U.S. Higher Education and Economic Inequality

Speaker: David Deming, Harvard University

This talk will make the case that higher education is a first-order contributor to rising economic inequality in the U.S. and around the world. While colleges and universities are a key lever for economic mobility, access to a high-quality college education is increasingly closed off for all but the wealthiest citizens. I’ll present historical evidence explaining how we got here, discuss the current U.S. higher education policy landscape, and talk about solutions that might reduce inequality by broadening access to higher education.

David Deming is a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He is the faculty director of the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy, and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research focuses broadly on the economics of skill development, education and labor markets. He is currently serving as a co-editor at the AEJ: Applied and is a principal investigator (along with Raj Chetty and John Friedman) at the CLIMB Initiative, an organization that seeks to study and improve the role of higher education in social mobility. Deming recently won the David N. Kershaw Prize, which is awarded biannually to scholars who have made distinguished contributions to the field of public policy and management under the age of 40.