philadelphia is said to be missing 30,000 of these men. Nicetown is exactly the kind of community they're vanishing from.

Once released, these inmates could be said to be joining the ranks of the re-appeared men, & Harrell is one of them.

He spent 20 years in federal prison, & returned to Philadelphia 5 years ago. But don't call him an "ex-con" - he & other activists worked hard to get Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter to issue a proclamation declaring that the city officially refer to former inmates as "returning citizens," & Harrell is deadly serious about changing stigma with language.

He'll never use the word "re-entry" either, a term he associates with the sometimes-exploitative network of halfway houses that are often a required stop after prison.

"Frankly I was treated with more disrespect in those six months than in 19 years of incarceration," he says.

Harrell's three-year-old organisation emphasises a holistic approach for former inmates coming home. Harrell & his staff of four help connect clients to housing & employment, but also encourage the men & women they serve to get involved in community service, to join a faith community if they're religious.

He wants to plant community gardens & start buying up the properties on Germantown Avenue to start business that will employ & train returning inmates ... .
...

In fact, job placement & spiritual guidance can only take you so far on the streets of Nicetown. When Harrell thinks about the notion of the "missing men" of North Philadelphia, his thoughts go immediately to Cynthia Muse, who lives just around the corner from his office.

On 31 May, Muse's son Abdul Salaam walked out the door of their row house & headed to a celebration for his 36th birthday. Within hours, he was dead - stabbed in the heart in front of his toddler son & girlfriend in the courtyard of a public housing project less than 2 miles from his mother's home.

This is not the first time Muse, a mother of 5 sons, has been through this.

"It was my third time," she says ... . "My emotions and my logical mind is not giving me no answers. Why have you taken a third son from me?"

Muse never seems to get any resolution. Nobody knows how her son Jalaal ended up in the trunk of his own car, or who shot her 26-year-old son Abdul Aliym to death. Her youngest is in prison.

Only one of her sons, Jamal, now has a steady job & a family of his own to look after, despite spending almost 10 years in prison. He's not entirely sure himself how he made it out, but says the deaths of his brothers helped motivate him.