Abstract: | Comparison of the average annual per student costs in U.S.A. and Sierra Leone shows that the per student public resource costs of higher education are much higher in Sierra Leone than in the United States. On the other hand, at lower levels of education, per student public expenditure in Sierra Leone is very much lower than that in U.S.A. The question which this paper investigates is whether such high commitment of the nation's resources to higher education (perhaps at the expense of lower levels of education) is justifiable on economic grounds. Shown is that the social rate of return to investment in higher education in Sierra Leone is quite high, especially when it is adjusted for 1) differences in unemployment rates at various levels of education, and 2) the expected growth of per capita real income at 3% per annum over the next 25 years. These adjustment, in fact, constitute the major contribution of this paper to the orthodox rate of return analysis of investment in education. Ref., notes, tables. |