The relationship between educational attainment, socioeconomic status, and demographic variation is well known. Along these lines, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) has published projections linking its estimates of educational attainment and population growth. The exercise reveals some interesting conclusions. The first is that, when both variables are cross-referenced, the projections indicate that the global population ceiling will be lower than that projected by the United Nations.

IIASA projections also show that the world will be inhabited by people with increasingly higher levels of education: by the end of this century, virtually the entire population of the planet will have received some degree of education. The vast majority will have secondary or post-secondary education. This segment of the population, which in 1970 numbered 700 million people, will reach 7 billion by the end of the 21st century, i.e., a mass similar to the current population of the planet.