For the past week in class we’ve been discussing the search for exoplanets in neighboring star systems. One of the most important tools that has arisen in astronomy was actually designed for this purpose: the Hertzprung-Russell Diagram, which classifies stars into “Spectral Types” according to their temperature and luminosity. Since its conception in 1913, the H-R diagram has become an integral resource for astronomers because it not only gives us a way to classify stars, but also points out the relationships between different stellar characteristics and even maps out an evolutionary path for most stars.
Our last assignment was to come up with our own H-R diagram, a plot that would define a set of human characteristics that fall in a pattern similar to that of the spectral properties of stars. For my “N-F Diagram”, in order to find a dataset that would exhibit an equivalent of the H-R’s main sequence as well as show an evolutionary trend, I researched the relationship between educational attainment and average annual income in the United States.
Perhaps not surprisingly, all of the sources I referenced indicated a fairly linear trend, with those attaining the highest levels of education making the most money per year, and those without high school diplomas making the least. However, this is an extremely generalized portrait of the country, and certain outliers produce points that don’t fall along the average, main sequence. For example, certain entrepreneurs became very successful after dropping out of high school or college, and thus produce a range on the graph much like that of the giant and supergiant stars on the H-R Diagram. Conversely, some very highly educated professors can make, depending on their school of employment, as low as $50,000-$60,000 a year, and serve as the human equivalent of the H-R’s white dwarves.
While at first glance this might seem like a fairly obvious relationship to choose as a subject of research, the greater implications of this trend invite more complex examination, especially when the additional variable of time is considered. For example, the percentage difference in income between the highest educated and the lowest has increased significantly in the last ten years, meaning that PhDs are making a much higher amount than blue-collar workers in comparison to a decade ago. In addition, the difference in unemployment rates of the highly educated and the less educated has doubled (7.2% for less educated and 2.3% for highly educated in 2001, to 14.3% and 4.3% in 2011). Together, these two trends suggest that there is a weakening demand in our economy for less educated workers, and a growing demand for the highly educated. Whatever is driving this, be it the rapid mechanization of many industries or the lack of blue-collar jobs as a result of economic unrest, it is apparent that people are already taking note of it and making adjustments as necessary. Between 2000 and 2009, the number of high school graduates enrolled in college jumped from 63% to 70%. Kids today are more frequently being told that they need to get into a good college to get a good job, and many schools have standardized their curricula in order to raise SAT and ACT scores and track their students into higher education.
Whatever this general shift may mean for the future of our country, as it stands the relationship between education and income falls almost eerily into the pattern prescribed by the H-R Diagram and its classification of stars in our galaxy. A blatant sign of alien interference, if you ask me.
http://geography.tamu.edu/class/bednarz/ep2Q98_4.pdf
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steven-strauss/the-connection-between-ed_b_1066401.html
