The Importance of Education: An Economics View

Ed Week

It's not headline news that educational attainment is highly correlated with income: College graduates typically earn more than less-educated Americans. What is often less discussed is that education is significantly linked to many other outcomes in life, including whether a person will get married and his or her life expectancy. More disturbingly, the gap between more- and less-educated Americans is getting bigger—in some cases, much bigger.

The Hamilton Project, an economic-policy group at the Brookings Institution, released a paper in September titled "A Dozen Economic Facts About K-12 Education" to help illustrate the growing importance of education on Americans' wellbeing. We found that although the benefits of education have increased over time, measures of educational attainment and achievement have stagnated, meaning that many of our nation's young people are not receiving the skills they need to thrive in the modern economy.

Click here to continue reading.