"According to data from the Labor Department, the price index for college tuition grew by nearly 80 percent between August 2003 and August 2013. That is nearly twice as fast as growth in costs in medical care, another area widely recognized for fast-rising prices. It's also more than twice as fast as the overall consumer price index during that same period." The increase in the cost of higher education is making it harder for people born into middle and low class families to gain more work and education opportunities. This article shows how the rate of increase is slowing, but it has not stopped.

"The countries that come out looking best include, no surprise, the usual suspects of Northern Europe. Interestingly, Eastern Europe scores quite highly as well, as do some post-Soviet countries in Central Asia. Perhaps that's a legacy of Soviet-era social programs meant to flatten class divides. But it's also a reminder that, while economic equality is great, it's not synonymous with a healthy economy. Some countries are economically equal because everyone is well-off, as in Denmark, and some because most everyone is equally poor." This article explains that sometimes economic equality is good, and sometimes it is bad. In a wealthy country with a low population, economic equality is good, but in a country with little resources and a high population, like the United States, it is important to be able to distinguish between classes.