📚 Tertiary Education

Welcome to Latinometrics. We bring you Latin American insights and trends through concise, thought-provoking data visualizations.

Education 🏫

Fifty years ago, less than one out of every ten Latin Americans attended university.

Educational inequality, like income inequality, served as an enduring legacy of the region’s colonial past. Only the very wealthy could afford to head to college—and men tended to go in larger numbers than women (more on that later).

Today, it’s a different world. Over half of all Latin Americans have enrolled in some form of tertiary education, which refers to the university level and above (graduate school, etc.). The rise from the figures of the early 1970s to today have been drastic, seeing nearly uninterrupted growth.

But is the (college) party over?

The most recent figures available from the World Bank, for 2022, show the first time this century that Latin American college enrollment dropped year-over-year. Not since the debt-crisis days of the early 1990s has a decline been seen, reflecting perhaps just a blip but perhaps a symptom of some of the economic malaise being seen in large regional countries like Argentina and Peru.

Regardless, there’s probably no reason to fret—yet. The last few years which featured declines in enrollment preceded the region’s fastest period of growth. No doubt Latin America’s excellent universities, if they can assure continued financial feasibility, will continue to attract many of the brightest minds in the region.

More often than not, these bright minds will be women, as today 6 out of 10 women in the region (compared to less than half of men) enroll in tertiary education. In fact, women have powered the rise of universities in Latin America since 1970, with 14x growth in enrollment numbers in that time period.

As a result? Latin American countries now look a bit more like the rest of the world when it comes to gender splits in schools, as our next chart shows.

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