The century of education

This paper presents an historical database on educational attainment in 74 countries for the period 1870-2010. We use data on total enrolment in Primary, Secondary and at University to estimate average years of schooling using perpetual inventory methods. Several difficulties arise due to missing data. We use some simulations to assess the quality of schooling estimates and show that most of them become reliable around 1900. Then, we extend our series over the period 1960-2010 using Cohen and Soto (2007) database, which relies mainly on surveys. The correlation between the two sets of average years of schooling in 1960 is equal to 0.96. We use a measurement error framework to merge the two databases while correcting a systematic measurement bias in Cohen and Soto (2007); the latter comes from the fact that surveys conducted in the 1990s were used to infer average schooling in 1960 without taking into account differential mortality across educational groups. Basic descriptive statistics show a continuous spread of education that has accelerated in the second half of the twentieth century. We find evidence of fast convergence in years of schooling for a sub-sample of advanced countries during the 1870-1914 globalization period, and of modest convergence since 1980. Less advanced countries have been excluded from the convergence club in both cases.