An Indian information technology expert, a Pakistan-origin doctor making fortunes in the United States. Sounds like a regular success story.
But there is an uncommon dimension to this story. These professionals do not represent the state of education among overall populations in their countries of origin. Instead, they come from the highly educated segments of the countries – among the best and the brightest.
The same is the case with Muslim and Hindu immigrants from other countries generally, as revealed in a latest study that looks at how followers of different religions fare in educational attainment around the world.
A new Pew Research Center global demographic study finds Muslims and Hindus who emigrate to the United States are highly educated and fill highly paid positions.
Their professional success also challenges a common perception that immigrants take away regular American jobs.
A key explanation is the US immigration system. Immigration policies favor such applicants that have higher levels of skills or education.
The Pew study on differences in educational attainment finds that religious minorities often have more education, on average, than a country’s majority religious group, particularly when the minority group is largely foreign-born and comes from a distant country.
For instance, the Pew Research Service says, in the U.S., where Christians make up the majority of the adult population, Hindus and Muslims are much more likely than Christians to have post-secondary degrees. And unlike Christians, large majorities of Hindus and Muslims were born outside the United States (87% of Hindus and 64% of Muslims compared with 14% of Christians, according to a 2014 Pew Research Center survey).
But both Muslims and Hindus have much lower levels of educational attainment in the countries they hail from. Yet, they have made the biggest advances in terms of expanding the school level education.
According to the findings, overall Jews are more highly educated than any other major religious group around the world, while Muslims and Hindus tend to have the fewest years of formal schooling.
“These gaps in educational attainment are partly a function of where religious groups are concentrated throughout the world,” the study concludes
It explains that, for example, the vast majority of the world’s Jews live in theUnited States and Israel – two economically developed countries with high levels of education overall.
On the other hand, low levels of attainment among Hindus outside the United States reflect the fact that 98% of Hindu adults live in the developing countries of India, Nepal and Bangladesh.
Despite recent strides, gender disparities exist.
The study that draws on census and survey data from 151 countries, finds large gender gaps in educational attainment within some major world religions.
“For example, Muslim women around the globe have an average of 4.9 years of schooling, compared with 6.4 years among Muslim men. And formal education is especially low among Hindu women, who have 4.2 years of schooling on average, compared with 6.9 years among Hindu men.”
Interestingly, there also are also important differences in educational attainment among religious groups living in the same region, and even the same country.
In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, Christians generally have higher average levels of education than Muslims. Some social scientists have attributed this gap primarily to historical factors, including missionary activity during colonial times.
Here are some parts of the Pew report that shed light on educational attainment trends among followers of major religions:
At present, Jewish adults (ages 25 and older) have a global average of 13 yearsof formal schooling, compared with approximately nine years among Christians, eight years among Buddhists and six years among Muslims and Hindus.
Religiously unaffiliated adults – those who describe their religion as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular” – have spent an average of nine years in chool, a little less than Christian adults worldwide.
But the number of years of schooling received by the average adult in all the religious groups studied has been rising in recent decades, with the greatest overall gains made by the groups that had lagged furthest behind.
For instance, the youngest Hindu adults in the study (those born between 1976 and 1985) have spent an average of 7.1 years in school, nearly double the amount of schooling received by the oldest Hindus in the study (those born between 1936 and 1955).
The youngest Muslims have made similar gains, receiving approximately three more years of schooling, on average, than their counterparts born a few decades earlier, as have the youngest Buddhists, who acquired 2.5 more years of schooling.
Over the same time frame, by contrast, Christians gained an average of just one more year of schooling, and Jews recorded an average gain of less than half a year of additional schooling.
