Is there a connection between the level of education in a country, and its national security? Writing in Foreign Affairs, Nicholas Eberstadt and Evan Abramsky think so.

“Education is a crucial component of human capital and, by extension, of national might. A better-educated citizenry means a more productive economy and thus greater military potential.”

Most countries have a citizenry that is much more educated than it was 50 or 100 years ago, but the distribution of education among countries is not even. Some countries have increased their “human capital” (including education) dramatically, others more incrementally.

“Americans enjoyed the world’s highest levels of educational attainment and accounted for far more of the world’s highly educated workforce than any other country. But that epoch is now history.”

China will soon surpass the US in the percentage of workers who are college educated, and in the next 20 years India’s workforce is likely to become more educated than America’s workers. “Western nations have been the biggest losers in the great reshuffling of educational heft."

 Can the US still remain economically and militarily dominant amid such change? “In an era when a single person’s productivity in one country can be greater than that of 90 people in another, human productivity will increasingly affect the global balance of power.”

It is not that levels of American education have fallen, rather that many developing countries (where most of the world’s population is) have narrowed a gap that was vast in 1950. Then, many nations had little school or college infrastructure, but huge investments have been made.

Educated world: “the share of the global adult population with at least some graduate education leaped from under two percent in 1950 to about 16 percent today and will approach 22 percent by 2040.” 

Economic boon: “Between 1950 and 2018, global per capita GDP more than quadrupled, growing at an estimated 2.2 percent per year. Our analysis suggests that increased schooling accounted for roughly a third of that productivity improvement.”

These fast rising levels of education have been a boon to the world economy, but what will the effect on geopolitics be?