School may be out of session, but education has never been more top of mind for Bryant’s Jongsung Kim, Ph.D. The professor of Economics is using his summer break to advance research on how education affects poverty, gender equality, and inequality.
“These issues are becoming more important — especially in relation to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs),” says Kim, a trained labor economist who teaches in the College of Arts and Sciences’ Mathematics and Economics department.
Developed in 2012 at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro, the SDGs seek to address environmental, political, and economic challenges faced globally. Composed of 17 objectives, the proposed goals are set to be accomplished by 2030 and include everything from taking urgent action on climate change to ending hunger and malnutrition. The three objectives Kim aims to provide insight on through his education research include ending poverty, achieving gender equality and empowerment, and reducing inequality within and among countries.
Education plays a crucial role in economic mobility, with Kim noting that schooling is the most important and well-known example of human capital. Human capital theory, which Nobel Prize winner Gary Becker developed in the 1960s, refers to a knowledge or skill that enhances a person’s productivity or earnings potential.
“For example, if someone speaks five languages, that skill cannot be taken from that person because it’s a part of that individual. Labor market success is based on skill set, which is acquired through education,” Kim says.
According to Kim, poverty and inequality regarding gender and ethnic minorities are two key issues that fall under human capital theory and more understanding is needed regarding different compensation patterns. Through his research, Kim will analyze how education affects an individual’s instance of falling into poverty and how deprivation appears different across ethnic groups. Additionally, he will look at education and inequality amongst the rich and poor as well as men and women.
He notes that despite the U.S. having one of the most affluent economies in the world, the country’s poverty rate remains in the double digits. For instance, according to Switzerland’s Federal Statistical Office, poverty affects 8.2 percent of the country’s population while data from Statistics Canada reveal that 9.9 percent of Canadians lived in poverty in 2022.
“The good news is that it's not 90 percent, but it’s still 11.5 percent,” he says, which represents 37.9 million people across the nation. “Any good society or organization should protect the least advantaged people.”
For his research, Kim is analyzing data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey and the Current Population Survey, which was completed in partnership with the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. These data sets supply information on the country’s population and housing and also provide information on income and poverty in the U.S. Having cleaned up each dataset and located foundational statistics, Kim will build econometric and statistical models to examine the historical data.
Kim hopes experts in other fields can draw upon his work and add their expertise since the issue of poverty and inequality goes beyond economics. For instance, while intergenerational mobility has been one of the U.S.’s strongest selling points, statistics show it is getting weaker and weaker.
“This problem is much more than simple economics. We need to understand the education system, and get insights from education administrators, sociologists, historians, and anthropologists,” Kim says.
