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IN RECENT years there have been a number of attempts to use social rates-of-return to determine what has been the contribution of education to economic growth and what share of a nation's resources should in the future be devoted to education In the following section I shall briefly indicate why I use present discounted values in my subsequent calculations rather than rates-of-return. In Section II, I review the nature of the earnings data employed in most of the subsequent dis- cussion. Section III is devoted to an examination of net present values of life-time earnings for broad levels of education and, more important, for particular occupations and levels of education within these occupations. The final section considers variations in the relation between expected discounted returns for the two occupations of teacher and engineer over time and the apparent effect of these variations on enrolments in the college courses prescribed for these vocations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]