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The facts about Education

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John Ess Posted: Thu, Oct 6 2011 4:16 PM

I just found these statistics. (source: us census bureau, pbs, pew forum, some other places).

Who is most likely to have a college degree?

Well, about 38 percent of people in America have a college degree. But that isn't a good statistic, because it doesn't describe who is trying for an education.

67 percent of Indian-Americans (Hindu) have a degree
60 percent of Pakistani-Americans have a degree
59 percent of Jews have a college degree
50 percent of Asians (total) have a college degree
36 percent of Arab-Americans have a college degree
29 percent of whites have a college degree
25 percent of immigrant blacks (from Africa) have a degree obtained here, and 16 percent of American blacks have a degree
13 percent of native Latinos have a degree, 9 percent of immigrant Latinos have a degree.

Then we can take a look at other countries to see if it transfers to wealth or better culture:

(Source: College board):


58 percent of Russians have a college degree
48 percent of Canadians
43 percent of Israelis
41 percent of Japanese
41 percent of New Zealanders
40 percent for US (a more recent answer than above)
36 percent of Finland
34 percent in Korea
34 percent in Norway
33 percent for Australia
33 percent Estonia
32 percent Ireland
32 percent Denmark
32 percent Belgium
31 percent United Kingdom
31 percent Switzerland


Everyone else apparently hates Education.

Russia has a GNP per capita of 18,000 dollars. Despite so many degrees.
Canada:  37,000 dollars.
Israel has a GNP per capita of about 27,000 dollars.
While the US has a GNP per capita of about 48,000 dollars.

The lowest on this list, Switzerland, has a GNP per capita of about 47,000 dollars.

Meaning, that it made really no difference that we can see from these statistics.

We can also see that race cannot be correlated entirely. Since India and Pakistan as countries hate Education, apparently, but people of these races do well in the US for some inexplicable reason. Perhaps the cultures themselves weigh people down, but the people are smarter than the cultures give them credit for. Only about 7 percent of Indians even graduate from high school, and high school is free in India. 15 percent even bother to go to class. (source: BBC).

China and Pakistan both have about 6 percent of their population with college degrees. This despite the fact that China has a literacy rate of 95 percent, while Pakistan has a literacy rate of about 50 percent. Go figure.
 
Educational spending based on GDP.
 
Cuba, Yemen, Swaziland, and Kenya all spend more as a percentage of their money on education than the US, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, or others.

7 percent of Cubans have a college degree.
39 percent of Cuban-Americans have a college degree. (which separates them from other Latinos).

Fidel Castro gives 18 percent of their GDP to education.
The US gives about 5.7 percent, which is a little bit higher than the european countries or Japan.

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/edu_edu_...spending-of-gdp
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Great work.  I think the high Indian/Pakistani statistic is due to the fact that the vast majority of the most intelligent and motivated individuals from these countries go overseas for higher education (particularly to the USA and Australia).

The Cuban education spending statistic is amazing.  I'm going to bring that one out whenever people claim that education spending is needed in order for people to become relatively wealthy, when in reality it is neither necessary nor sufficient, and its positivie effects compared to the detrimental effects of state intervention are meagre.

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Thomas Sowell pointed this out here at 5:35.

 

"One of the things that protects American education is the fact that American universities are in fact leading universities of the world.  But that's very misleading because some of these universities are so good, that it's very hard for American college students to get into them.  [...] So what we really have are international universities, on American soil."

 

 

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