 The most notable disparity was between urban and rural Panama; 94 percent of city-dwelling adults were literate but less than two-thirds of those in the countryside were—a figure that also represented continued high illiteracy rates among the country's Indian population.From the 1950s through the early 1980s, education enrollments expanded faster than the rate of population growth as a whole and, for most of that period, faster than the school-age population.The steepest increases came in secondary and higher education enrollments, which increased ten and more than thirty times respectively.