Perspective | Investing in education is the biggest long-term bet we can make

There’s a growing movement, especially among Effective Altruists, for “long-termism” — investing in positively influencing the long-term, distant future as a key moral priority, such as through preventing existential catastrophes, space colonization, or human enhancement and life extension.

It’s hard to square the fact that some of those who advocate for this approach also counsel against investing in education. They argue, however, that education already receives substantial funding and that efforts to improve it are not sufficiently cost-effective.

It is hard to imagine a better future without investing in the development of the next generation. That means transforming our education systems to develop young people with the knowledge and skills to navigate complexity, the agency to act on the world around them, the sense of purpose to use their capabilities in ways that improve collective welfare, and the wellbeing and connectedness that enable them to contribute alongside others.

This matters even more in a world defined by rapid change and growing complexity. If we are genuinely concerned with the well-being of people 100 years from now, it is hard to imagine what’s much more important than developing future generations so they can be responsive, resilient, and creative in responding to new challenges.

With that in mind, I want to consider the arguments that education already receives substantial investment and that improving it has not proven tractable.

‘Education already receives substantial investment’

Considering how people-dependent education is, we’re not investing nearly enough in education. Staff compensation is typically about three quarters of day-to-day education spending across Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. 

Yet in most, teaching does not compete well with other professions. According to the OECD’s 2026 report, primary school teachers across countries with available data consistently earn comparably less than workers with a similar mix of educational qualifications. In the United States, teachers’ annual salaries are roughly 25% below the earnings of similarly educated workers.

People often point to differences in per-pupil expenditure as evidence that additional investment will accomplish little. New York spends substantially more per student than Mississippi, for example, yet Mississippi achieves stronger results on some measures of fourth-grade reading and mathematics.

These comparisons raise legitimate questions about how resources are used, but they overlook the different labor markets in which schools compete for people. A separate analysis by the Economic Policy Institute comparing weekly wages found that teachers in New York earn over 17.7% less than comparable college-educated workers in their state; in Mississippi, the gap is 14.4%. Despite its much higher spending, New York is paying teachers at a similar disadvantage relative to their other career options.

While some envision artificial intelligence (AI) eliminating teachers, an overwhelming amount of evidence shows that learning depends on human connection. The recent PISA results — the OECD’s international comparisons of 15-year-olds’ achievement levels — reveal a correlation between students’ use of technology inside and outside of school and lower achievement levels. At the same time, they reveal a positive correlation between students reporting that their teachers care about them and high educational attainment.

This explains the recent experience of Khanmigo, for example, the AI tutor that Khan Academy launched and later acknowledged had struggled to sustain student engagement. Reflecting on its limited uptake, Sal Khan said, “I think our biggest lever is really investing in the human systems.” Even the much-discussed Alpha School, which by its own account achieves strong academic results in two hours of technology-enabled learning a day, depends heavily on human guides.

‘Improving education is not tractable’

Some U.S. philanthropists have shared, in both U.S. and global circles, that they’ve invested substantial resources in school systems and found progress slower and harder than they expected. Yet the record of educational progress in the U.S. gives us substantial reason to challenge the conclusion that education is intractable.

Research by Harvard economist Thomas Kane and his colleagues shows that income- and race-based achievement gaps in the United States narrowed over roughly 25 years, between 1990 and 2015, even as income inequality and income-based residential segregation increased. Kane has described educational improvement during this period as “one of the greatest social policy success stories in recent decades.”

These findings challenge the perception that decades of effort to improve education have accomplished little.

Chicago is an example of what this progress can look like. Once regarded as one of the worst-performing school systems in the United States, it went on to achieve substantial improvements in student learning. Educational researcher Tony Bryk’s work on school improvement in Chicago shows why improving an education system is itself a long game.

Thirty years ago, the system was stuck: its district bureaucracy, responsible for enacting top-down directives, was completely disconnected from the educators in classrooms and schools. The business community, meanwhile, was disengaged, constantly complaining about the schools, but doing little to improve them.

When I spoke with Bryk about how the system improved, he described a process that unfolded over 15 to 20 years. New teachers entered the system, and significant investment went into their development.

Over time, some became principals, some launched innovations and nonprofits, and others moved into district leadership and began changing it from within. They also drew business and philanthropic leaders into making sustained investments in the system, while Bryk’s Center for Urban School Improvement helped these stakeholders learn together. Bryk described this as “one big project in adult development.”

Teachers needed time to gain experience, grow into new roles, and continue developing at each stage. Even under ideal political conditions, he believed that process would still have taken time. For those concerned with the long-term future, this is a reason to invest patiently: The people we develop today can spend decades strengthening the institutions that shape generations to come.

Today, the systems that serve our young people aren’t delivering for most of them.

Systems are too often failing to develop the holistic qualities that young people need to shape a better future in today’s world, and they frequently fail to deliver even a satisfactory basic education, with hundreds of millions of children worldwide “in school but not learning” and global levels of education declining over the past decade, especially among disadvantaged children.

According to the World Bank, 7 in 10 children in low- and middle-income countries cannot read a simple text with comprehension by age 10. In the United States, nearly 7 in 10 fourth graders scored below NAEP’s Proficient level in reading in 2024.

We need to be clear about how far we are from preparing the next generation to navigate and shape this world for the better. The difficulty of improving education is a reason to be more serious about how we invest in it, not less ambitious. The future ultimately depends on the capabilities, judgment and choices of generations of people we will never meet, so education may be one of the biggest long-term bets out there.

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Editor’s note: This article was originally published on Wendy Kopp’s LinkedIn. It’s republished here with permission.