> The main reason that the United States became the dominant superpower of the early-mid 20th century and eclipsed its European peers was that many more kids in the United States had been going to high school for a long time.
The data from the time shows little difference between Canada and the USA in high school attendance. Canada might have even had a slight edge. And now Canada is considered most educated nation on earth, according to the OECD, approaching 70% of the population having a tertiary education, compared to just 40% stateside.
If high school was the significant factor, why has Canada never really become all that significant of a power? Several European powers are more powerful than Canada despite their supposed lack of education. It is questionable if Canada would even be strong as it is if it weren't America's neighbour.
> I think if we want to educate more people we need to take a long hard look at how tertiary education works in the US.
I guess the first question is: What is Canada getting out of it? Certainly the top promise the tertiary education system likes to trumpet – higher incomes – hasn't materialized. Canadians make far less money than their American counterparts in almost all cases, not to mention that incomes have been stagnant as far back as the data goes.
> If high school was the significant factor, why has Canada never really become all that significant of a power?
Because Canada had far, far fewer high school graduates. It just has a smaller population, currently ~1/9th of the United States. There are enormous economies of scale due to populations. As very simple examples, look at the size of the impact - the market for what a business produces, the people affected by what an activist achieves - or compare the money and military that the populations of the US and Canada can afford to invest in international influence. Consider the difference today, from Russia's or Iran's perspectives, between being cut off from the Canadian market and being cut off from the US market.
So what you're saying is that America became a superpower because it had a lot of people who, notably, weren't busy spending their time rebuilding society after a war? That seems like a much more reasonable explanation, honestly.
You said that America became a superpower because it had a lot of people, unlike Canada which had comparatively few people.
To which I added that America was different to the countries in Europe that had large populations as those large populations were busy cleaning up the mess made by several wars that took place during the rise of America.
It stands to reason that if your people are busy cleaning up, they aren't moving you forward. There is only so much time in the day. That's a tremendous advantage America had alongside its large population.
I see; I didn't realize you were talking about European countries. Good points, IMHO.
I would add that much of what was destroyed in Europe was necessary to productive, advanced economic activity - factories and their contents, infrastructure, etc etc. The most valuable human capital (looking at it from a purely economic perspective) - young, able, working age adults - were the soldiers and disproportionately killed. And without functioning economies, they produced much less money to invest in rebuilding and growing.
However, the US population is still ~4x the size of any advanced European economy (Germany has ~80 million).
> If high school was the significant factor, why has Canada never really become all that significant of a power? Several European powers are more powerful than Canada despite their supposed lack of education
The same reason as why Norway or Switzerland are not great powers despite being rich - population. At the end of WW2 Canada had 12.5mn people, an order of magnitude less than Germany or Japan, let alone the US or the USSR.
Since then Canada's population has tripled, while the German/French/Polish/Italian population has been flat-ish, so now Canada is considered in the same ballpark -- but it is still one tenth of the size of the US, with 1/10th of the potential for military/espionage funding, 1/10 of the market to bootstrap global market leading companies etc.
I don't know much about Canada, but I'd be very interested in looking at census data for primary and secondary education in Canada for the whole of the 19th century. Do you have a source? Remember, the argument goes that the U.S. maintained a large educational gap for over 100 years which allowed it to overcome the productivity leads that the advanced European nations had built up.
I also question whether "making money" is the best way to judge education. Without opening up the philosophical Pandora's Box or determining a correct answer, the US is also far more unequal than Canada, a much worse place to be poor, etc.
The census, but the data starts to become a little sketchy going back as far as you're looking for. Admittedly, I was look at the period around the war, not the 100 years prior.
Canada wasn't great at record keeping in its early history. I expect you won't find anything before the 1910s and even then it is not exactly great. However, in the 1910s it seems both countries only saw around ~10% of the population attending high school, as best as I can tell. More clearly, they both saw around 30% by the 1930s when we start to see much better data.
Let's just assume it was 10% through the entire 19th century. If we attribute America's success in becoming a superpower to that small portion of the population attending high school, that still lends credence to the idea that most don't need to go to high school. Whether or not high school was significant, it is clear that America didn't need most in high school to reach superpower status.
> I also question whether "making money" is the best way to judge education.
I agree, but the industry doesn't. That is the number one feature pushed on students in the marketing. I sincerely doubt Canada or the USA would have such high attainment if people weren't lead to believe that they would make money by doing it. Some attend college because they truly have a love for education, but many more attend simply because they believe they'll be poor in the rest of their life if they don't.
So I did a little digging into the citations, and the most authoritative paper on the subject is J.-W. Lee and H. Lee, Human capital in the long run [1]. While there isn't a time-series for Canada, Fig. 9A shows the U.S. had a significant advantage over Canada in 1870 (in terms of average years of schooling per capita) and both countries had been increasing this number at approximately the same rate. Fig. 10 shows that this advantage remained in 1910. One other note is that the U.S. had a significant slave population until the Civil War (and Black Americans faced significant educational barriers thereafter) which has a significant effect on the U.S. numbers.
Another thing that this analysis doesn't take into account is the base level of GDP per capita per job. One of the reasons the U.S. took a long time to catch up was that Europe was much more productive to begin with. I don't know enough about the Canadian economy of the early-mid 19th century to speculate there.
I think the difference is due to entrepreneurship culture. Human capital is useless if they're not used efficiently. There's a lot more monetary capital flowing into R&D and startups compared to Canada that just invests in real estate (it's literally the largest sector of our GDP).
Do you have evidence that engineers create more economic growth? HN is a bit biased of course, and general reactionary culture is biased against humanities. But generally engineers have a bit of a ceiling on their careers. Management, leadership, and roles in society depend more on what you learn in the humanities.
> if your personal goals include having things like PTO and health insurance you're going to want the degree.
Only ~40% of Americans have completed some level of post-secondary schooling, and only ~30% have a college degree. ~60-70% of jobs do not offer PTO and health insurance? That seems a little hard to believe. The BLS indicates that 79% of jobs offer PTO.
Sure, but that PTO is pretty... not great outside of salaried careers. For instance, for 5 years of work at Starbucks, you can get a maximum of ~2 weeks paid vacation across those 5 years in California (which has specifically friendly legislation to encourage this).
The data from the time shows little difference between Canada and the USA in high school attendance. Canada might have even had a slight edge. And now Canada is considered most educated nation on earth, according to the OECD, approaching 70% of the population having a tertiary education, compared to just 40% stateside.
If high school was the significant factor, why has Canada never really become all that significant of a power? Several European powers are more powerful than Canada despite their supposed lack of education. It is questionable if Canada would even be strong as it is if it weren't America's neighbour.
> I think if we want to educate more people we need to take a long hard look at how tertiary education works in the US.
I guess the first question is: What is Canada getting out of it? Certainly the top promise the tertiary education system likes to trumpet – higher incomes – hasn't materialized. Canadians make far less money than their American counterparts in almost all cases, not to mention that incomes have been stagnant as far back as the data goes.