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October 26, 2006
Education rules
We’ve heard many different statistics about the benefits of education, but this information is usually from national sources. For North Carolina, N.C. State University economist Mike Walden says, we see the same benefits.
"If you compare wages, adjusted for inflation in North Carolina from 1980 to 2004, you see a definite pattern. Real wages –- what we call real wages adjusted for inflation -- actually went down for high school dropouts," he says.
"They gained but only 5 percent for high school grads. They gained 12 percent for workers who had some college. And they gained 19 percent for college graduates.
"So the pattern here is clear," he concludes. "Not only if you get more education do you earn more, but in the last roughly 25 years your wage gains have been greater."
Posted by deeshore at October 26, 2006 04:47 PM