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The million-dollar question
It has become a widespread assumption that a college degree is worth a million dollars--that is, that the average lifetime earnings for bachelor's degree recipients exceeds those with only a high school diploma by one million dollars. That number is a popular talking point for college officials and politicians eager to promote higher enrollment at colleges and universities--or to justify raising the cost of the "investment." But is that true?
Mark Schneider, a distinguished professor of political science at SUNY Stony Brook and a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, has done some number-crunching for this month's Education Outlook. What he found was that there is a payoff for earning a bachelor's degree--but it falls short of a million dollars. And when you factor in the ever-rising tuition rates, the opportunity costs of forgone work while pursuing education, and variants between graduates of different institutions and academic subjects, the payoff can be even lower.
The moral of the story? For one, colleges and universities should stop making unrealistic claims about future graduates' earning potential, and should certainly stop using it to justify tuition hikes or as an excuse not to cut costs and improve operations. Furthermore, parents and students should not look upon higher education simply as a means of increasing one's future salaries, but also as an opportunity to gain valuable knowledge and expand one's horizons, regardless of subsequent earnings.
Posted by Sandra E. Czelusniak on May 20, 2009 at May 20, 2009 04:12 PM
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