"Of course colleges and universities do many things. They teach students, conduct research, provide knowledge and guidance to citizens and policy makers, and actually provide some entertainment and other amenities," says Dr. Walden, a North Carolina Cooperative Extension specialist.

"But the easiest aspect of all of this to measure is the value of educating students. What economists typically do is we look at what we call the value added of degrees. We look at, for example, if a student graduates from college what their income would be over their lifetime, then we subtract off what their income would have been if they had just stopped at high school. And that gives us some measure of the value of that college degree.

"And you simply do that for all graduates of all universities and colleges, for example, in the state. If you do that in North Carolina what you quickly find is that college education is worth billions of dollars annually to North Carolina graduates."