Many Americans would agree that all people should have equal educational opportunity and equal pay for equal work. And yet, inequality in postsecondary education access, college completion, and post-college outcomes such as wages stubbornly persists, along with the impression that achieving equal outcomes would be too expensive and would take too…

In this report, we present the results of a thought experiment in which we estimated the potential costs and benefits to society of achieving equality in educational attainment and related workforce outcomes by race/ethnicity, class, and gender. We conducted this thought experiment to clarify the role that education can play in reducing…