Pew Report: Jews and Christians More Educated Than Atheists and Muslims
A new study by the Pew Research Center found that worldwide, Jews have the most years of formal education, followed by Christians, with atheists, Buddhists, Muslims and Hindus trailing behind.
The report suggested that differences in educational attainment are partly a function of where religious groups are concentrated throughout the world. For instance, most of the world’s Jews live in the United States and Israel – two especially developed countries with high levels of education.
But the study also noted that even within a given country there can be important differences in educational attainment. In sub-Saharan Africa, the report stated, Christians generally have higher average levels of education than Muslims, perhaps due to the importance placed on formal education within religious traditions or historical factors such as missionary activity during colonial times.
In its summary of the Pew report, the New York Times chose bury the lede regarding the educational accomplishments of Christians worldwide to underscore the situation of Christians vis-à-vis religious minorities in America, with its piece “Christians in U.S. Are Less Educated Than Religious Minorities, Report Says.”
The Pew study explained this situation by noting 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.”
Immigration policies often favor highly skilled applicants, Pew stated, and “it is often the well-educated who manage to overcome the financial and logistical challenges faced by those who wish to leave their homeland for a new, far-off country.”
Of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims in 2010, nearly four-in-ten (36%) adults had no formal schooling at all, the Pew Center reports. Globally, Muslims and Hindus have the largest shares of adherents with no formal education, and are four times more likely than Christians to have had no schooling.
In Europe, which has experienced a heavy influx of Muslim immigrants in recent years, Muslims tend to have significantly less education than non-Muslims. The biggest gap is in Germany, with Muslims having and average of 4.2 fewer years of schooling than non-Muslims (9.5 years vs. 13.7 years, respectively).
The data used in the recent report is from 2010, and the Pew Center notes that “the surge of Muslim refugees to Europe in 2015 and 2016 from countries such as Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan may have increased the number of Muslims with fewer years of schooling than non-Muslims in several European countries.”
This past year, Europe also saw a massive increase in immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa, where the formal education of Muslims is particularly low.
I thought the majority of atheists were more enlightened than this. I guess there are plenty of atheist ditch diggers.
Proselytizing Atheists are more intolerant than any other group in America.
That's certainly true.
Education and common sense don't always go hand in hand though. I've seen a couple of doctors who just had to have a Jaguar.
I have to laugh at silly shit like this. Christians love to point out the high percentages of the population that identify themselves as Christians, and then take every opportunity to call out what kinds of people aren't "real" Christians. There isn't much left when you remove the ones who cheat on their spouses, have abortions, don't practice their faith, exhibit greed and hate, etc etc. The same thing is probably typical of all faiths. Take out the ones that aren't "real" and re-run this analysis, then we'll talk.
Christians in U.S. Are Less Educated Than Religious Minorities, Report Says
By LIAM STACK DEC. 13, 2016
Religious minorities in the United States are far more likely to have attended college or a vocational school than members of the Christian majority, according to a review of census and survey data from 151 countries released on Tuesday that found wide gaps in education among followers of the world’s major religions.
The review was based on data from 2010 and was conducted by the Pew Research Center , which also found an education gap between men and women within religious groups. The researchers said the educational differences among the faiths were rooted in immigration policies that favor the educated, as well as in political, economic and historical factors.
There were 267 million Christians in the United States when the data was collected, but only 36 percent of them had a postsecondary education, including college or a vocational school, the researchers said. That made them the least-educated religious group in the country.
Jews in the United States were more than twice as likely as Christians to have a postsecondary degree, and Hindus were almost three times as likely, Pew said. Buddhists, Muslims and those who said they were religiously unaffiliated were also more likely to have a college degree than those who identified themselves as Christians.