Beyond Supply and Demand Wars

In this section of the MIT poverty course the discussion about misconceptions on education continues. One major misconception is that the rate of return or the outcomes of the investment in education is always the same when in reality it can differ from one country to another. Factors that affect rate of return is a country's education quality, overall GDP, and health of its citizens. The higher the quality in education, the higher the rate of return. The higher the the GDP is, the more likely a country will invest in education and the healthier a countries over all population is, the more likely there will be available funds to invest in education.


Another huge misconception that parents believe is that if a child gets through high school they will be able to automatically get a government job. When they make a 12 year investment and realize that this may not be so true, they are discouraged from continuing to educated their child and are less likely to educate another child if they have one. The thing is not that the parent does not believe education is valuable, they just do not know which part of it is valuable.

This made me develop the following questions.

Why is their not a system that supports education if it is so valuable?

Why is education not easy to improve?

I have not found an answer to these questions yet but for the last one I suggest that education is easy to improve on a small scale but harder on a larger scale.