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Friday, April 4, 2014

More On The Economic Returns Of A College Education

I want to thank all of my readers for your great interest and attention to this blog post. Below is the actual article that started it all as follows:
Please bear in mind that people who really revolutionalized the world like Bill Gates of Microsoft, Steve Jobs of Apple, and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook did not finish four year degrees. They dropped out of college and went for it.
We all know other people without college degrees who have done quite well. We all know of other people with college and even post graduate degrees who have not done well at all.
I decided to do research on my own situation. I finished college in 1971. I added up my earnings from 1971 to today. I looked at a Department of Commerce study from 1971 that predicted that the average college graduate would earn $750,000 in a 40 year work career. I surpassed that total by over $250,000. It was not due to salaried jobs or what I learned in college. It was due to "on the job training" that I got in law and finance.
Now the latest Pew study predicts that the average college graduate will earn $1,400,000 US over a lifetime. The study is below:
In my case I attended what was then South Texas Junior College for the first two years of my college career. (It is now the University of Houston Downtown campus.) My tuition was zero. My last two years of college at Tulane cost me $5,000 each year. So,in theory, my $10,000 investment yielded a return of over $1 million dollars over 40 years.Even Warren Buffet would love a return like that!!!

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