Using Statistics as Support

The graph shows that there is a positive statistical correlation between level of education and income (Baum, Sandy, and Payea 10). The higher education the workers have, the more they earn. According to statistics on College Board Online, people who have professional degrees have the highest median income, earning US$95,700 in 2003. The earnings of people with professional degrees are almost twice as high as those of people with bachelor's degrees. In fact, yearly income decreases as the level of education goes down. For example, people without high school diplomas only earn $21,600 a year, which only equals 43.3% of the median earnings of people with bachelor's degrees and 22.6% of the median earnings of people with professional degrees (qtd. in Mclntyre et al. Table 3). To sum up, level of education correlates with income; workers with higher educational achievement get higher pay.

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2004a, PINC-03; Internal Revenue Service, 2004, Table 3; McIntyre, et al., 2003; calculations by the authors.