Public four-year colleges generate economic value that reaches far beyond individual students, rippling out to strengthen entire communities and state economies. A new report from the Institute for Higher Education Policy (IHEP) puts numbers to that impact and pairs them with federal and state policy recommendations designed to grow it.

IHEP’s new Economic Value Simulator, is an interactive tool that estimates the additional income generated by public four-year colleges in every state and shows how investments in affordability, college completion, and workforce outcomes can strengthen those returns. Using the Postsecondary Value Commission’s framework, the simulator estimates that young adults who earned bachelor’s degrees from public four-year colleges generate $140 billion in additional annual income nationwide, after accounting for the cost of college.