Aug 10, 2026 14 min Reading Part of One Sentence Counts as Literate The world's most-used household survey decides you can read if you finished secondary school, or read a sentence off a card, or read part of one. Of 686 country-years where UNESCO records how a literacy rate was produced, 52 came from an actual test. Of the 60 countries reporting 95% literacy or better, 54 have never been recorded administering one. DataEducationStatistics
Aug 5, 2026 20 min The Payback Period Assumes You Are Paying It Back Divide a degree's median debt by its graduates' median earnings and you get the price of that degree in years of salary. Across 31,941 US programmes the median is 0.59, about seven months. That sum is correct. It is also a price, not a deadline, and it quietly assumes a ten-year repayment schedule that about one federal loan dollar in five is actually on. DataEconomicsEducation
Jul 27, 2026 17 min The Easiest Promise to Keep Is the One You Can Count Indonesia put an education spending share into its constitution, went to court to enforce it, and has met it every year since 2009. The money was budgeted exactly as promised. The reading was not. A percentage is a promise about an input, and it can be kept in full while the thing it was meant to buy stays out of reach. DataIndonesiaEducation
Jul 11, 2026 8 min The Cheapest Degree Abroad Isn't the Best Deal A master's in the USA costs about thirteen times one in Greece. But sticker price is the wrong ruler. Once you divide the cost by what you would actually earn, the bargain ranking reshuffles, and the cheapest countries stop being the best deals. Mexico looks cheap and is one of the worst. DataEducationEconomics