Conventional wisdom is that greater schooling and skill improvement leads to higher wages and income inequality falls with wider access to schooling. Yet, since the early 1970s earnings stagnated and inequality climbed while educational attainment and worker skills gained rapidly and dispersion in schooling levels plummeted. The book explores these apparent paradoxes.

This book challenges the conventional wisdom that greater schooling and skill improvement leads to higher wages, that income inequality falls with wider access to schooling, and that the Information Technology revolution will re-ignite worker pay. Indeed, the econometric results provide no evidence that the growth of skills or educational attainment has any statistically significant relation to earnings growth or that greater equality in schooling has led to a decline in income inequality. Results also indicate that computer investment is negatively related to earnings gains and positively associated with changes in both income inequality and the dispersion of worker skills. The findings reports here have direct relevance to ongoing policy debates on educational reform in the U.S.