Education prepares young people for success later in life. But because we tend to only be able to measure short term inputs and outputs (like per pupil funding and student test scores) we often fail to estimate how much a program costs or benefits over the long term.

Admittedly, the longer into the future one looks, the more uncertain the facts are. But with appropriate cautions in place, we can make some informed assumptions as to what will happen to students who participate in choice programs over the long term.

Private school choice programs have been repeatedly found to increase both high school graduation, college matriculation, and college graduation rates, for both participating students and for students who remain in public schools. All three of those are associated with higher lifetime earnings (and thus higher tax payments), and a host of other positive outcomes from longer, healthier life expectancies to decreased risks of either committing or being the victim of a crime.

Economists have put dollar amounts on those benefits, and thus if we can estimate how many more high school students will attain education at a higher level than they would have absent the program, we can project the long term benefit of the program.

Taking this into account we can reasonably estimate a positive long-term impact of a universal private educational choice program of between $215.2 million and $3.2 billion per academic year.