With graduation season upon us, it is time for the annual conversations about the value of schooling.  Robert Barro--professor of Economics at Harvard--and Jong-Wha Lee--Head of the Asian Development Bank’s Office of Regional Economic Integration (OREI) and Acting Chief Economist--have been studying the economic impact of "educational attainment" for several years.  In a recent column for Vox, they introduce some of their most recent findings.  

The average years of schooling has gone up steadily--from 3.2 years, globally, in 1950, to 5.3 years in 1980, to 7.8 years in 2010, the authors point out.  So what about the rate of return for extra years of schooling?  It appears that geography matters.  

Here's a graph from Barro and Lee that shows the "rates of return to an additional year of schooling, by region":

Barro and Lee:

Our estimates of rates of return for an additional year of schooling range from 5% to 12%. These estimates control for the simultaneous determination of human capital and output by using the 10-year lag of parents‘ education as an instrumental variable for the current level of schooling. These estimates are close to typical Mincerian return estimates found in the labour literature.

Estimates of rates of return to education vary across regions (Figure 2). The estimates for the group of advanced countries, East Asia and the Pacific, and South Asia are the highest at 13.3%. In contrast, the estimated rates of return are only 6.6% in Sub-Saharan Africa and 6.5% in Latin America. 

Read Educational attainment in the world, 1950–2010 here.