The Relationship Between Population Growth and the Expansion of Education Systems in Developing Countries 1950-1970

In the past two decades or so an education revolution has occurred in developing countries. Most people want education for their children and governments have responded to the rapidly growing demand by increasing the supply of educational services at a rate without precedent in human history. But, questions have recently been raised about qualitative aspects of the expansion in school enrolments in developing countries. A number of studies have illustrated the potential awesome effects of population growth on education budgets in developing countries[4, 5, 8,12,13,15 and 21 pp.497-498]. The obvious question arises as to whether the negative qualitative implications of such population growth on education systems in developing countries are already apparent. The present paper evaluates available evidence on the extent to which quantitative and qualitative indicators of education trends have been related to population trends in developing countries over the period 1950-1970.