Bernanke: Education best investment

WASHINGTON, Sept. 24 (UPI) -- Education is the best U.S. economic investment, providing excellent societal as well as individual returns, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said Monday.

"Education -- lifelong education for everyone, from toddlers to workers well advanced in their careers -- is indeed an excellent investment for individuals and society as a whole," Bernanke told a U.S. Chamber of Commerce education and workforce summit in Washington.

"Education fundamentally supports advances in productivity, upon which our ability to generate continuing improvement in our standard of living depends," said Bernanke, who spent 17 years teaching economics at Princeton University.

But the Fed chairman said he was not speaking only of formal education.

He was also speaking of "lifelong learning" that also includes "early childhood programs, informal mentoring on the job and mid-career retraining," he said.

He said if the United States planned "to successfully navigate such challenges as the retirement of the baby-boom generation, advancing technology and increasing globalization, we must work diligently to maintain the quality of our educational system where it is strong and strive to improve it where it is not."

In particular, the nation must find ways of increasing the number of students, "especially minorities and students from disadvantaged backgrounds," who continue their educations after high school, he said.