page_title: Income inequality in the United States
section_title: Education and family structure
hierarchical_section_title: Income inequality in the United States / Other indicators of inequality / Education and family structure
caption_attribution_description: English: Illustration from a 1916 advertisement for International Correspondence Schools, Scranton, Pennsylvania, a vocational school, in the back of a US popular science magazine. During the Industrial Revolution, income inequality in the US was very great, and education was seen as a route to social mobility. This advertisement uses the threat of poverty to recruit students. Part of advertising copy that appeared below the picture: "Here is your future charted for you, based on the actual average earnings of trained and untrained men. Which way will you go? You'll either go up, through training, to a position that means good money and more comforts as the years go by, or you'll go down, through lack of training, into the ranks of the poorly paid."
context_page_description: Income inequality in the United States is the extent to which income is distributed in an uneven manner among the American population. It has fluctuated considerably since measurements began around 1915, moving in an arc between peaks in the 1920s and 2000s, with a 30-year period of relatively lower inequality between 1950–1980.
  The U.S. has the highest level of income inequality among its industrialized peers. When measured for all households, U.S. income inequality is comparable to other developed countries before taxes and transfers, but is among the highest after taxes and transfers, meaning the U.S. shifts relatively less income from higher income households to lower income households. In 2016, average market income was $15,600 for the lowest quintile and $280,300 for the highest quintile. The degree of inequality accelerated within the top quintile, with the top 1% at $1.8 million, approximately 30 times the $59,300 income of the middle quintile.
context_section_description: Another form of inequality is the different level and quality of education available to students. School quality and educational results vary dramatically, depending on whether a student has access to a private or charter school or an effective public school. Many students have no choice but to attend dysfunctional public schools, where fewer achieve grade level performance.
  
  Pundit David Brooks argued that in the 1970s, high school and college graduates had "very similar family structures", while later high school grads were much less likely to get married, and much more likely to smoke, be obese, get divorced, and/or become a single parent.
  The zooming wealth of the top one percent is a problem, but it's not nearly as big a problem as the tens of millions of Americans who have dropped out of high school or college. It's not nearly as big a problem as the 40 percent of children who are born out of wedlock. It's not nearly as big a problem as the nation's stagnant human capital, its stagnant social mobility and the disorganized social fabric for the bottom 50 percent.
caption: Illustration from a 1916 advertisement for a vocational school in the back of a US magazine. Education has been seen as a key to higher income, and this advertisement appealed to Americans' belief in the possibility of self-betterment, as well as threatening the consequences of not achieving economic security in the great income inequality existing during the Industrial Revolution.
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