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New Web site features interactive tools showing possible effects of better (or worse) education
By John Higgins
Beacon Journal staff writer
Published on Sunday, Jun 14, 2009
Researchers have long associated getting a better education with getting more pay, a healthier life and a stronger, safer community.
Now the United Way offers an interactive Web site called the Common Good Forecaster that shows users what would happen if the residents in their communities were better (or worse) educated.
The United Way of Summit County, which has focused its local education funding on helping children and their parents prepare for kindergarten, showed off the forecaster Tuesday in Akron.
The site is at http://www.liveunited.org/forecaster.
''I think it's a neat tool if you're going to apply for a foundation grant, for instance,'' said United Way of Summit County President Bob Kulinski. ''You have an approach here to do a 'what if' scenario.''
The forecaster allows users to see what happens to life expectancy, murder rate, median personal income, unemployment rate, poverty rate if they adjust the level of education using an interactive slider.
Summit County's 'health'
For example, 11 percent of adults 25 or older in Summit County have less than a high school education, according to the forecaster, which uses data from the U.S. census and other government agencies.
Slide that up to a higher percentage of high school dropouts and median earnings drop, the poverty rate goes up, unemployment rises, life expectancy drops, the murder rate increases and voter participation shrinks.
Slide up the measure for the percentage of adults with a college degree or higher and Summit County residents make more money, get more jobs, live longer, kill each other less and vote more often.
United Way created the Common Good Forecaster with the American Human Development Project, an initiative of the Social Science Research Council that tracks progress in health, education and standards of living.
The forecaster drills down to the county level for every state, based on data from the 2005-07 American Community Survey of the U.S. census.
Other factors play role
The data do not reflect the recent economic turbulence, however, showing, for example, an unemployment rate in Summit County of 5.6 percent. The Summit rate in April was 9.7 percent, according to the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services.
And associations between higher education and other social goals is not the same as causation.
For example, research cited on the Web site shows that those who acquire education beyond high school have an average life expectancy of seven more years than those whose education stops at high school. But it doesn't necessarily follow that having more education makes you live longer.
''Another important caveat is that extreme changes in the educational levels should be viewed with caution,'' said Eduardo Martins, statistics director for the American Human Development Project. ''For example, creating a scenario where all the adult population in a community has a college degree might generate results such as zero unemployment, zero crime rate, very high earnings, etc. However, such a scenario is utterly unrealistic, and as such, the results it produces should be viewed with some skepticism.
''Having said that, we took extreme care in using the best available data and research, and are confident that the forecaster can be very useful in 'predicting' the positive impacts of education under more realistic scenarios, such as United Way's goal of reducing the high school dropout rate by half.''
The forecaster's interactive sliders make it easier to represent those associations and the possible effects of a better-educated population.
''With this kind of tool here, we can look at it and say, 'This is what we're striving for,' '' said United Way spokesman Michael Gaffney. ''It's a better community for all of us.''
John Higgins can be reached at 330-996-3792 or jhiggins@thebeaconjournal.com.
Researchers have long associated getting a better education with getting more pay, a healthier life and a stronger, safer community.
Get the full article here.
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