In this paper, we present a conceptual framework and a theoretical model to argue that education serves to lower the expected variability of future income from labor. Building on the LEN model by Spremann (1987), we suggest that the total variance in an individual’s lifetime labor output depends on that person's stock of education as well as idiosyncratic and systemic (macroeconomic) risk. We further investigate the impact of an individual's cultural environment on the optimal educational investment. In particular, we consider two important aspects that vary across cultures and societies: the opportunity cost of education and a society's effectivity in using education, skills, and knowledge to enhance value creation. To test our model’s implications, we then examine how surveyed household and business uncertainty impacted educational expenditures of governments and households within a sample of 20 member states of the European Union from 2005 to 2021. Our dataset therefore includes several episodes of heightened uncertainty in Europe: the 2008 crisis, the European Sovereign Debt Crisis, and the COVID-19 crisis. Our uncertainty measure is based on the dispersion of views about the economic prospects perceived by businesses and households, like Girardi and Reuter (2017). We present evidence that the effect of uncertainty on expenditure on human capital formation is different from its effect on consumption and investment. In agreement with predictions of our theoretical model, we find a positive impact of business and household perceived uncertainty on various types of educational expenditure of the government and households -- such as primary, secondary, tertiary, other, R&D in education, etc. Moreover, we find evidence of the importance of culture (measured as in Hofstede, Hofstede, and Minkov, 2010) for the uncertainty-educational expenditure relationship. We find that, just as our model predicts, the increase in educational expenditure in response to rising uncertainty is greater in long-term oriented cultures as well as in cultures that are more effective in creating output from a given educational stock. Our findings are robust to using an alternative measure of economic uncertainty, the Economic Policy Uncertainty Index (EPUI). They present educational expenditures as a way for governments and households to counteract episodes of heighted macroeconomic uncertainty. Moreover, they suggest that investment into culture and into programs which subsidize households’ expenditures on education have the potential to improve economic stability and long-term growth prospects of the European nations.