Schooling Ain't Learning, But It Is Money By Bryan Caplan

Lant Pritchett is enjoying justified praise for his new The Rebirth of Education: Schooling Ain’t Learning. His central thesis: schooling has exploded in the Third World, but literacy and numeracy remain wretched.

The average Haitian and Bangladeshi today have more schooling than the average Frenchman or Italian in 1960:

On international literacy and numeracy tests, however, the average student in the developing world still scores far below the average student in the developed world. Gaps of one standard deviation plus are typical:

Solid work. But there’s an amazing fact that Pritchett largely ignores in this book. Despite the woeful failure of Third World schools to teach basic skills, Third World employers still greatly value educational attainment. In fact, credentials pay more in the developing world than they pay in the developed world! Psacharopoulos and Patrinos provide a thorough survey of the evidence. Quick (and conservative!) estimates say that the education premium averages 10.9% in low-income countries versus just 7.4% in high-income countries: