This paper focuses on the changing economic value of secondary and higher education in four potential world economic powerhouses - Brazil, Russia, India, and China - known as the BRIC countries. We show that in the past twenty-five years in the BRIC countries, changes in rates of return to higher education have not conformed to the diminishing returns to capital theory, which says that rates decline with level of education and that this pattern holds as countries develop economically and educationally.