The unemployment rate for all individuals with at least a bachelor’s degree is around 3 percent nationally, about half of the rate for high school graduates. The resultant unemployment differential saves taxpayers billions of dollars in unemployment benefits, food stamp and welfare expenditures and other economic programs to help the unemployed.
Each additional year of education represents at least a 7 percent to 10 percent earnings premium. Extrapolated over a lifetime, this roughly translates into a million dollars.
College graduates on average live about five years longer than those who didn’t graduate high school.
Also, the level of educational attainment affects graduates’ children and their children’s children. Children with parents who had even a year or two of college are far more likely to succeed in school.
Let’s look at a child born into the lowest income segment. He or she has a 45 percent chance of remaining in the same segment as an adult, with only a 5 percent chance of moving into the highest segment. But add a college degree, and there is a dramatic change: The low segment income likelihood drops to 16 percent; the top segment likelihood jumps to 19 percent. Talk about transformative!
There are other personal and societal benefits from college education — higher voting rates, higher volunteerism, higher taxes, lower incarceration, lower unemployment, higher levels of good health, higher educational attainment of graduate’s children.
There are economic impacts to a community from family wage jobs, student and visitor spending, construction expenditures, learning transference and new startup and spin-off businesses founded and supported by the availability of graduates.
Increasingly, firms take a holistic view of workforce satisfaction, recruitment and retention. With workforce turnover costs for professional positions estimated in the range of 150 percent of annual salary, commitment to workers’ lifelong learning and ability to receive retraining and advanced degrees is vital to retaining a high-performing workforce.
Having strong community college and university programs available in our community makes a difference to both new and expanding companies and organizations. And you don’t see competitive college graduates without a vibrant and effective K-12 system. In turn, K-12 builds on early learning — that critical first building block of transformative education.
The state of Washington is under court order to increase the investment in K-12 education. Voters recently approved decreasing class sizes, without any dedicated funding to support this. All of this puts pressure on our state budget which has cut state funding to Washington State University by 52 percent from 2009-2013. Resultant double-digit tuition increases did not fully fund the loss of state support. For the last two years there have not been tuition increases, supported by legislative steady-state funding.
We need long-term commitments to fund early learning, K-12 and higher education to provide our community, state and nation with an educated, healthy, productive and successful citizenry.
Lynn Valenter is vice chancellor at Washington State University Vancouver.
