Opportunity knocked

When I was at university, back in the Dark Ages when only 5% of the age group had that privilege and only ¼ of them were female, one of the questions which might be put to us – by tutors – was: Is it worth using such scarce investment resources to educate girls who will probably withdraw shortly from the labour market in order to be wives & mothers?

Of course any girl who could not justify her resounding answer YES! really should not have been studying economics.

One part of the answer usually involved the idea that the benefits of her education would show up in better educated children, encouraged to talk, argue, question from an early age.

And now the government sponsored An Anatomy of Economic Inequaltiy in th UK: Report of the National Equality Panel (Jan 2010) tells us that “The gap in assessment for English children [at age 5] depending on mother’s highest qualification was … equivalent to 15 months of typical development – between those whose mothers had no qualifications and those with the highest qualifications.”

The real question should have been why do we not devote more resources to giving this opportunity to more of those perfectly capable of benefiting from it.

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