Links for 10/21/09

Tim Ranzetta

Warning: This education can be hazardous to your financial health. At this institution, you have a higher probability of defaulting on your student loan than you do of completing this program.

Edward L. Glaeser

But that just pushes the puzzle one step back. Why is the cross-country relationship between income and education levels so strong?...

The wealth of well-educated countries is far higher than one would expect based on the private returns to schooling…
Historic educational enrollments predict subsequent income growth quite well, even when holding past income constant, which seems to reject the view that education is just following income….
If the link between country level income and education is real, then we need to understand why the link between schooling and education gets magnified at the country level…

One hypothesis is that there are spillovers from education, and that human capital enables places to gain access to better technologies…

But country-level income and education may also be closely linked because of politics. There is a very strong correlation between quality of government and education…