In recent decades, progress toward universal education has been unprecedented. Illiteracy in the developing world has fallen from 75 percent of people a century ago to less than 25 percent today. The average number of years spent in school in developing countries more than doubled between 1965 and 1990, from 2.1 to 4.4, among those age twenty-five and over. However, while the number of people with access to some schooling has increased, improvements at the secondary level have been patchy. At the same time, improvements in the quality of primary education have also been less than impressive and there are still many countries, especially in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, where basic education is far from universal.

The focus of this talk is on the rationale, the consequences, and the means of providing a basic and secondary education of quality for all the world's children. The talk will summarize the findings of a 3 year research project on universal basic and secondary education sponsored by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and jointly directed by Professor Joel Cohen (Rockefeller University and Columbia University) and the speaker.

David Bloom is an economist and demographer and the Clarence James Gamble Professor at the Harvard School of Public Health. In January 2003 he was appointed Chairman of the School's Department of Population and International Health.

Bloom received a B.S. in Industrial and Labor Relations from Cornell University in 1976, an M.A. in Economics from Princeton University in 1978, and a Ph.D. in Economics and Demography from Princeton in 1981. Prior to joining the public health school faculty in 1996, Bloom served on the public policy faculty at Carnegie-Mellon University, and on the economics faculties at Harvard University and Columbia University.

From 1996 to 1999 Bloom served as Deputy Director of the Harvard Institute for International Development. From 1987 to 1996 he was Professor of Economics at Columbia University where he served as Chairman of the Department of Economics from 1990 to 1993. Bloom has worked extensively in the areas of labor, population, and health and has been retained as a consultant to various public and private organizations, both within the United States and abroad. He has taught numerous courses on labor economics, development economics, global health and population, and statistics and econometrics at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. He has also published more than one hundred fifty articles, book chapters, and books.

Bloom has extensive field experience throughout the developing world, including work in Indonesia, China, India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, South Africa, Jamaica, and El Salvador. Bloom has served as a member of the Book Review Board and the Board of Reviewing Editors of Science magazine, Associate Editor for the Review of Economics and Statistics, and Contributing Editor for American Demographics. In addition, he has received various honors and awards for his research and teaching, including a Sloan Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a Visiting Scholar appointment at the Russell Sage Foundation.

Bloom is currently serving as a member of the Board of Directors of the American Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR). Bloom is a coauthor (with Henry Rosovsky) of Higher Education in Developing Countries: Peril and Promise. He is also co-director (with Joel Cohen) of an American Academy of Arts and Sciences project on universal basic and secondary education.