Education decisions are among the most important choices people ever make. So we were surprised and disappointed to see an article so loosely reasoned and reckless in its conclusions as “Five Reasons to Skip College” published in Blank Slate at Forbes.com on April 18, 2006. The article never provides a numerical assessment of the costs and benefits of going to college, uses statistics inappropriately and in a way that biases the conclusions against college, contains conceptual errors on how to evaluate the return on a college education, and greatly exaggerates the only substantive criticism of typical evaluations of the financial worth of a college degree.

The educational attainment in 2000 of the entire 25-or-older population in Arizona was similar to the national average and ranked in the middle of the states. Arizona compared less favorably to two sets of comparison states: “competitor” states defined by the Greater Phoenix Chamber of Commerce and “new economy” states identified by the Milken Institute. In 1990, however, Arizona’s educational attainment had exceeded the national average. Arizona ranked among the bottom 10 states in the 1990 to 2000 gain in educational attainment. Among both the entire population and those active in the labor force in 2000, the
educational attainment of Arizona residents 55 or older exceeded that of their peers nationally.

A landmark assessment of infrastructure needs in Arizona was produced by the L. William Seidman Research Institute in May 2008 for the Arizona Investment Council (AIC): "Infrastructure Needs and Funding Alternatives for Arizona: 2008-2032", that addressed infrastructure needs in four categories: energy, telecommunications, transportation, and water and wastewater. The information from the AIC report is a major input to the report that follows. Other types of infrastructure — most notably education, health care, and public safety — also are analyzed here to provide a more complete picture of infrastructure needs in Arizona. The goals of this report are to place Arizona’s infrastructure needs into national and historical contexts, to identify the changing conditions in infrastructure provision that make building Arizona’s infrastructure in the future a more problematic proposition than in the past, and to provide projections of the possible costs of providing infrastructure in Arizona over the next quarter century.

The educational attainment of Arizona’s workforce is less than the national average and has deteriorated over time relative to the U.S. average. Job quality and average earnings in Arizona also are below the national average. These three factors — job quality, earnings, and educational attainment — are interrelated. On average, the higher the educational attainment of a worker, the higher are his or her earnings. The largest increase by far occurs with the completion of a university degree. In Arizona, the average earnings of those with a college degree are approximately $28,140 (73 percent) higher than those with only some college. Thus, working individuals financially benefit from enhancing their educational attainment.