Was higher education a major channel through which the US became an economic superpower in the 20th century?

Abstract

This paper offers a thesis for why the United States (US) overtook the United Kingdom (UK) and other European countries in the 20th century in both aggregate and per capita GDP as a case study of recent models of endogenous growth, where "human capital" is the engine of growth. By human capital we mean an intangible asset, best thought of as a stock of embodied and disembodied knowledge comprising education, information, entrepreneurship, and productive and innovative skills, which is formed through investments in schooling, job training, and health as well as through research and development projects and informal knowledge transfers (cf. Ehrlich and Murphy 2007). The conjecture is that the ascendancy of the US as an economic superpower in the 20th century owes considerably to its faster human capital formation relative to that of the UK and "old Europe." This paper assesses whether the thesis has legs to stand on through both stylized facts and a supplementary quasi-experimental empirical analysis. The stylized facts indicate that the US led other major developed countries in schooling attainments per adult population member, beginning in the latter part of the 19th century and lasting throughout the 20th century, especially at the secondary and tertiary levels. The quasi-experimental analysis constitutes the first attempt to test the hypothesis that the US's ascendancy to a major economic power stems largely from the impact of the first Morrill Act of 1862, which launched the public higher education movement in the US through the establishment of land grant colleges and universities across the nation during the latter part of the 19th century. The higher education movement appears to have spearheaded a higher long-term rate of growth in per capita income in the US relative to the UK and other major European countries.

Carbon-Free Energy and Sustainable Environment: The Role of Human Capital and Technological Revolutions in Attaining SDGs

“…Human capital development enables individuals to have a comparative advantage over others. Human capital consists of health, education, expertise, experience, leadership, and access to services [12].…”

Public and private investment in human capital and intergenerational transfers in Asia: an overview

“…The only paper in the first category is 'Was higher education a major channel through which the US became an economic superpower in the 20th century?' (Cook and Ehrlich 2018). This paper proposes, and provides empirical support for, an intriguing thesis-that the US overtook the United Kingdom and other European countries in the 20th century in both aggregate and per capita GDP thanks to a faster rate of human capital formation beginning in the latter part of the 19th century and lasting throughout the 20th century.…”

“…The five papers included in this special section can be categorized by both geographic focus and topic. When the papers are categorized by geographic focus, one paper (Lee and Lee 2018) conducts a cross-country comparison, one paper (Cook and Ehrlich 2018) analyzes the case of the United States (US), one paper (Niimi 2018) analyzes the case of Japan and two papers (McGarry and Sun 2018;Haepp and Lyu 2018) analyze the case of China.…”

Factors Affecting Employment Stability of Labor Immigration: Implications for Sustainable Development

“…Human capital is represented by the knowledge, skills, experience, and health that people have [21]. With the development of society, people pay more attention to objective human capital, with "education, health, and skill training" [22] as the core, as well as to subjective human capital in terms of "emotion, ability", indicating that subjective human capital plays an extremely important role in employment stability. Although the government provides certain employment opportunities for labor migrants at the beginning of their relocation, whether they can truly obtain stable employment and a stable source of income depends on the level of human capital they themselves have, especially in terms of subjective human resources.…”