• By
  • Kathleen Madigan

Slackers, beware: A student’s income later in life is tied to the level of mathematics taken in high school, according to research done at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.

Bloomberg News

Using Labor Department data and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, Jonathan James, a former researcher at the Cleveland Fed, looked at math and high-school completion rates, college attendance and wages.

In order of difficulty, high school math usually progresses from pre-Algebra to Algebra I, Geometry, Algebra II and more advanced classes. What Mr. James found is that the higher level of math taken, the more likely a student would graduate and the more likely he would go to college.

Half of low-math students attend college versus 68% of high-math high-school grads. But importantly, Mr. James found the students who took higher level math classes were three times as likely to earn a four-year college degree than students who took only Algebra I.

Mr. James also found math imparted career gains to students who did not go onto college. “The more math one takes, the more one earns on average, and the more likely one is to have a job,” he writes.

The benefit even shows up among high-school drop outs. The median wage for full-time workers aged 20-30 years who dropped out of high school after completing only Pre-Algebra, Algebra I, or less was $12.70 per hour. Dropouts with Geometry or Algebra II earned a significantly higher hourly pay of $14.36.

“While math may be difficult for many, our findings indicate that the payoffs for all students may be substantial,” Mr. James notes.

The good news is that more students are entering the world of quadratics and log functions. In 1982, Mr. James notes, 39% of high school graduates had taken Algebra II or higher. By 2009, the percentage had jumped to 75%.