High school got its name when secondary schooling counted as higher education
When most children never went beyond basic schooling, higher education meant what we now call secondary school. That older usage survives in the term high school. Today higher education means university-level study, and the share of young people worldwide enrolled in it doubled from 19% in 2000 to 38% in 2017.
The oldest known institutions of advanced learning are credited to dynastic Egypt, where houses of life served as libraries and scriptoriums holding works on law, mathematics, architecture and medicine, and trained both male and female doctors. Plato's Academy and Aristotle's Lyceum became templates for schools in Ptolemaic Alexandria. In South Asia, Taxila and later the Buddhist monastery of Nalanda, active from roughly 427 to 1197 CE, drew scholars from far away. China's Han dynasty set up the Taixue, or Grand School, to train officials in the Confucian classics, and it survived in some form until 1905.
In 425 CE the Byzantine emperor Theodosius II founded a school for public servants with 31 professors. Madrasas began as primary schools inside major mosques and grew into centres of advanced study. Historians often reserve the word university, though, for the self-governing guilds of students and teachers that emerged in 12th-century Europe, independent of church and state. Claims to be the oldest therefore compete: UNESCO and Guinness cite al-Qarawiyyin in Fez as the oldest continuously operating institution, Ez-Zitouna in Tunis dates from 737, and Bologna, founded in 1088, coined the term universitas itself.
Since the Second World War, participation has moved from an elite level of up to 15% of the age group to mass levels of 16 to 50%, and in many rich countries beyond half, which sociologist Martin Trow called open access. Only 9% of the relevant age group enrol in the poorest countries, against 77% in the wealthiest, and since the 1990s men have been underrepresented among students in most developed nations.
The payoff is measurable. An OECD report found that by 2014 tertiary graduates earned twice as much as median workers, and close to 40% of people aged 25 to 34 had gone to university. Critics worry about grade inflation and graduates outnumbering suitable jobs. The UN's 1966 economic and social rights covenant calls for higher education to be equally accessible on the basis of capacity.
Source: Tertiary education
