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Friday, August 17, 2007
Education Economics
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
All this week, Steve Dolinger of the Georgia Partnership for Excellence in Education, has been talking about what he likes to call the “economics of education.”
Dolinger’s given this talk many times and he plans to present it at least nine more times in coming weeks. The point? To create a sense of urgency about the need to improve Georgia’s public schools, which continue to rank low on many education measures, including SAT and NAEP scores.
Some of the takeaways from Dolinger’s PowerPoint:
The more educated you are, the higher your earnings potential and the lesser the chances for you to be unemployed.
Low or high educational attainment is cyclical. That is, the more educated you are, the more income you have, the better chances your children will have to be successful themselves.
Communities with large numbers of uneducated citizens suffer from a drain on government services and lose out on potentially billions of dollars that could be feeding their economies.
Of course, none of this is news for those in the know. But I wonder how many people that Dolinger speaks to are hearing it for the first time.
