Kindergarten pays — literally — according to a new study funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF).
The research and findings from the study conducted by researchers from Harvard University, Northwestern University and the University of California Berkeley indicate that one’s earning potential as an adult increases with improved performance even in the earliest phase of our school experience. A modest 10 percent improvement, from 50th to 60th percentile in a score on the Stanford Achievement Test, is associated with a $1,000 increase in annual salary by age 27. Additional improvements are tied to even bigger pay boosts.
The NSF study additionally finds that as compared to students of similar cultural and economic backgrounds, those who learn more during the first year of school are more likely to attend college, to own a home by age 28, to save for retirement, and are less likely to become single parents.
Characteristics of the learning environment itself may have a good deal to do with improving the likelihood of the students’ success, the study finds. Harvard economist John Friedman explains:
“Kindergarten interventions matter a great deal for long-term outcomes. For instance, being in a smaller class for two years increases the probability of attending college by 2 percent”
He adds:
“We find that both smaller class sizes and teachers with more experience improve long-term outcomes. We believe that other teacher characteristics, as well as various characteristics of a student’s peers, also have significant impacts on later life outcomes, but the data did not allow us to measure those effects well.”
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