Education is in many ways a valuable preparation for future work, there are many important goals which can only be achieved (or can be achieved better) with lot

Education is in many ways a valuable preparation for future work, there are many important goals which can only be achieved (or can be achieved better) with lots of education. But... it is also a social signal, and therefore a positional good. To the extent there is social status in being among the top third of the education scale, there can never be more than third of all people in that category. The above seems ridiculously obvious... but is underappreciated in the analysis of many phenomena. (Another example: if you define poverty as the 15th percentile of some measure, by definition the poverty level will always be 15%. To figure out if there's real progress being made, on poverty or education or anything else, a scale must be found that is not positional, that is somehow an absolute measure.)