A Survey of Impacts of Higher Education in Economic Growth: an Empirical Study of Iran

Higher education effects national economic growth and development in three perspective: 1-human capital formation 2-consumption 3-postive externality effect. Around the world there are many researches in developing countries about these effects on development and growth. This paper investigates the effects of higher education curricula and academic disciplines on the labor force and thus on economic growth and growth of value added of economic sectors (industrial, agricultural and service) in Iran over the 1978-2007 periods. In order to survey above material we used an economic growth model, and estimated it with econometric methods. Results reveal that higher education overall provided a positive and significant effect on Iran's economic development and that engineering and agricultural science played the most prominent role in this process. In order to get higher economic growth, allocation of resource to higher education specially engineering group is important