http://www.cansar.com/2009/05/04/are-the-poor-underestimating-returns-to-education/ Entrepreneurship. Innovation. Inspiration. Wed, 10 Mar 2010 19:20:22 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 http://www.cansar.com/2009/05/04/are-the-poor-underestimating-returns-to-education/comment-page-1/#comment-39 Paul Thu, 07 May 2009 04:04:49 +0000 http://www.cansar.com/?p=330#comment-39 I agree with this. Right now my wife and I are trying to convince her brother who lives in rural Mali to stay in school, finish high school and go to university. He would be first in his family and community. However, he is saying now that he wants to drop out and go look for work where he can make money now. The operative word being "now". We are trying to argue from afar that the returns of furthering his education will be much greater than what he can earn now. The problem is that those returns are far off in his mind and going off to work is immediate. Also, he has no role models or examples of success through education to look to in the community. His family isn't strongly encouraging him to stay in school either because they too only know the "short-sighted" solution of money now via hard work vs. the long term benefit of education. So how do you convince a community and children living in a community where they have no evidence that they can relate to of the benefit of education? If someone else in the village had completed higher education and succeeded, we could point to that as the example. But at present it is hard to be convincing by just saying it is true. I agree with this. Right now my wife and I are trying to convince her brother who lives in rural Mali to stay in school, finish high school and go to university. He would be first in his family and community. However, he is saying now that he wants to drop out and go look for work where he can make money now. The operative word being “now”. We are trying to argue from afar that the returns of furthering his education will be much greater than what he can earn now. The problem is that those returns are far off in his mind and going off to work is immediate. Also, he has no role models or examples of success through education to look to in the community. His family isn’t strongly encouraging him to stay in school either because they too only know the “short-sighted” solution of money now via hard work vs. the long term benefit of education. So how do you convince a community and children living in a community where they have no evidence that they can relate to of the benefit of education? If someone else in the village had completed higher education and succeeded, we could point to that as the example. But at present it is hard to be convincing by just saying it is true.

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