The census, but the data starts to become a little sketchy going back as far as you're looking for. Admittedly, I was look at the period around the war, not the 100 years prior.
Canada wasn't great at record keeping in its early history. I expect you won't find anything before the 1910s and even then it is not exactly great. However, in the 1910s it seems both countries only saw around ~10% of the population attending high school, as best as I can tell. More clearly, they both saw around 30% by the 1930s when we start to see much better data.
Let's just assume it was 10% through the entire 19th century. If we attribute America's success in becoming a superpower to that small portion of the population attending high school, that still lends credence to the idea that most don't need to go to high school. Whether or not high school was significant, it is clear that America didn't need most in high school to reach superpower status.
> I also question whether "making money" is the best way to judge education.
I agree, but the industry doesn't. That is the number one feature pushed on students in the marketing. I sincerely doubt Canada or the USA would have such high attainment if people weren't lead to believe that they would make money by doing it. Some attend college because they truly have a love for education, but many more attend simply because they believe they'll be poor in the rest of their life if they don't.
So I did a little digging into the citations, and the most authoritative paper on the subject is J.-W. Lee and H. Lee, Human capital in the long run [1]. While there isn't a time-series for Canada, Fig. 9A shows the U.S. had a significant advantage over Canada in 1870 (in terms of average years of schooling per capita) and both countries had been increasing this number at approximately the same rate. Fig. 10 shows that this advantage remained in 1910. One other note is that the U.S. had a significant slave population until the Civil War (and Black Americans faced significant educational barriers thereafter) which has a significant effect on the U.S. numbers.
Another thing that this analysis doesn't take into account is the base level of GDP per capita per job. One of the reasons the U.S. took a long time to catch up was that Europe was much more productive to begin with. I don't know enough about the Canadian economy of the early-mid 19th century to speculate there.
The census, but the data starts to become a little sketchy going back as far as you're looking for. Admittedly, I was look at the period around the war, not the 100 years prior.
Canada wasn't great at record keeping in its early history. I expect you won't find anything before the 1910s and even then it is not exactly great. However, in the 1910s it seems both countries only saw around ~10% of the population attending high school, as best as I can tell. More clearly, they both saw around 30% by the 1930s when we start to see much better data.
Let's just assume it was 10% through the entire 19th century. If we attribute America's success in becoming a superpower to that small portion of the population attending high school, that still lends credence to the idea that most don't need to go to high school. Whether or not high school was significant, it is clear that America didn't need most in high school to reach superpower status.
> I also question whether "making money" is the best way to judge education.
I agree, but the industry doesn't. That is the number one feature pushed on students in the marketing. I sincerely doubt Canada or the USA would have such high attainment if people weren't lead to believe that they would make money by doing it. Some attend college because they truly have a love for education, but many more attend simply because they believe they'll be poor in the rest of their life if they don't.