Education for All

One of the most remarkable social changes of the post-neoliberal era has been the dramatic expansion of tertiary and higher education throughout the industrializing world. Here are the numbers from UNESCO's 2010 Education for All report on tertiary education around the world, measured in millions of students per country. Note that the BRIC countries are just the tip of the iceberg:





For the sake of comparison, note that the comparable US figure rose from 13.769 million in 1999 to 17.759 million in 2007. While the developing world is still far behind in per capita terms, it is catching up fast, and its vast student body has become one of the central drivers of its own unique forms of democratization, industrialization and mediatization.