I was doing my geography homework when I came across a grammar problem. I don’t know whether to use a noun or an adjective in the blank:
This neighbourhood provides a local labour supply with a higher _____ level.
Should I use educational or education in the blank?
Also, what’s the difference between educational or education when both are possible as premodifiers?
Best Answer
Both are used, and in practice there is little difference in meaning.
However, the collocation varies by corpus and timeframe. In English fiction, the adjective is still preferred:
Although the preference is not quite so strong in overall writing:
Meanwhile, over in Britlandia, the trend is different:
As John Lawler observes in comments:
In any event, education is only ever a noun, never an adjective. That means it can only be modified by adjectives like compulsory — not by adverbs like very the way educational can.
Per the OED, it means:
However, this noun can also easily be used as an attribute of another noun: education policy, education system, education funding, education legislation.
The adjective educational is nothing more than the adjectival form of the word education. It means:
It gets used to modify nouns as in educational opportunities, educational system, educational cartoons, educational psychology.
Another adjective with identical meaning but far less frequency is educative.
There’s perhaps some theoretical ambiguity with the attributive noun, but I really don’t think people will often read higher education level as a level of higher education rather than a higher level of education.