A new report released Monday by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce (CEW), supported by College Futures Foundation, argues California could generate $4.4 trillion in net monetary gains if 70 percent of adults across all demographic groups attain a postsecondary credential by 2035.
Hispanic and Latino Californians, who currently hold some of the state’s lowest attainment rates, account for $4.2 trillion of the projected impact alone.
“How much opportunity are we leaving on the table?” asked the report’s lead author and Director of Research at the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce Dr. Zach Mabel. “What happens if disparities continue, and what becomes possible if they don’t?”
What the report surfaces is not simply a case for education as an economic strategy; it is a case for closing equity gaps as a public good. That means migrant farmworkers in the Central Valley, working mothers returning to community college after a night shift, older adults who are re-imagining school again after decades in a labor force that told them experience was enough — all of them have an important role to play in raising the state’s economic standing, if California leaders invest in the supports they need to attain the credentials.
That possibility carries weight. With five years of major investment, the report projects California could see $65.5 billion in annual net gains. Over five decades, the returns would eclipse public costs nearly 30 times over.
The report treats credentials as pathways and public investments. It also insists geography matters; the Bay Area is not the San Joaquin Valley, and they should be treated according to their unique contexts. A credential means something different in a region shaped by agriculture than in one shaped by tech.
“We have to de-silo systems,” Mabel said, calling for regional alignment where policy moves with the realities of local economies.
But Mabel said it is important to keep the conversation focused on people over numbers, especially those too often treated as peripheral. This means it is important to “not only to increase credential attainment for young adults (early teen to college age), but to focus on the 25 - 52 older working adult group.”
“While gains may be made much more quickly for young adults, the gap to credentialed older working adults should be taken seriously with the types of investments [we make] and to make post-secondary opportunities for working-age adults,” he said.
The End of the Degree Hierarchy
The old debate — degrees versus workforce credentials — is the wrong framing, Mabel said.
“It’s not one over the other,” Mabel said. “There have to be multiple pathways to economic mobility.”
Still, even if gains came largely through associate degrees and short-term credentials, researchers estimate the impact would still approach $4 trillion.
Mabel cautions against policymakers pivoting from encouraging bachelor’s degree attainment and disinvesting from four-year programs, pointing out that “while the BA isn't risk-free, the returns of attaining one tend to be greater across any demographic.”
“Short [and] long-term [credentials] are all moving towards raising the goal of attainment and better quality of life across every demographic in California,” he said.
A Demographic Question
The quiet radicalism of the report is that it imagines education and economic development not as separate agendas, but braided together and asks us to widen who we picture when we hear the word student. Not only young adults moving through traditional pipelines, but the older worker, the parent, and people at 25, 40 or 52 re-entering learning in pursuit of dignity and reinvention.
Mabel is clear: the state does not reach 70 percent without them. To Mabel, adult learners are not peripheral to the attainment agenda. They are central to whether it succeeds.
That opens into a deeper democratic question: What does it look like to build an attainment agenda around those historically underserved, instead of designing systems around those already nearest the finish line? Who gets invited to participate in prosperity?
“For example,” Mabel said, “for Latino men and women, when achieving credential attainment, they experience lifetime earnings increase, increase in tax revenue, less reliance on government aid. These types of models and studies can be put in place to be more place-based throughout the state to focus on the needs and the resources and interests of the people in those areas.”
The real question is not whether California can afford this investment. It is whether the U.S. as a whole can keep accepting the cost of exclusion.
