10/7 Essay: Similar to 9/30’s essay, write what topic (or graph(s)) you are looking at. Describe what you see. Are there trends? If so, what are they? Does anything surprise you? Where possible, connect what you see to previous readings, discussions, or your experiences.

The topic I chose was financing education, which focuses on how much a country spends on education, of all levels, and it also talks about whether the government or people are spending the money. The first graph I observed showed the government expenditure on education from 1960 to 2010. It compared the values for several low to middle income countries and the average for high-income countries. Starting in 1960, there was a range of 0.9% to 2.3% of government expenditure on education in the middle to low-income countries. More of the countries studied were closer to 2%, with the exception of Pakistan which was 0.9%. However, in the high-income countries, this percentage was 5.2% from 1965, the first year there was data available. In 2010, the range of percent government expenditure was 2.37% to 5.62%. Pakistan had the lowest with 2.37%, and India had the next lowest with 3.33% but the other low and mid income countries were near the 4.5% to 5.5% range. Brazil ended up having the highest percentage with 5.62% spent, and the high income countries was 5.59% spent. Overall, you can see that overtime the government of countries, whether they are developed or not, have put more money towards paying for education. The high-income countries data is interesting to look at because there was not a great increase in the percentage spent from 1965-2010, whereas the low- to mid-income countries made great strides. The importance of education, especially in these lower income countries, is being stressed and the education inequality is being decreased. This relates to the freedoms, Sen talks about where people need to be educated for the country to develop. If children are getting educated, they can help contribute to society and help better the economy. In high-income countries, there might not be a great change because they are already able to spend money on schools, because people are educated and making money. In the other countries, people need to become educated so that they can make more money, and then through taxes the government can spend that money to keep funding schools.

In the second graph I looked at, it described the percentage of total education expenditures by household in 30 different countries grouped by income. It broke up each country to show how much the households spend on each level of education as well. The top group of countries I assume is the higher-income countries and the bottom group is the low- to middle-income countries. In the top group, the primary and secondary education expenditure is much lower, and then the tertiary education is what makes the expenditure percentages greater in some of the countries. In the lower part of the chart (low-mid income), the secondary education is what is using the most money on average, and then tertiary and primary education seem to be around the same percentage but less than the secondary. It seems that there is a greater percentage of expenditure from households in low-mid income countries on average for all education. I think the secondary has a greater percentage than tertiary for the bottom countries because less people in less developed countries will even go to tertiary school, therefore spending less money on it. They have to focus more on paying for secondary education. For the higher income countries, primary and secondary education expenditures are extremely lower and about equal in each country, making me think that this education is provided by the government (through taxes), and then they focus more on paying for tertiary education.

Graph 1:

Graph 1: 2010

Graph 2