117 The present research examined the return to schooling (Public and Private schools) in the census region of the East South-Central Division of the United States. The demographic diversity of this region is the primary reason for its selection. The functional form has specified wage as the log-linear function of school attendance, controlling for gender, race, work experience, occupation status, and educational attainment. We followed the extant literature to include a few socioeconomic variables. The article has used 2020 sample data from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series to estimate the parameter coefficients. The results show that private schools yield a higher return regarding subsequent wage earnings. Further, the wage differential between private school & public school is higher for African Americans than for Caucasian Americans; similarly, the same differential is higher among females and males. We differed from the earlier studies in choosing a simplistic qualitative variable of schooling choice. Rather than looking into more school-specific details like the student-teacher ratio, the relative salary of teachers, and the length of school terms on the estimates of the return to education, we have considered the choice of schooling (public school versus private school) as the critical quality parameter https://ijhem.com/details&cid=117 https://ijhem.com/cdn/article_file/ICRSF-2026-Abstract-Proceeding.pdf Volume 12 Issue 02 23 2026-08-01 2026-06-22 no 0000-00-00 0000-00-00 0000-00-00 0000-00-00 Schooling Choices Public Schools Private Schools Demography Human Capital Wage Differential none 14 0 0 Piya Chatterjee University of Akron, USA Deepraj Mukherjee Kent State University, USA