By any measure of the public good—economic prosperity, business competitiveness, quality of life, tax revenues or government spending discipline—Georgia is much better off when the public and private sectors invest in Georgia’s colleges and universities.

When it comes to higher education in this state, the more you give, the more you receive isn’t just a proverb, it’s a common sense fact. Whatever money we spend in this area is an investment instead of an expense, returning far more in dividends than the original dollars we paid.

Let’s take a look at those dividends.

There’s a direct relationship between the level of education and personal and societal prosperity. Census figures show that college graduates in Georgia average more than twice the per capita individual income ($58,500) and have less than half the unemployment rate (2.6 percent) of high school graduates ($27,600 and 5.9 percent, respectively). Those with post-graduate degrees make about $78,500 on average and have a 1.2 percent jobless rate.

As new businesses are created in Georgia, so are new jobs. College graduates in Georgia begin more of the former and hold more of the latter. More of them start a business (4.4 percent) than high school graduates (2.5 percent), and during the 90’s, more of them were hired to full-time jobs (570,700) than people who only finished high school (129,800). In fact, the ranks of those who didn’t complete high school suffered a slight net job loss in that decade.

Georgia households where the highest-educated breadwinners are bachelors and post-graduate degree holders are the building blocks of Georgia’s tax base. They contribute an average of $6,290 and $6,950, respectively, to State and local tax coffers in Georgia, according to a study by the U.S. Congressional Budget Office and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.

Higher education, or the lack thereof, has economic consequences that last a lifetime. More than three times the number of Georgia high school graduates (20 percent) lived in poverty during their retirement years as did college graduates (6 percent). Even worse, more than two-thirds of Georgians who didn’t graduate high school lived in poverty between ages 65 and 75.

It’s also true that people with less education are more of a drain on the taxpaying public. More than three-quarters of direct public assistance funds in Georgia go to people who didn’t attend college—including those without a high school diploma. Just 8 percent of those funds went to college graduates.

One of the saddest public expenditures is on prison inmates. Last year, the Georgia Department of Corrections spent over half a billion dollars on prisoners who hadn’t finished high school. Those inmates who were high school graduates cost the state $160.7 million, while college-educated inmates—both graduates and non-graduates—accounted for $97.9 million.

Academic and behavioral problems tend to concentrate in children whose parents had limited educations. More highly educated parents have children with higher test scores and fewer disciplinary problems than children of lesser-educated parents. The children of the college graduates scored 94 points higher on their SATs than the offspring of high school graduates. Some 14.7 percent of kids aged 15-17 whose parents only graduated from high school were suspended or expelled. The percentage for kids of college graduates was just 6.2.

So how does Georgia rate as a state that supports higher education? Not very good, if we look at the percentage of college graduates here. Just 13 of the state’s 159 counties graduate a higher percentage of their adults than the national average of 24.4 percent. In a sizable majority of Georgia counties – most of them rural and poor—fewer than 13 percent of the adults have college degrees. Moreover, Georgia only ranks 35th among the states in the number of years its citizens are educated.

Higher education really is the first domino. Depending upon how we support Georgia’s colleges and universities, everything else either falls down, or falls into place. Those institutions generate over $1.1 billion in research and development that spurs new business formation and expanded markets.

There are less tangible, but equally important, returns on our investment, too: college graduates are the movers and shapers of our society, the ones who vote, volunteer and read to their kids more often.

Our children learn well what we teach them. The facts teach us that Georgia’s future is inextricably tied to our investment in making quality college education possible for all our citizens. It’s a lesson we dare not fail to learn.