It is commonly asserted that education is essential to supporting economic growth and improved living standards. And in modern contexts, there is considerable evidence of the gains from education to individuals and society. However, the historic evidence is rather more mixed.
The starting point for my research is Joel Mokyr’s idea that the general level of education of the population may matter less for growth and development than the specialised skills of a relative elite: the ‘upper tail’ of the human capital distribution. I focus specifically on the role of upper-secondary and tertiary-level education — what I define as ‘higher education’ — as a channel for the accumulation of this upper-tail human capital.
My dissertation presents a compilation of papers that examine both who pursued higher education, and how the skills of graduates contributed to economic and social development in the lead-up to and during industrialisation. The empirical setting for my analysis is nineteenth and early twentieth century Scandinavia, drawing on historic source material on the graduates of higher education in Denmark, Norway and Sweden.
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