College degrees are not sufficient to solve all inequality—only a slight decline in Gini coefficient

There's now among politicians that is a serious problem in the United States, but there's little consensus on what to do about it. A simple thought experiment may rule out one potential solution: Helping more people go to college. Getting a college degree is valuable, according to calculations by a group of economists including former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers. If more people went to college, they'd be much better off. It's just hard to imagine how helping more high school graduates to earn college degrees could substantially undo the massive increase in inequality of the past several decades, which is largely a result of skyrocketing earnings among the very rich. Indeed, the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans now claim nearly as large a share of national income as they did . "I am all for improving education," Summers earlier this month. "But to suggest that improving education is the solution to inequality is, I think, an evasion." Summers and his collaborators, the Upjohn Institute's Brad Hershbein and Melissa S. Kearney of the University of Maryland, calculated what would happen if they could wave their magic wands and give a college education to about 6.8 million American men who don't already have one. Relatively speaking, that's an enormous increase -- about the same proportion as the increase in the overall share of the population with a college degree since 1979. Everyone would be better off, not just those lucky men. Annual earnings at the first quartile -- those Americans making less than three quarters of the rest of the population -- would increase by about 43 percent. Median earnings -- what the typical worker makes -- would increase by 9 percent, or about $3,020 a year. These improvements are small compared to the overall level of inequality in the economy as a whole, however. A common measure of the disparity between rich and poor called the Gini coefficient would only decline slightly, from 0.57 in 2013 to 0.55. (The figure was 0.43 in 1979.) You might think that adding millions of college degrees would dramatically reshape the U.S. economy. Yet earnings for people with college degrees since the turn of the millennium. Meanwhile, for highly compensated workers, particularly , have been . Given these larger trends, even heroic efforts to improve educational attainment can only achieve so much. And it's important to note that Hershbein, Kearney and Summers don't try to provide a clear explanation of .