In the Soviet era, the Georgian population achieved one of the highest education levels in the Soviet Union. In 1989 some 15.1 % of adults in Georgia had graduated from a university or completed some other form of higher education. About 57.4 % had completed secondary school or obtained a specialized secondary education. Georgia also had an considerable network of 230 scientific and research institutes employing more than 70,000 people in 1990. The Soviet system of free and compulsory schooling had eradicated illiteracy by the 1980s, and Georgia had the Soviet Union's highest ratio of residents with a higher or specialized secondary education.

During Soviet rule, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union controlled the operation of the Georgian education system. The combination of party organs and government agencies overseeing education at all levels formed a huge bureaucracy that made remarkable reform impossible. By the mid-1980s, an education crisis was openly recognized everywhere in the Soviet Union.

In the early 1990s, Soviet education institutions were still in place in Georgia, although Soviet-style political propaganda and authoritarian teaching methods gradually disappeared. Most Georgian children attended general school (grades one to eleven), beginning at age seven. In 1988 some 86,400 students were listed in Georgia's nineteen institutions of higher learning. Universities are located in Batumi, Kutaisi, Sukhumi, and Tbilisi. In the early 1990s, private education institutes began to appear. Higher education was provided almost exclusively in Georgian, although 25 % of general classes were taught in a minority language. Abkhazian and Ossetian children were taught in their native language until fifth grade, when they began instruction in Georgian or Russian.