Just as Bill (it wasn't me) Clinton is famous for his slogan "It's the economy, stupid", his contemporary in Britain, Tony (two-face) Blair ran for office with the slogan "Education, education, education." Sadly, Tony spent loads of money on schools and broke the economy. We all know that like the economy, education is important to a society but is that the case in Cities Skylines? If so, then why?

First off, here's what the Wiki says about education:

Originally posted by "Wiki":

Schools provide children, teenagers, and young adults with education. The education level affects how much the buildings in your city can be upgraded.

• Elementary Schools serve the children, providing your citizens with basic education.
  
• High Schools serve mainly the teenagers, providing well-educated citizens for industry and businesses.
  
• Universities are for young adults and adults, and they provide highly educated citizens for industry and businesses

.
Educated citizens generate less garbage than uneducated.

Not a lot then, except to describe what the three educational buildings do. It's fairly elementary (:-D) what each school does but it's worth noting that an additional effect of a University is that a young adult or adult in degree-level education does not count towards your workforce. So if you have precisely 100% employment and suddenly plop a University, expect to need whole load more workers very soon as your CIMs go to school instead of work :-)

Also, as mentioned above, the reduction in garbage production is a real bonus, especially in high density residential areas. A lot of high density, low education areas can cripple your garbage collection. This can start to have real effects when you push beyond the 10k population barrier and start building lots of high density residential zones with your no-doubt now booming economy.

Let's look in a bit more detail at how education can have different effects on your game.

Building Level - Education plays a big part in helping to level up your buildings. Residential, Industrial and Office buildings all require education to level up. Levelling up creates bigger, fancier buildings with higher population/workforce densities, higher taxes and outputs and they generally look nicer. The average education level of CIMs living in any residential building will directly affect its ability to level up, likewise the average education level of CIMs working in offices and factories will directly impact their ability to level up. Commercial is only indirectly affected, however, since it is the wealth of their customers which determines their level but since that wealth is determined by the building level the customer lives in so as you can see, it is still a huge influence.

Note - whilst a building cannot level up without the required education level, a highly educated population does not guarantee high level buildings, there's much more to it than that but this info is for another guide.

Specialised Industry - Specialised industry is a thorn in the side of any education planner. If you choose to ignore specialisations then you'll find that, given other factors are taken care of, your industry will grow and level with your education and your city will match your workforce. However, industry specialisations don't level up! Farming and Forestry both require only uneducated workers whereas Oil and Ore both require a mix of educated and uneducated.






If you try to use Oil or Ore districts before you have the educated population to support them, they will constantly complain about a lack of educated workers and are likely to become abandoned. Likewise, if you try to use Farming and Forestry on a mature map with a well educated population then you will have to keep a very close eye on them. If people need jobs, they will work at a lower education level as they would in real life. However, if a better suited job becomes available, they will leave the manual labour job and go and get a better one. Who wouldn't, right?

You can see from the screenshots of the forestry and farming industries in one of my more mature cities above, the tooptip is talking about having "overeducated workers". This is precisely what I am describing: highly educated workers taking menial jobs because there are no better ones available. This is why I say you have to keep a close eye on them. If you are close to 100% employment and then zone more commercial or offices, these workers are going to immediately leave the farm and forest to go and work in a nice, warm building. With a chair. Even if you build more standard industrial, it will level up so fast that it will also require educated workers and they'll leave anyway. it's a tough balancing act at times. Zone too many nice jobs and all of a sudden whole areas of your map will have a little yellow person symbol, complaining about a lack of workforce and will very quickly abandon if nobody works there.

Now why am I telling you all this in an education mini-guide? Because you can help to alleviate this problem by controlling the education level of your CIMs :-)

Using the education tools available to you, it is very easy to take a quick look to see how many CIMs are currently eligible for each education level. I then example below, we can quickly see that in this fledgling city, where we currently have no schools at all, there are 404 CIMs eligible for elementary education. Each elementary school has a capacity of 300 so we have a choice to make. We can place either one or two elementary schools depending on whether we want to go for total education or control our levels.



A similar circumstance exists for higher education. There are 1223 CIMs eligible for higher education and each high school has a capacity of 1000 so we have the same choice to make.



Total education is easy; a controlled populous less so. Like so many things in this game, it's about balance and reacting to circumstance. If you want to keep a quite realistic an varied level of education amongst your workforce then you will have to make an effort. You will have to always make sure your demand is higher than your capacity but not by too much.

In the city below with 50k population, there is a nice spread of education levels meaning that I was able to have a varied city and not just one full of skyscrapers and identical shiny white buildings. This was what I aimed for, was a mayoral decision and was achieved by always keeping my education demand ahead of capacity at each level.



Which route you choose is up to you. A good spread gives a varied city whereas a fully educated population is the route to a massive, sprawling metropolis full of pimped skyscrapers. You're the mayor: you decide :-)

One thing to note if you plan to educate your CIMs early is that apart from the effect it has on your workforce, there are other knock-on effects on their expectations. An educated CIM is a snob. They demand more access to places to stretch their legs, walk their poodle and to allow Tarquin and Evie to play in safety in their Armani Junior outfits. if you don't provide such things, they will complain. And boy will they complain.




So just remember that if you're going to give them schools early, you're going to need to plan your estates around parks and nice things to keep your soon-to-be educated CIMs happy as they get cleverer and more demanding :-)

The voodoo factor? What is he on about, I hear you say. Well, I'm afraid I have no better term for it because some crazy magic happens with education in Cities Skylines. Here are a few factors to consider.

Your area of effect from an education building is not representative of who can be educated at that building. Young students are not simulated in this game, it seems, and so your education is nothing more than demand Vs capacity. That's it. You can put your schools on the moon and people will still be educated. People do not seem to need access to school and don't care how far it is from their home. They teleport to school anyway. People will, of course, need to get to school if they work there. And a school without any workforce will not operate. More testing needs to be done in this area to fully explore the education mechanic.

When you place your school, the area of effect: the green lines spreading down your roads, shows you the area which will gain a happiness benefit from the proximity of a school.



A happy population spends more money, keeping your commercial zones alive and they commit less crime. It is also a factor in levelling up buildings and not to be confused with the direct effect education has on levelling up.

Your CIMs will educate themselves. What do I mean by this? I don't mean that they will simply get themselves to the schools you've provided, but I mean they are capable of becoming educated despite a lack of schools provided. Really. Look at the example below from the 50k population city:



I did not build any Universities in this city. Ever. Not one. They just weren't on my roadmap at this stage and at only 50k population, It's not like I'd made a huge effort to start getting large zones of level 4 buildings. I didn't want or need highly educated adults just yet and so I didn't create any Universities. So what, I hear you ask. Well 1 in 3 of my CIM workforce has a degree. 1 in 3 has attended University somewhere and achieved the highest possible standards of education on their own. Good for them - I'm all in favour of self-motivation and a desire for high standards but I can't help but think that there's some unexplained voodoo magic going on here that takes education somewhat out of our control as mayor of our simulated city. I don't believe that immigration can explain this on its own so as with oh-so-many aspects of this new game, much more testing is required to fully explain what is happening here :-)

As you can see, it's not as simple as plopping schools and making sure you can afford to pay for them and ruin them. There a whole bunch of other factors to consider, whether you choose to educate your CIMs or not. Either way there will be effects and either way has its plusses and its minuses. You have subjective, creative decisions to make as a mayor and making the right educational decisions will help you to achieve your own goals :-)