Educational Attainment and Income

Podcast created by: Samuel Kerner, Katherine Bablin, and Matthew Faulkner

The human capital theory suggests that acquiring more education and training adds to a person's skill and therefore increases productivity and efficiency. By this logic, those with more education should end up receiving higher salaries, thus there is a return to education. In this podcast we discuss how the rate of returns to education changes with the business cycle, noting the gap in the rate between women and men. Furthermore, whether or not one obtains education or not in the first place, as well as how much education they achieve depends on a variety of factors. Here, we hope to answer the question: is acquiring more education worth it?