Alexis

“Then the investment in education grew almost tenfold in the course of the twentieth century and reached about 6 percent of the national income in all Western countries during the 1980s and 1990s, making it possible to finance almost universal access to secondary education, with a clear advance in access to higher education. Within this general landscape marked by the expansion of education, the United States’ edge was particularly prominent around the middle of the twentieth century. In the 1950s, the proportion of children aged twelve to seventeen (boys and girls taken together) enrolled in secondary education was already almost 80 percent in the United States. At the same time, the rate of enrollment in secondary schools was between 20 and 30 percent in the United Kingdom and France, and barely reached 40 percent in Germany and Sweden.”
― Thomas Piketty, A Brief History of Equality