creased health problems, lost worker
productivity, and lost tax revenue as individuals achieve and earn less,” write
John Cook and Karen Jeng in their report Child Food Insecurity: The Economic
Impact on our Nation.22 In the Brandeis
study cited earlier, the cost of hungerinduced illnesses in 2011 amounted to
$130.5 billion (78 percent) of the total
cost of hunger to the nation that year.23
Economic mobility must be a real
possibility for every low-income child
born in America.
As recently as a generation ago someone with a high school diploma could
find a job that paid enough to keep a
family solidly in the middle class. Today,
the educational credentials needed for
such jobs are much higher. Meanwhile,
approximately one-fourth of all U.S. children fail to graduate from high school,
a figure virtually unchanged since the
early 1960s. Most of the children who
drop out live in neighborhoods with
high poverty rates. Harry Holzer, an
economist at Georgetown University
and the Urban Institute, has studied the
impact of high school dropout rates on
the national economy. He estimates the
cost to be about $125 billion per year. 24
In other words, the dropout rate is not
simply a problem confined to marginalized neighborhoods.
Safety net programs such as SNAP
and the EITC can make life less intolerable, but they do not eliminate hardship
altogether. Safety net programs do not
create opportunities that lift people out
of poverty once and for all, nor do they
correct structural inequalities of opportunity that affect individuals from birth
and lead to cycles of intergenerational
poverty. Thus, safety net programs must
be matched with a human development
agenda.
Human-capital development—that
is, investing in people and their capabilities—is fundamental to achieving
sustainable progress against hunger
and poverty. One of the most important investments a nation can make is
ensuring that all children have access
www.bread.org
Figure 4
High School Graduates as a Proportion of the Age-17 Population
100%
75.9%
No High School Diploma
77.7%
75%
50%
High School
Graduates
25%
0%
1899 1939 1969
1970
1980
1990
2000
2010
Source: Familyfacts.org, based on U.S. Department of Education, Digest of Education Statistics.
to a high-quality education. But U.S.
schools do more to perpetuate social
and economic inequalities than reduce
them. The United States has high-quality schools, but they are overwhelmingly located in wealthy and middleclass neighborhoods. Children who
attend these schools generally perform
well on achievement tests compared to
their peers in other countries.25 In lowincome school districts, where it is difficult to attract and retain the best teachers and some children are bound to be
hungry, student performance is lower as
a reflection of these realities.26
The interrelationships between poverty, education, and earnings are at the
root of the human-capital challenge. It
was the challenge a century ago and it
is still the challenge today, and it follows
that the United States needs to reinvest
in human capital development now just
as it did a century ago. Until the middle
of the 20th century, as we mentioned
earlier, the United States maintained
an educational advantage over all other
nations because of its higher secondary
school completion rates. No one would
argue that the U.S. education system
was perfect—“separate but equal” was
the most blatant of many problems—but
it’s clear that overall, the priority placed
on education helped the entire country
prosper. By the middle of the 20th century, educational achievement had not
only made the United States the most
prosperous nation in the world, but had
helped lower the degree of income inequality.
Today, almost every industrialized
country has a secondary school completion rate that is comparable to or better
than the U.S. graduation rate, and several have higher postsecondary completion rates. Other countries were bound
to catch up, but the long plateau in U.S.
achievement levels was not inevitable.
The generation of U.S. adults ages 5564 has the highest college completion
rate in the world among this age cohort;
but as with high school, our college
graduation rates have stagnated over
the past generation. In the age cohort
25-34, many countries have caught up;
the United States ranks 16th in college
completion rates.27
One reason college completion rates
have stagnated is that students drop out
for financial reasons.28 Children from
low-income families who finish high
school have a much more difficult time
paying for college than their parents’
generation did; wages have not kept pace
with inflation, while the cost of postsecondary education has soared. Meanwhile, government grants to low-income
Bread for the World Institute 5