Measuring worth — should we?

How do we measure the value of an education? We want educators to help us create future leaders with exceptional drive, creativity, interpersonal skills, and ethics and we also need to create skilled and unskilled producers, but who should pay for the cost of education? How do we identify the children to educate – should this be based on their parent’s performance? Have we determined the ratio of leaders, skilled, and unskilled workers that we need to educate to keep our society healthy, wealthy, and civilized?

The web site “Measuring Worth” starts each page with Adam Smith’s quote:

“The real price of every thing, what every thing really costs to the man who wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it… But though labour be the real measure of the exchangeable value of all commodities, it is not that by which their value is commonly estimated… Every commodity, besides, is more frequently exchanged for, and thereby compared with, other commodities than with labour.” – Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1776

and goes on to explore the value of money. Does this mean the value of a product is based on the scarcity of the product, not the labor taken to produce it?

Businesses can measure the economic value by the output of a “skilled” employee. Should we associate factory workers with IT workers – software development, system administrators, database administrators? Are these employees the production workers in this century? Will we use the same calculations for the “knowledge” worker — statistician, business analyst, and educators? Could we come up with the production levels for these workers and then determine the true cost to educate them?

How should we determine a high school teacher’s salary and how much should we spend on a baseline for all students? According to “Education.com” Syracuse spends $17,141 per pupil. How do we measure the value of that expenditure – in graduation rates, employment rates, new business developed?

There are lots of interesting links with education information, but how to correlate all the data —

“CNY Vitals – Onondaga County”
“US News Education – Fayetteville-Manlius High School”
“Scribd – 2010 CNY Public School Graduation Rates”
“Education.com”
“A Life’s Value – As U.S. Agencies Put More Value on a Life, Businesses Fret”

where is that statistician when I need one? 🙂