Persuasive essay on advocating community or workplace change

¶ … Invest More in Education

Higher spending on education is an investment in our collective future. It is an investment in our children. It is an investment in our community. It is an investment in the future world in which we want to live. A more educated community has better economic outcomes. A more educated community has hope. A more educated community is empowered to create their own pathways to their dreams. A more educated community has the ability to understand what really matters, rather than getting bogged down in inane minutiae. This paper will argue that greater investment in education pays dividends for our world down the road. We have a lot of challenges to solve, and they will not be solved any other way. Investment in education will benefit our community.

The Value of Education

What anybody with half a brain already knows intuitively, that education is a worthwhile investment for the community and for our children, has been demonstrated in a number of different studies. One need not rely on logic alone to reach the determination that investment in education is beneficial. In a study for the World Bank, education investment has been shown to improve both individual and community outcomes. The issue has been studied since the early 1970s, and the evidence is always that education is an investment that pays a positive return. Psacharapoulos (1994, p.1325) notes that investment in education yields positive results in terms of increasing a country's per capita income, and that education investment has positive returns in the private competitive sector as well.

Studies have showed that investment in women in particular yields better returns than investment in men. The reason for this is that there are diminishing returns to education investment. In many parts of the world, investment in female education has lagged that of male education, and as a result, there are greater incremental gains in investing in girls, because they have further to gain. Thus, investing in educating females yields greater returns than investing in men, who usually have already received significantly more investment (Psacharapoulos, 1994, p.1327). Likewise, education in rural areas tends to yield better returns -- the value of investment where there has been little before is greater than the value of education investment in areas where there already was some (p.1328). The rate of return on investment money in sub-Saharan Africa was found to be over 13%, versus less than 7% in OECD nations (p.1331).

Well-Being

If Psacharapoulos' work focused on the broad-based economic benefits of education, that is not the only perspective under which the call for greater investment in education is supported by the literature. Villa (2005) uses the perspective of people's well-being. It is reasonable to assume at least some correlation between wealth and happiness -- at least to the extent that one is wealthy enough not to worry about food and shelter. But Villa goes further, and determines that social outcomes are also superior -- people who are better educated are happier, and more satisfied with their lives, than people who are not. Education provides greater security, but it also provides more opportunity, in particular to pursue dreams and achieve a level of actualization.

Methods of Investment

It is an interesting question, if one accepts the proposition that increased education investment is valuable, to examine if the type of investment in education matters. Schmit, Monteiro and Omar (2014) investigated a cash transfer program. They examine a cash transfer program in Brazil, which may not translate all that well to the American context, and found that such a program did have a positive net outcome on the recipients of the education cash transfers (p.570). In most cases, they were poor people, which corresponds with what Psacharapoulos found about education investment having better returns when focused on the undereducated classes. The implication here is that investment can come in many forms, and they are all going to be useful as investments in the future.

One of the other issues is whether there is benefit to focusing education on specific things. A generalized view of education as being valuable does not necessarily reflect the reality that education takes a lot of different forms. Would investing strictly in religious education add value? Would investing only in liberal arts? Or vocational education? Money invested in specific areas should concentrate outcomes in this areas, so policymakers who are receiving greater educational investment will need to take that into consideration. For example, it has been shown that training people in entrepreneurial studies will improve the degree of entrepreneurial mindset in a country (Solesvik et al., 2013). In many parts of the world, such risk-taking mindset does not exist much, so there is merit to looking at this type of study as a means of breaking down education spending to specific target areas. If improving economic output is the objective, for example, then focusing increased education spending on things like entrepreneurial studies might be a solid approach.

Counterpoint