Education: The Aging of the Greening

Generation gap, step aside for the “education gap.” According to a study based on the census and released last week, the chief reason for conflict between parents and children may well be their sharply changing exposures to learning. The proportion of young adults with high school diplomas has risen from 38% in 1940 to 75% today; those with one or more years of college have increased from 13% to 31%, and college-degree holders have almost tripled, from 6% to 16%. By contrast, the fathers of nearly two-thirds of today’s college students did not go beyond high school.

Even so, the older generation may find comfort in the fact that all those dire predictions of a day when half the population will be under 25 are not coming true. Though Americans aged 14 to 24 now constitute 20% of the population, the birth rate is falling. As a result, the nation’s median age is expected to rise from 27.6 to 30 in the next 15 years. The people most likely to achieve mutual understanding, says University of Michigan Sociologist Theodore Newcomb, are “the educated young and the educated old.”