Why education is such a crucial investment

Almost 50 years ago, a Harvard president said that “if you think education is expensive, try ignorance.” Most of us agree — “hitting the books” is important and education has intrinsic value.

It is hard to find anything else about education where public opinion is either uniform or unanimous. The legion of laments seems limitless — Google “education problems” and more than 86 million articles appear in under a second. While there is no question that problems persist at every level of education in this country, two truisms should be front of mind as political campaigns dissect education over these next two months.

Preschool and post-secondary education, often viewed as “optional” steps on the education continuum, yield lifelong benefits to individual learners, and provide important benefits to society at large. The evidence for these “bookends” of education in America is simply irrefutable.

First, preschool works. It is just that simple — quality preschool levels the learning field for all students. Business leaders and law enforcement understand what more than 100 studies and the National Academy of Sciences tell us: Quality pre-school is a good investment with an eight-fold return in reduced educational, human service and criminal justice costs.

Pre-kindergarten education positively correlates to higher primary grade test scores, quicker grade advancement, more college education, and increased income, and according to reports from district attorneys and police chiefs from all over the country, reduced crime. Preschool students were 29 percent more likely to graduate high school, 50 percent less likely to become a teen parent and 70 percent less likely to be involved with the prison system as a juvenile. No matter their economic background, race or gender, preschool attendance raises cognitive and non-cognitive skills alike. Reading levels improve and the ability to process emotion develops.

Here is the really good news. Support for funding early childhood education transcends partisan politics. The slow march to funding pre-school in this country has been led by Democrats and Republicans alike, from senators to governors and from mayors to city councils. Philadelphia became the first jurisdiction in America to pass a soda tax. The only reason it passed was because the proceeds go primarily to preschool education.

Second, higher education works — not just fouryear degrees, but any posthigh school, professional, two or four year education is going to increase your income. Getting a college degree costs money, no doubt about it. But, in the long run, earning that degree is worth a million dollars more than just having a high school diploma, and that’s a four-fold return (in additional income) from even the most expensive college degrees in America (like Harvard’s) and an almost ten-fold return (in additional income) on a degree from a college like the one where I work (Mount Aloysius).

A decade ago, the U.S. Department of Commerce estimated that College graduates will earn a million dollars more in their lifetimes. That wage gap is only widening. In 2013, Americans with a four-year degree earned 98 percent more an hour that those with only a high school degree — a 50 percent increase just since the 1980s.

That gap persists over every demographic divide — race, gender, ethnicity. The math is simple: If you go on for higher education, you will earn substantially more in your lifetime than if you don’t. That’s true whether you are white, black, Latino, male, female, first in your family to go to college or last. The Pew Research Center concluded that your chances of being unemployed are nearly twice as high if you stopped your education at high school.

The good news is that the facts are clear on these bookends of education in America: Pre-school benefits children, families, communities and public budgets; post-secondary education lessens chances for unemployment and increases lifetime income dramatically.

The bad news is the cost of ignoring these facts. With a majority of brain cells in action by the time a child reaches 3, the price of inadequate investment in pre-school is a slow start and the promise of higher ladders to climb on education, life and work skills. Considering that the average person will have seven different careers in their lifetime, critical thinking skills (the ability to collect info, apply it to a problem and solve it) so central to the higher education experience will be essential for every 21st century worker. And those skills are essential whether you are fixing the latest coolant system in an industrial freezer, working in health care or editing this newspaper.

So as we listen to debates about education, let’s pay attention to what is being said not only about hitting the books but about investing in the bookends.