A study from the RAND Corporation and RAND Europe found delayed start times could add $83 billion to the US economy by 2027.The increases would come from improved high-school graduation rates leading to better jobs and fewer costs associated with sleep-related car crashes, obesity, and mental illness.Schools may need to make short-term investments, but the long-term upsides could be worth it.A new study may have discovered a simple way to add billions of dollars to the US economy: delay school start times.A new study published by the RAND Corporation and RAND Europe found that moving the first bell to 8:30 a.m. across America's middle schools and high schools could add some $9.3 billion to the economy within the next year and $83 billion over the next decade."Everybody's always talking about the costs," Marco Hafner, a research leader at the RAND Corporation who was lead author of the study, told Business Insider, pointing to the costs of changing bus routes and the hassle of shifting school activities. "But no one's really talking about the benefits."Sign up for Business Insider's newsletter: What you need to know every day delivered right to your inbox.Schools have been slow to adopt recommendations from the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics, which have cited health reasons in arguing that preteens and teenagers shouldn't start school earlier than 8:30 a.m."The research is clear that adolescents who get enough sleep have a reduced risk of being overweight or suffering depression, are less likely to be involved in automobile accidents, and have better grades, higher standardized test scores, and an overall better quality of life," pediatrician Judith Owens, the lead author of a 2014 AAP policy report, said in a statement.Some statesas well as individual districts and schoolshave taken steps to follow those recommendations; however, many more have said the move isn't feasible from a scheduling standpoint. In certain cases, Hafner said, schools have needed to push their athletics back to compensate for lost time. Others are forced to invest in more buses, since the single fleet that used to get kids at different times now must get them all at once.In 2014, roughly 93% of high schools and 83% of middle schools in the US started before 8:30 a.m., according to a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.For the latest study, researchers relied on CDC data comprising school start times from 47 states. They used that data to build an economic model on the effects that car crashes and high-school graduation rates had on economic gain in a given state.Results showed marked increases in students' long-term output once they entered the working world. The data suggested an additional $140 billion could be added to the US economy over 15 years.Hafner said he had no expectations entering the study, and he conceded that $140 billion was small relative to the US's gross domestic product of $18.57 trillion. But he also said $9.3 billion a year was nothing to sneeze atit's roughly the annual revenue of Major League Baseball.Plus, the researchers' estimates erred on the conservative side, he said. As Hafner noted, the team's model didnt examine every possible consequence of early start times. Insufficient sleep has been linked to weight gain in children, for example, and one study suggests that childhood obesity has an annual cost of roughly $45 billion. And research has suggested that teens who haven't slept enough are more likely to commit violent crime and damage property, both of which carry annual costs in the billions, the authors say. Decreases in mental illness would most likely bring costs down too, they said."People mainly talk about the cost implications," Hafner said. "But I think this could be a good contribution to the whole kind of feedback about it. It's not only about public health, it's not only about costit's actually good for the economy."SEE ALSO:Schools around the US are finally pushing back their start times ' and it's workingJoin the conversation about this storyNOW WATCH: This school in Thailand is made entirely out of earth and bamboo
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