• Globally, literacy rate is increasing and education inequality is declining (in many countries women outperform men in educational attainment); literacy rates rose from 83% in 1990 to 92% in 2015 worldwide and from 60% to 74% for low-income countries (pdf). 
  | Related Megatrends:  Work; Education
• Of the EU-28 population aged 20–24, an average 83% had completed at least an upper secondary level of education (for women, the average is 85.6%). | Related Megatrends:  Work; Education
• One of the targets of the Europe 2020 strategy for education is to increase to 40% the proportion of 30–34 year-olds with tertiary education by 2020 (it has been 39.1% in 2016). | Related Megatrends: Technology; Work
• Policies that decrease educational inequalities are likely to also reduce societal inequalities.
• Expanding the coverage of high quality publicly funded pre-school child care could diminish social inequalities, which already exists before school starts. 
• Rising compulsory school age is associated with decreased dropout rates and hence lower inequality of educational attainment.
• By 2030, developing economies will be home to 3 times more skilled workers than high-income (OECD) countries – up from 2 times more in 2012. This is triggering major changes in global income distribution, reducing global inequalities and swelling the ranks of the world’s middle class, which accounted for just a quarter of the global population at the turn of the millennium, but by 2030 is projected to account for 5.3 billion – or nearly two thirds – of world population.

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