It’s no great secret that globally, education rates have been on the rise for decades.

The UNESCO Institute for Statistics tracks primary, secondary, and tertiary enrollment rates, which are the number of students enrolled in primary, secondary, or tertiary education programs versus the officially reported size of the age group.

From 1970 to 2023, the most recent year with data available, the gross secondary enrollment rate has nearly doubled, and the gross tertiary enrollment rate has more than quadrupled!

This is some seriously great progress, but it leaves open room for the question, what does the world look like with an increasingly well-educated population?

Perhaps the most obvious, and therefore least interesting, expected outcome from this increasingly educated populace is an increase in GDPs.

It makes sense, in a world where increasingly the highest paying sectors are highly skilled services type roles, an increase in educated well-trained workers naturally leads to higher economic output.

The shift here was subtle, but if you imagine a bell curve over the bars, it starts in 1970 very far to the left and as time goes on and eventually reaches 2023 has drifted steadily to the right.

Did you miss it? Now that you know what you are looking for, try replaying the animation and see if you can catch it.

Perhaps this trend is most clear when comparing it with our enrollment rates from earlier. We’ll start with secondary enrollment rates because this is where the trend is the easiest to spot, but you can always switch to primary or tertiary enrollment rates using the axis control at the bottom.

From this we can see a clear trend emerge. While it is not strictly correlational, in general as the educational enrollment rate rises, so does the per capita GDP.

We cannot definitively from this say that higher enrollment rates cause a country’s GDP per capita to rise, but we can reasonably conclude that it is very difficult for a country with low enrollment rates (especially primary and secondary) to have a high GDP per capita. The inverse also appears to be true; the higher a country’s educational enrollment rates the higher the likelihood they will have a high GDP per capita.

These are all great observations, but it can be a little difficult to track specific countries, let’s see these data on a map!

Hover over the countries below to track each value. Like before you can use the control at the bottom to switch between enrollment rates and GDP per capita.

That’s all well and good but what if we swap this for something more interesting?

This whole concept started because I had often heard talk that increasing education rates would result in a more accepting populace, but does that hypothesis really pan out?

While public policy in many cases tends to lag public opinion, it can still be a useful barometer to understand how the public is feeling about an issue.

The LGBT+ Legal Equality Index combines and weights 15 different individual policies related to LGBT+ rights and equality into an easily comparable score.

Let’s once again graph it versus our educational enrollment data.

Once again, we see a similar pattern start to emerge, countries with higher educational enrollment rates are more likely, but not guaranteed, to have more equitable laws surrounding LGBT+ rights.

While we can’t draw conclusions just from these datasets, what we can see here is an optimistic sign that the world is well on course to become a more educated and therefore open and welcoming place for all! ∎