Justifying the Ivory Tower: Higher Education and State Economic Growth

As the U.S. continues to embrace a comprehensive plan for economic recovery, this article investigates the validity of the claim that investing in higher education will help restore state economic growth and prosperity. It presents the findings from a study that indicates that the most consistent predictors of state economic growth related to higher education are state and local spending on higher education research and development (R&D) from 1988 to 1996 and number of junior colleges for every million persons in a state population from 1997 to 2008. However, per capita highway spending tends to be the most consistent predictor of economic growth during all of the time periods investigated.