We hear it every day. “It’s a great value for the money,” but really, what does that actually mean to educators and students alike? What exactly is the value of an education?
Statistics from the US Census Bureau and 2010 report by Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workplace offer some striking insights on the value of an education:
A high school dropout can expect to earn nearly one quarter of a million dollars less during their lifetime than their high school counterparts. And the unfortunate truth is that the likelihood that they will be unemployed is more than 40% higher than that of a high school graduate.
College graduates, on the other hand, can expect to have lifetime earnings that are nearly one million dollars more than high school graduates ($2.3M vs $1.3M) and be 48% less likely to be unemployed than their high school counterparts.
Similarly, those with masters degrees can expect $2.7 million in lifetime earnings, more than twice that of high school graduates, who, themselves, will be more than twice as likely to be unemployed than those with advanced degrees.
And the costs do not end there. More than 40% of college students in public colleges and universities do not graduate, or drop out within six years of college entry. This means that irreplaceable and significant tuition loss occurs during sophomore, junior and senior years. Could a virtual tutor, available anytime, help reduce college dropout rates? A mere 1% reduction in the dropout rate of a college with 6000 undergraduate students, assuming a 30% dropout rate and annual tuition of $20,000, translates into $1.2 million in recaptured annual tuition revenue.
We believe our education tutor can indeed reduce dropout rates that contribute to societal pressures of unemployment, and the concomitant earnings losses engendered by dropping out of college.