Global: The Economic and Noneconomic Benefits of Tertiary Education in Low-Income Contexts

Abstract

There have been debates around the social impact of tertiary education in developing countries for decades. In the late 1980s, a series of studies commissioned by the World Bank seemed to indicate that, in developing contexts, investment in tertiary education would yield a much lower social return than that in lower levels of education. In contexts where primary education was scarce and illiteracy was rampant, there was a clear economic argument for prioritizing basic education to fuel economic growth.