Raj Chetty: belief

Transcript context

…But say we do that. What do we do next? I think eventually it’s conceivable that you move up the quality ladder, and you’ve got everybody getting a very good primary school education. Then you need to work on secondary education and so forth. But there again, I would say there are lots of bargains to be found. In our most recent work looking at colleges and upward mobility, we see that there are a number of colleges where kids seem to be doing extremely well that are not all that expensive. Also, I think, here a macroeconomic perspective is useful. If you look at countries that have some of the best educational outcomes, like Scandinavian countries, they’re not actually spending dramatically more than the United States. At some abstract level, I think that logic has to be right, that eventually, in order to raise the level of education beyond some point, we’re going to have to spend more and more on that, but I don’t think we’re close enough empirically to such a point that that is really a critical consideration at the moment. Some people I know, who studied the Finnish system and who also know the South Korean and Singaporean systems, claim that simply giving teachers a higher status, especially in smaller economies that may not have quite the opportunities that smart people would have in the United States, has a big value-added to K–12 education. What’s your opinion of that?…

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