2022 Book
Authored and Edited by Walter W. McMahon and Jennifer A. Delaney
Price: $39.00
ISBN: 979-821804838-9
2022 - Paperback
Please order the book HERE!
This volume presents original research on the external social benefits of higher education. The external benefits of higher education are the public, or social, benefits that flow to others, including future generations. These are distinguished from private benefits such as individual earnings. We are excited to present this research because these and other external social benefits are shown to be central to productivity growth, economic growth, broader per capita development, and hence to human well-being.
This book is the first and only known comprehensive documentation of the theory, size, and estimated value of the external individual and total social benefits of higher education. This is shown to be a key source of per capita total factor productivity growth and the main rationale on efficiency grounds in economics for public support. The book features the discovery and estimates of five new previously unidentified social benefits of higher education, as well as strong new empirical evidence strengthening the case for significant positive effects on democratization that interacts with human rights, political stability, and, indirectly through these, on higher per capita growth and development. The book also includes endogenization of new ideas through investment in the education of graduate students leading to careers in research and development. These social benefits of higher education, often modest in the short run, are, in the long run, essential to the improved well-being of individuals, communities, and nations.
AUTHORS AND EDITORS
Walter W. McMahon is a Professor Emeritus of Economics and Education at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Jennifer A. Delaney is an Associate Professor of Higher Education in the Department of Education Policy, Organization, and Leadership at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
2021 Journal of Education Finance Special Issue
Link to access: https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/44817
This special issue of the Journal of Education Finance presents new, original research on the external social benefits of higher education. The external benefits of higher education are the public, or social, benefits that flow to others including future generations. These are distinguished from private benefits such as individual earnings or individual health that benefit both the college graduate and his or her family. We are excited to present this new research especially because external social benefits provide the main rationale for public support of education at all levels, including higher education. They are also important because they are known to be central to total factor productivity and economic growth (based on modern endogenous growth theory and research). In addition, they are central to per capita development (which includes the non-monetary benefits of higher education beyond earnings). External benefits of higher education, therefore, are vital to development and the well-being of individuals, communities, and nations.
The theme of this special issue is that education, and especially higher education externalities, are central to economically efficient rates of per capita development and therefore crucial to the well-being of an educated society. These external social benefits depend on public funding. This means that education finance, and especially the funding of higher education, profoundly matters.
—This special issue was supported by the Forum on the Future of Public Education at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign with funds from the Richard E. and Ann M. O'Leary Endowment. It is dedicated to the memory of Edwin J. O'Leary—
For over three decades the Journal of Education Finance has been recognized as one of the leading journals in the field of the financing of public schools. Each issue brings original research and analysis on issues such as educational fiscal reform, judicial intervention in finance, adequacy, and equity of public school funding, school/social agency linkages, taxation, factors affecting employment and salaries, and the economics of human capital development.