Higher education is more than a degree. It's about Tennessee's quality of life. | Opinion

• Lisi Schoenbach is associate professor of English at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Tennessee’s 111th General Assembly’s convened on Jan. 8. Our elected representatives now face finding solutions to some of Tennessee’s greatest challenges, including the state economy, health care and the opioid crisis.

If they wish to address these issues effectively, our legislature must first change how they think about, and value, higher education.

The University of Tennessee has in recent years been represented almost exclusively as a hotbed of conflict and controversy, with attention-grabbing headlines that bear little relation to the day-to-day work taking place on our campus. In many cases, these so-called controversies have been the inventions of people outside the university.

The public focus on these stories has helped to encourage a view of our university that is sensationalized, oversimplified and inaccurate. It overshadows the hard work of our faculty, staff and students, but it also obscures a central and crucially-important fact: higher education is good for our state.

Here are three facts about the value of higher education

Let me offer instead the following facts—none of them under dispute—about higher education.

Fact No. 1: College degrees are directly and conclusively correlated with higher income. In fact, median income grows steadily higher as educational level rises. A person with a master’s degree earns a median monthly salary roughly twice the amount of a person with a high school diploma.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, higher educational attainments also correlate with lower unemployment. A recent poll from New America found that 80 percent of the 1,600 adults surveyed agreed that “there are more opportunities for people who pursue education after high school.”  

Fact No. 2: The percentage of college graduates in any given state correlates directly with economic prosperity. According to a 2013 report by the Economic Policy Institute, “Expanding access to high quality education will create more economic opportunity for residents and do more to strengthen a state’s overall economy than anything else a state government can do.” 

Fact No. 3: Education is linked to better health — and investment in education has the potential to lower health-care spending. A March 2015 study by Virginia Commonwealth University’s Center on Society and Health found a clear and convincing link between increased education and improved health outcomes, including improvements in chronic diseases such as diabetes, hypertension and obesity. The economic impact of these health crises are huge: diabetes alone can be responsible for up to $27.6 billion of state budget expenditures per year.

UT Knoxville delivers a positive effect for the state

Higher education matters far beyond its economic impact. Our university makes important contributions to national security, medical and scientific research, and the preservation of our greatest cultural traditions. But we shouldn’t lose sight of the real, measurable, overwhelmingly positive economic effect of our state universities.

The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, according to a conservative estimate, helped to create 1.7 billion dollars in economic impact last year, supporting an estimated 35,232 jobs across Tennessee, and generating $166 million in state and local tax revenue. 

Politicians in Tennessee have often used our flagship University as a punching bag, but voters should make sure their elected leaders know: if they value the health and economic well-being of the citizens of our state, the case for supporting higher ed is as clear-cut as they come. No other investment yields comparable returns—in economic impact and in the health and happiness of our citizens and our communities.

Lisi Schoenbach is associate professor of English at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.