Declining Education Leads to Poorer Healthcare

Lower quality education areas are not developing the medical framework and infrastructure for their communities to sustain reliable healthcare. When looking at California, a common trend is lower quality of education, usually substantiated by lack of funding. There is a clear line connecting these same areas with increased violence, lower level job opportunities, and substance abuse. Declining medical standards are also noticeably going up within these areas causing untold amounts of injuries and deaths.

The declining rate of education has caused fewer people to be educated, leading to fewer people being in medicine, as shown in the article “Declining Enrollment in California Schools: Fiscal Challenges and Opportunities in the Coming”.  Within this article, they delve into how the overall enrollment in California Schools is declining due to a lack of substantiated funding leading to lower levels of education. The government branch that funds schools has an unfair system. The system allocates funding to the school depending on how many students enter the school and nothing else. If a school is required to downsize for lower amounts of students that year, they actually lose more money than what they were trying to save. Many districts are forced to reduce spending in other areas like teachers’ pay, quality of facilities, and the overall focus on education is shifted to having enough money to stay afloat. Connecting to my point earlier about funding for schools, the lack of funding that is imparted onto a school for having lower enrollment rates causes a further decline in quality for those still in attendance. The cycle entraps the school into having less students as the quality lessens.

The government’s lack of concise and formative funding for more underprivileged schools has led to less people being able to pursue higher education. This article, “Mind the achievement gap: California’s disparities in education”, transcribes the importance of how education starts to decline in relationship with the level of jobs that one is able to acquire. The article continues to discern how the people that graduate from these lower level areas have not gone on to pursue higher education or higher level jobs. This ties back to my point that the people within these areas are to receive lower levels of healthcare due to the educational backing they didn’t receive to support their community in that way. The less one feeds into the community, the less one can expect to get out of it. This is why poorer education leads to lower levels of student interest to pursue higher levels of education, let alone healthcare itself.

Poorly funded schools lead to a lack of higher education being pursued by many living in those areas which directly results in  poorer healthcare. In the article, “Social Determinant of Health: Education Is Crucial”, a line is drawn between overall poorer education leading to poor healthcare within the community. When people are not given the education standards they are supposed to be offered, the interest and socio-economic value of education loses its value to them. Whether it is the feeling of not being prepared to take on higher education or being deterred from colleges as they prefer areas with higher standards of state-funded education, which are often affluent areas. This essentially blocks the pathway for people to pursue a larger array of careers, often with higher pay than the jobs available without higher education. The community, in turn, receives less people that are able to substantiate economic growth, so even if someone from the community did finish their education, they are less likely to work within their community. 

One argument some may have is that doctors should be dispersed into the lower education areas for more people to receive the healthcare they need. However, this can only be sustained for so long as there would be no constant involvement within the community’s health care. This would be forcing a temporary solution that would cause doctors to be displaced, the government using tax-payer’s money, which many who pay taxes may not support, and most importantly will not solve the main issue. One way we could mitigate the issue is to lobby lawmakers or the people in charge of allocating school funds in order to find a different way for these schools to receive funding, rather than solely depending on school enrollment. This may allow schools to improve their attendance and quality of education without fiscal worries.

Overall, the articles given have accurately described the problem at hand. The quality of education that has become standard may hinder those with dreams to pursue a career in the medical field as many students are not sufficiently supported by their educational systems.  If we as a community change the way that governments manage the fiscal requirements for a school to get money, we can help to start improving education within these areas, to finally substantiate the continued healthcare involvement in a community.