Education: The Price of Ignorance

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What does it cost to drop out of school? Billions, everyone agrees, but it remained for Henry M. Levin of the Stanford University School of Education to attempt some computation of how many billions. In a study made for the Senate Select Committee on Equal Educational Opportunity, Levin focused on the 3,180,000 American males now between 25 and 34 who failed to win a high school diploma as of 1969. He then figured that dropping out would cost them a total of $237 billion (about $74,000 each) because of lower incomes during a working lifetime. As for the government's loss, it would have cost $40 billion to complete the dropouts' education, but the tax collector would have taken in an additional $71 billion on their higher incomes.