An Educated Public Doesn't Grow The Economy.

A lot of liberals claim that government should provide "free" college because it helps to grow the economy. I thought, I dunno, to test that hypothesis. We should see that countries with a higher percentage of people with college degrees should have higher rates of growth. You know what I found out? There's ZERO correlation.

Here's a scatter plot showing of GDP growth vs. The percentage of people with a tertiary education Aged 25 - 64 by country.

I have also looked at the percentage of people with different levels of higher education and with different age groups having a degree. I have also found no correlation with those stats either.

Another thing I found is that there's no correlation between gdp growth and the academic performance of 15 year olds.

Something is that is correlated with high school student performance and percentage of people with a tertiary education, is income inequality in different countries. So more equal a society is the better academic performance and more people complete higher education.

There's 18% correlation with people with a higher education and gini coefficient. There's also a 16% correlation with high school student performance and gini coefficient. These aren't super high correlations

I'm not exactly sure the reason for these correlations. It might be because more equal countries tend to encourage kids to achieve more in academics. It might be because poorer kids tend to have more attention in class and more resources. It might be because where education is better people tend to demand more from their governments.

Note: A high gini coefficient means that a country has a high amount income inequality and vice versa.

Sources

• GDP Growth: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG
• Tertiary Education: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tertiary_education_attainment
• Academic Performance of 15 year olds: https://www.oecd.org/pisa/pisa-2015-results-in-focus.pdf
• Gini Coefficient: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2172rank.html