Английский язык для специальных и академических целей: Международные отношения и зарубежное регионоведение. Часть 1 | страница 60

What has gone wrong? American liberals argue that widening inequality inevitably causes falling social mobility. [...] But to European eyes, this is also a familiar story of poverty traps created by well-intentioned welfare programs. A single mom with two young kids is better off doing a part-time job for just $29,000 — on top of which she receives $28,327 in various benefits — than if she accepts a job that pays $69,000, on which she would pay $11,955 in taxes. Another good example is the growth in the number of Americans claiming Social Security disability benefits. Back in the mid-1980s, little more than 1.5 percent of the population received such benefits; today it's nearly 3.5 percent. [...]

The other main reason for declining social mobility [is] the disastrous failure of American high schools in the places like Murray's imaginary Fishtown.

Despite a tripling of per-pupil expenditure in real terms, American secondary education is failing. According to the Council on Foreign Relations, three quarters of U.S. citizens between the ages of 17 and 24 are not qualified to join the military because they are physically unfit, have criminal records, or have inadequate levels of education. [...]

In international comparison, the United States is now somewhere in the middle of the league table for mathematical aptitude at age 15. [...] The proportion of 15-year-olds who are functionally illiterate is 10.3 percent in Canada. In the U.S. it is 17.6 percent. And students from the highest social-class groups are twice more likely to go to college than those from the lowest classes.

In a disturbing critique of Ivy League admissions policies, the editor of The American Conservative, Ron Unz, recently pointed out a number of puzzling anomalies. For example, since the mid-1990s Asians have consistently accounted for around 16 percent of Harvard enrollments. At Columbia, according to Unz, the Asian share has actually fallen from 23 percent in 1993 to below 16 percent in 2011. Yet, according to the U.S. census, the number of Asians aged between 18 and 21 has more than doubled in that period. Moreover, Asians now account for 28 percent of National Merit Scholarship semifinalists and 39 percent of students at CalTech, where admissions are based purely on academic merit.