"Worth it" suggests that the values in question are only those of money and calculation. Is that the best way to measure what college can offer?
Yes, college is worth it, and it’s not even close. For all the struggles that many young college graduates face, a four-year degree has probably never been more valuable.
he singer Jill Scott, who was being given an honorary doctorate, at graduation ceremonies at Temple University in Philadelphia this month.
hat the pay gap has nonetheless continued growing means that we’re still not producing enough of them
experts and journalists
According to a paper by Mr. Autor published Thursday in the journal Science, the true cost of a college degree is about negative $500,000. That’s right: Over the long run, college is cheaper than free. Not going to college will cost you about half a million dollars.
education brings a huge return.
benefits of college don’t go just to graduates of elite colleges
Economists are trying to measure a home computer’s educational impact on schoolchildren in low-income households.
little or no educational benefit is found. Worse, computers seem to have further separated children in low-income households, whose test scores often decline after the machine arrives, from their more privileged counterparts.
few children whose families obtained computers said they used the machines for homework. What they were used for — daily — was playing games.
“Scaling the Digital Divide,” published last month, looks at the arrival of broadband service in North Carolina between 2000 and 2005 and its effect on middle school test scores during that period. Students posted significantly lower math test scores after the first broadband service provider showed up in their neighborhood, and significantly lower reading scores as well when the number of broadband providers passed four.
The expansion of broadband service was associated with a pronounced drop in test scores for black students in both reading and math, but no effect on the math scores and little on the reading scores of other students.
THE one area where the students from lower-income families in the immersion program closed the gap with higher-income students was the same one identified in the Romanian study: computer skills.
How disappointing to read in the Texas study that “there was no evidence linking technology immersion with student self-directed learning or their general satisfaction with schoolwork.”
“We’re lifting the basic skills of young kids,” said Bruce Fuller, an education
professor at the University of California, Berkeley, “but this policy is not
lifting 21st-century skills for the new economy.”