Study finds UN education plan inadequate for poor

from the Standard

The United Nations goal of universal primary education by 2015 will not be enough to help lift countries from poverty through schooling, according to a study.

Brian Sullivan

The United Nations goal of universal primary education by 2015 will not be enough to help lift countries from poverty through schooling, according to a study.

To reap economic benefits of education, students need to remain in school until they are at least in their early teens, wrote the authors, including demographer Wolfgang Lutz of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria.

The UN objective is among the eight Millennium Development Goals set by the organization to end poverty for more than one billion people globally.

The new study, published in the journal Science, calls the UN educational objective "important but insufficient" to help spur national economies.

"Our findings show that in order to get a significant push in economic growth for a poor country it helps to have not just universal primary education but also half or more of the population with at least junior secondary education," Lutz says in an e-mail.

His co-authors were Jesus Crespo Cuaresma of the University of Innsbruck, in Austria, and Warren Sanderson of Stony Brook University, a branch of the State University of New York.

China is an example of how this finding works out in practice, Lutz notes in an e-mail. China has a strong universal primary education system and many children follow that with additional schooling.

For industrialized countries, students need to remain in school until they are young adults, according to the study. Lutz says further economic growth in those countries often comes from the use of technology that is "associated with more university education."

The study looked at 120 nations. The researchers had complete economic and education data for 101 nations covering the years 1970 to 2000, Lutz says.

Earlier studies have not directly linked a nation's economic health to the education of its residents. Many of those studies attributed this "puzzle" to flaws in the education data available.