Teaching Human Capital By Calculating the True Costs of Education
Human capital, defined as any individual characteristic that contributes to worker productivity, has been presented as a unifying theme for academic advising in higher education (Shaffer, 1997). An approach to calculating the true costs of a college education is presented as an exercise to maximize students' human capital. When considering college expenses, students usually overlook opportunity cost: that is, the income forgone while they are pursuing degrees. In addition to a true-cost calculation worksheet, the paper presents a strategy for making true costs salient to students: projecting the number of years needed for college graduates to recoup their investments. The article closes with suggestions for using the true-cost exercise in academic advising.
Contributor Notes
Dr. Shaffer wishes to thank Evan Leach, Sam Moore, Catherine Renner, Richard Robbins, and Tracy Skipp for comments on a previous draft. This article is a revision of a paper by the same title which was presented at the National Student Success Conference in Kansas City, MO in April 1998. Correspondence concerning this article may be addressed to Leigh S. Shaffer, Department of Anthropology and Sociology, West Chester University, West Chester, PA 19383. E-mail may be sent via the Internet to lshaffer@wcupa.edu.
