The University of Georgia's newest alumni will officially graduate Friday. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it will be the first virtual commencement in UGA's history. Some 4,400 undergraduate and graduate students have met the requirements to graduate.
The undergrad ceremony is scheduled to premiere at 9:30 am on commencement.uga.edu. The graduate ceremony premieres at 2:30 pm. All grads will receive a celebratory gift in the mail.
One benefit for those new graduates - higher lifetime earnings over non-college grads. Jeff Humphreys is director of economic forecasting at UGA's Terry College of Business. He says those with Bachelors' degrees earn significantly more than their peers during their lifetimes.
“Yeah, I think the thing is, we want to make sure we don’t leave any money on the table. On an individual level, if you don’t go on and get a college degree after high school, you’re leaving $2 million on the table.”
But the benefits don't stop there.
“At the state level, right now about 33.4% of Georgians get a Bachelor’s degree or higher, but that’s below the national average, and if we were to increase that to about 40% of the population, that would be an additional $18 billion to Georgia’s economy.”
That $18 billion is about 3.1% of Georgia's GDP.
