high-income country (OECD 2011b). But the American education system does
not promote mobility to the extent that it could, because educational spending
is more likely to benefit the relatively well-to-do. The OECD suggests that
the higher levels of spending in the United States—both private and public—
are driven by much higher spending on tertiary education. For every $1 spent
on primary education, $3 are spent on tertiary education, the highest ratio of
all high-income countries. Further, tertiary spending is dominated by private
sources of financing, which makes up over 60 percent of all spending on this
level of education. Education spending, in other words, is allocated to make
higher education relatively more of a priority, and in a way that is of relatively
more benefit to the relatively advantaged.