Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host, Russ Roberts,

of Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org where you can

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conversation. We'll also find our archives where you can listen to every episode we've ever done

going back to 2006. Our email address is maladycontalk.org. We'd love to hear from you.

Today is March 20th, 2014, and my guest is Brian Kaplan, Professor of Economics at George Mason

University. He blogs at econlog, which, like econtalk, is part of the Library of Economics and

Liberty. His latest book is Selfish, Reasons to Have More Kids, and he's working on a book on

education. Brian, welcome back to econtalk. He's great to be back. Our topic for today is education,

and part of the conversation will, I assume, be a sneak preview of your next book, but I'm

hoping we'll get into some general issues related to measurement and empirical work. What we're

going to talk about specifically today is the return to education. What's the impact on a person's

earning potential or earning power or income after attending college, graduating from college for

that person? I want to start with some basic empirical measurements. How much more do college

graduates earn relative to high school graduates, and how has that return changed over time?

In 2011, college graduates made 83% more than high school graduates, and high school graduates,

namely people who have gone to college, not at all. How has that amount changed over time?

It's gone up quite a bit, so maybe around 1970, it would have only been about 35 or 40 percent,

so it's something like doubled over the last 40 years during my lifetime.

What are some of the standard explanations for why that's happened? Why is college more productive

for people who attend and graduate? The usual story is that there's been a lot of technological

change in the economy and globalization as well, and that this has somehow made it more important to

...