In Focus | Higher Education and the Labor Market

The more education you have, the more money you’ll make. That’s Rule #1 on the relationship between educational attainment and earnings, and it’s still generally true, says Anthony P. Carnevale, Ph.D., Director of Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce. It’s when he gets to Rules #2 and #3 that things get more complicated. Increasingly, Carnevale said, your earnings will depend not on where you went to school or how many degrees you have, but on what you studied. In fact, there is now a $3.3 million difference in career earnings between the highest-paying bachelor’s degree and the lowest. Here Carnevale talks with Stephanie Kim, Faculty Director of Georgetown’s Master's in Higher Education Administration program, about the new rules on education and earnings.

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