Maureen Lane

Two Worlds

Two interesting articles were published in the last week. The Wall Street Journal published its "Survey of CEO Compensation" this past Monday. The typical CEO of a large U.S. company gets about $2.2 million a year. The recompense of CEO's has jumped wildly in the last few years but salaried employees' compensation has remained flat; all the while, productivity has risen. Someone is being paid for the increase in work but it doesn't appear to 'trickle down' from the CEO to other employees. Is this disparity a function of a profit driven market place? Could profits increase with more employees sharing in the rewards? I wonder.

The second article is important as we think about people going into the public sector to work. In an article from April 5, 2006, USA Today's Ledyard King noted a Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) Higher Education Projectreport on the state of graduating college students' loan debt burden. As PIRG notes low income and middle-income students are the ones hardest hit by hamstringing debt. Their debt can affect us all.

For example, we need teachers. As Ledyard King writes in USA Today, "The government estimates 2 million instructors will be needed over the next decade to fill retirements and turnover." The Pirg report shows, "Factoring in high debt levels, the congressional fixed 6.8% interest rate for federal student loans, and low starting salaries, we found that 23% of public four-year college students graduate with too much debt to manageably repay their loans as a starting teacher." Is it any wonder that the National Education Association reports that about half of new teachers leave the profession within their first five years?

Higher education increases the chances of families making livable wages. The sites of higher learning should not be feeding grounds for corporate profiteers. As I and others have reported the studnet loan secondary market is a mutli billion doallar business. PIRG and other groups are supporting legislation, Student Aid Reward Act (STAR), on the federal level that will help take the sometimes debilitating sting out of higher eduaction and put money into grants for impoverished students.

The private and the public sectors may be two worlds but more and more they are linked by the economic disparities that prevail in them. Low and middle-income students graduating college and going into the marketplace are finding they are dragging debt burdens with them that the free market may not allow them to overcome without great difficulty. I am hopeful that we can make plans on the state, federal and local levels to think through our collective committment to education and how it plays out in the working world. In the real world the survey and the report are connected even if they reflect two different worlds. The values driving CEO pay are not refelected in the pay of salaried employees or in the cost of higher education for students wanting to enter the public sector as teachers or the private sector, for that matter, unless of course they are going to be a CEO.

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Posted at 9:02 AM, Apr 13, 2006 in Education
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