@bobsal u1553115,
Quote:OK dumbshit I give, where did the poor come from if not the forty plus percent drop out rate? From the graduated students????
Often yes, they were the ones who were not good enough for either factory jobs or go to the university, but where good enough to graduate HS. They finished high school and then did not much. A lot of the guys were good at factory work, good enough to get the middle class on factory work or farm work , and more school was not going to help. Why go to school when they could be making money in that case? There are some guys right now making the same argument about avoiding the university, they encourage youth to get out of high school and go right to work. This idea that more education is closely connected to having a better life and making more money is fairly recent. You are reading into the 1950 drop out rates the reality of 2015 drop out rates, because now not finishing HS makes one pretty well fucked.
The fact that your brain is assuming that 1950 reality is the same as 2015 reality is another clue that you are not especially bright.
This flawed thinking of yours afflicts others too. At a couple of points in my life the military has done steep drawdowns of the force. Somehow people tended to assume that the good would elect to stay given the choice, that the not so go will go. This is not what happened, the talented people often leave first because they can, they are good enough to go into something else, very often making more money. Especially if severance pay involved the military needs to limit the offer to leave to the not so good people, which is what they do usually try to do now.
To sum up you are massively wrong on two levels: you cant assume that those who stay are the better people, because very often this is not the case, and you cant assume that more education equaled more income in the 1950's, because often it did not.