Although there has been a widely held impression that net benefits decline as more people seek and attain higher levels of education, investigations indicate that the rates of return have held roughly constant over a long period in the face of the universalization of secondary education and growing participation in tertiary education. The paper…

Institutional costs need to be analyzed for several reasons: (1) to increase the income of the institution; (2) to improve decision-making at the margin; and (3) to maximize efficiency. The means of costs analysis involve a simple issue: which costs to include. This decision depends on the purpose of the analysis. The actual effects of the usual…

The rate of return on investments in higher education, defined as a measure of productivity that relates the costs of resources expended in instruction to the value of benefits produced, is discussed and computed for several student populations. The concepts of "overeducation" and "underemployment" are also discussed. (SF)

The rate of return on the student's investment in college is the measure of productivity which relates the costs of resources expended in instruction to the values of benefits produced by instruction. Costs, which are concentrated in a brief span of years in early adulthood, and the stream of benefits, which is spread over most of the remainder of…

An analysis is made in this speech of the rates of return on investments in higher education. Results indicate that the annual rates of return are higher in every year (1961-75) than the 10 percent realized on business investments. On the basis of the evidence presented, it is concluded that Americans are not overeducated. The trends in student…