CATHERINE RAMPELL

Dollars to doughnuts.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics has produced the following chart showing weekly earnings by ethnic group and education, broken down into quartiles. It provides yet another excuse to talk about why college is worth it:

Take a look at the right side of the chart, which shows earnings by education. The median weekly earnings for college graduates are $1,043. Not bad, especially when you consider that the median weekly earnings for a high school graduate are $643.

What’s more impressive, though, is that even the economic underachievers among college graduates earn more than the typical high school grad: A college graduate at the 25th percentile makes $730 per week, which is still 13.5 percent more than the median high school grad.

Things only get worse for high school dropouts. A high school dropout in the 75th percentile — that is, a worker who earns more than do three-quarters of all equally educated workers — makes less than a college graduate in the bottom quartile of his or her educational class.

The bottom line is that college can be very expensive, and certainly doesn’t guarantee a high-paying job and a cushy lifestyle, but at the very least it almost guarantees a higher-paying job and a cushier lifestyle than what you’d get without it.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=103cdb0a78721a7219f0bc5c7846c94b