Education, Globalisation and the Role of Comparative Research

v 11.The main finding confirms the hypothesised relation between educational equality and societal cohesion.There is no significant relation between mean levels of education and societal cohesion.However, excluding the outliers Norway and Germany, there is a negative and significant correlation of -0.765 between societal cohesion and education inequality.This relationship is also confirmed as significant using linear regression analysis and robust regression analysis.In the later case, a 0.1 change in education inequality, say from 1.2 to 1.3, will decrease the social cohesion index by -0.583 units.12. The results also show there is a negative relationship between income inequality and social cohesion.Once again, excluding Norway and Germany, a negative and significant correlation of -0.616 exist between these two variables.13. Multivariate analysis was used to examine societal cohesion as a function of education inequality and income inequality.The relationship between income inequality and societal cohesion has the expected negative sign, and so did education inequality.However, only education inequality has a significant linear negative impact on the social cohesion index.14.The results show that there is a linear relationship between education inequality and the index of social cohesion that is not mediated by income but they do not verify that educational inequality affects social cohesion through its effects on income distribution.This is probably due to the co-linearity between education inequality and income inequality which overshadows the effect from income inequality.However, what the results do suggest is that whatever the links through income equality, educational inequality also has effects independently on social cohesion. Conclusions15.No strong claims to have demonstrated a causal relationship between educational distribution and societal cohesion are made here.The number of units involved in the statistical analysis is too small to draw hard conclusions from the correlations and, in any case, if the correlations are judged to be sound, causality may run in different directions.