Who Gets to Learn? A Global Snapshot of Education

Imagine lining up 22 countries from most to least educated. At the top sits Israel, where about 53% of adults have completed 16 or more years of schooling. At the bottom are India and Tanzania, where only about 1% have reached that same level.

In some nations, more than half the population has a college education, while in others, that number drops to just one percent.

That is a staggering gap — and it is one of the key findings from a massive study of over 200,000 people across the globe. The researchers wanted to understand not just how much education people have in different countries, but who within each country tends to get more education. They looked at factors like age, gender, marital status, employment, income, and whether someone was born in their country or moved there. What they found is that education is deeply uneven — not just between countries, but within them.

For example, people who earn more money tended to have more education in nearly every country studied. But even among the highest earners, a meaningful share of people still had fewer than 16 years of schooling. Employment mattered too: people working for an employer had higher education levels on average than self-employed people or homemakers, though there were exceptions. In Poland, self-employed people were actually more educated than those working for employers. The study also revealed fascinating country-level contrasts.

In Japan, younger people were more likely to have high education levels, while in Brazil, older people tended to have more. The researchers compared their estimates to existing data from the OECD and found a strong match (a correlation of 0. 83), giving them confidence in the results — while also providing brand-new education data for six countries and territories that had never been included in major international reports before.