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Study: College does pay off
Students from John Moores' University celebrate and pose for family photographs as they take part in their degree congregations at Liverpool's Anglican Cathedral on July 13, 2011 in Liverpool, England.
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BOB MOON: Well, provided you can find a job, it's no surprise you tend to make more if you've gone to college. tend to make more money in the workforce. That's nothing new. But a new report out today from the Lumina Foundation says the college payoff is getting bigger -- despite the high price.
From the Marketplace Education Desk at WYPR in Baltimore, Amy Scott reports.
Amy Scott: A worker with a bachelor's degree makes 84 percent more over a lifetime than someone with just a high school diploma. Lumina Foundation president Jamie Merisotas says even at its most expensive, college still pays.
Jamie Merisotis: Unemployment rates are much lower for people with college degrees, and wages are considerably higher. So from a variety of different perspectives, getting a college degree is now more important than ever.
But the payoff isn't the same for everyone. African Americans and Latinos with master's degrees earn less than the average white person with just a bachelor's. Georgetown University's Tony Carnevale co-wrote the report. He says the conventional wisdom is that Blacks and Latinos go into occupations that pay less.
Tony Carnevale: But what comes through here very strongly is irrespective of occupation, there's a difference in earnings that we can't account for.
Skeptics of the idea that everyone should go to college say there won't be enough high-skill jobs for all those graduates, but Lumina's Merisotas says educated people help create jobs.
I'm Amy Scott for Marketplace.
how come Asian not counted in the report? And why?
And his report is very true for me and I have been very fortunate and I can see my undergraduate degree really worth the hard work I had put it to earn it. And recently, I also finished my graduate degree from a non-profit. And I can see a boost to my income and many new opportunities too.
He should also study the FOR-PROFIT graduate since they are either "high school" or "college" drop out and try to "pay" their degree without the hard work to earn a real one. In fact, I had observed and worked with many and learned that they lacked of many skills set we learned in "real" school. Any study to compare this different? And so what is their income disparity between Non-Profit or For-Profit grad?
I too was struck by Tony Carnevale's comment. So much so that I called Georgetown's Center on Education and the Workforce for elaboration. It seems the report's authors acknowledge institutional racism as a factor, but are unable (unwilling?) to say so directly and explicitly because such factors can't be measured in an "econometric approach."
In other words, they can't prove what they know to be true.
I wrote about this at www.americanprogress.org/issues/2011/08/rab_080911.html
So very disappointing!
Hi,
Regarding the report, "College Does Pay Off", I'm hoping that Dr. Carnevale was either misquoted or under-quoted. His comment that he "can't account for" the income disparity between blacks, Latinos, and whites seems incredibly naive. Perhaps institutional racism might have something to do with it?
The Pew Center's recent study about wealth disparities ("Wealth Gaps Rise to Record Highs Between Whites, Blacks, Hispanics") and about forty years of sociological research that exists about the impact of race on income and wealth just might begin to account for the impact on race and college payoff outcomes.
It was a daft comment to end an otherwise enlightening report.
