In Marginal Revolution: Is education good for growth?, Tyler Cowen notes that “It has long been received wisdom that education spurs economic growth,” then points to a skeptical take on the issue:
[T]here is actually a striking global correspondence between the world economic slowdown since 1973 and ever-increasing levels of educational spending. [...] Between 1970 and 1998 Egypt’s primary enrolment rates grew to more than 90 per cent, secondary schooling levels went from 32 per cent to 75 per cent, and university education doubled — yet over the same period Egypt moved from being the world’s forty-seventh poorest country to being the forty-eighth. [...] The rapid growth of Hong Kong, another of the East Asian tigers, wasn’t accompanied by substantial investment in education. Its expansion of secondary and university education came later, as more prosperous Hong Kong parents used some of their newfound wealth to give their children a better education than they had had.
As he points out, “Rich countries spend more on education for the same reason that they consume more leisure.” Anyone whose friends spent five years finishing their English Lit degrees knows that.