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poverty

Please join me at Lunafest

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UntitledLunafest is an annual film festival of short films by, for and about women. It’s the main fundraiser for the Bloom Again Foundation, which helps poor working women.

I’ll be joining award-winning artist Sylvia Saint James and my friend Lois Frankel (author of several books, including “Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office”) on Sunday, Dec. 7 for the films and the reception at the Autry Center in Los Angeles’ Griffith Park. Tickets are $75 for adults and $25 for children, and include admission to the museum (which currently has a special exhibition on Route 66).

For more information, please visit Bloom Again’s site.

High school graduates are losing ground fast

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hobo with cardboardWe’ve known for awhile that incomes have been dropping for people with only high school educations. But there was a statistic in a recent Pew Research Center study that really set me back on my heels: 22% of people aged 25 to 32 who graduated high school, but not college, live in poverty. That compares to 6% of people with college degrees.

The poverty rate overall and for the college educated has doubled since 1979, when the early wave of the Baby Boom was in the same age bracket. For those with just a high school diploma, though, the rate has more than tripled.

Meanwhile, the earnings gap between college graduates and high school graduates is the widest it’s been in 50 years.

For more on the Pew study, read my latest Reuters column. You can subscribe here to weekly updates of my education column.