We place a lot of faith in education to meet our needs both as
individuals and as a society. Given all the time and money we
invest, especially as students, we hope that the payoff will be
worth it. One way to begin addressing that question for
individuals is to check to see if there is a correlation between
educational attainment and income level. The good news is that
recent data from the U.S. Census Bureau demonstrates a strong
positive correlation: as educational level goes up, median
income also rises. My past posts (here and here) on the
relationship between education and income routinely receive
among the most visits of any posts I have. The new numbers in
this post are for 2010 and were released in 2011. They come from
the Current Population Survey’s Annual Social and Economic
Supplement (PINC-03, Table 28). Graphically, the new numbers
look like this: In addition, the Census Bureau released a
report, Education and Synthetic Work-Life Earnings Estimates
(pdf), in September, 2011 providing projected li