Democratic societies are rooted in the widely shared belief that all lives have value. As a result, the idea of educational adequacy in a democracy is rooted in the conviction that education's primary mission is to provide knowledge and skills sufficient to allow people to live fully, according to the standards of their time. In a democracy with a market economy--and little support for an extensive social safety net--paid work is essential to individual human flourishing. In the U.S. socioeconomic system in particular, individuals are expected to attain a base of self-sufficiency. In this system, individual well-being is primarily a personal responsibility. Education is the preferred method in the United States of providing access to opportunity to attain self-sufficiency. This report begins with a brief history of the co-evolution of educational adequacy and democratic capitalism. The report then discusses the difficulty of defining education adequacy in a rapidly changing economy and educational system. It then presents a simplified approach to calculating a standard for measuring educational adequacy based on the earnings of graduates, to give the reader a concrete grasp of how these principles can be applied. This report ends with a discussion about some of the issues that will need to be grappled with, and suggests that the answers to many questions will need to be based on very subjective decisions, or on social consensus.