Years of schooling since 1870

The average years of schooling of people aged 15 to 64, every five years since 1870.

This is the average number of years of school completed by people aged 15 to 64, every five years from 1870. The economists Jong-Wha Lee and Hanol Lee built the series from censuses, enrolment records and historical statistics, extending the Barro-Lee dataset back in time. It shows how mass education spread: from about four years in the richest countries of 1870 to more than twelve today. The Schooling page gives the UN's yearly figures for recent decades.

World map · Average years of schooling

Year

Source: Barro and Lee (2015); Lee and Lee (2016) – with major processing by Our World in Data (updated 2023-07-17) · fetched 30 Oct 2026

Over time · Average years of schooling

Source: Barro and Lee (2015); Lee and Lee (2016) – with major processing by Our World in Data (updated 2023-07-17) · fetched 30 Oct 2026

Years

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All countries · Average years of schooling

Continent Year

Source: Barro and Lee (2015); Lee and Lee (2016) – with major processing by Our World in Data (updated 2023-07-17) · fetched 30 Oct 2026

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Every country and year, with the source on each row.

About the author

Hello there, I’m Klaus Jürgen Folz. I studied Mechanical Engineering at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) in Brazil, and I work in Austria as a lead Python and Power BI developer. I built Data Mechanics because good decisions start with facts. Public data is often scattered, hard to find or locked behind paywalls, and too much of what we read about the world is biased. Here, every number is shown as it was published, next to its source, so anyone can check it, compare countries and leaders, and draw their own conclusions.

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