I think the answer to this question should always include "inspect your data" (or at least check model fit) as one of the steps. It looks like this is more of a textbook exercise though, so I would theorize along these lines:
Your outcome is a count, meaning non-negative integers only. An appropriate model should account for this, so a Poisson or negative binomial GLM would be a good starting point. That has relatively little to do with the choice of dependent and independent variables though.
Because a count cannot be less than zero, the predictor is usually log-linked to ensure the model does not predict anything below 0. A side effect of this transformation is that it plays along with the usual mean-variance trend that counts display - larger counts tend to have higher variance, but will be squished closer together by the transformation. If $y$ is your count and $\mathbf{\beta X}$ your linear predictor, you could write this as $ln(y)=\mathbf{\beta X}$ but in reality you would be fitting $y=e^{\mathbf{\beta X}}$. So, an appropriate model works in the log scale, but you would not be taking the log of the count yourself (unless you're shoehorning all of this into an ordinary least squares or something).
A second aspect in counting is to keep in mind the basis of that count. If one population is much larger than another you'd expect them to have higher counts just by virtue of there being more people (if they have roughly the same chance of being a case). What you really want to model is the number of cases divided by the total possible cases: if we add $n$ to express the size of each population our previous model becomes $ln(\frac{y}{n})=\mathbf{\beta X}$. Through the rules of logarithms we can shuffle this to be $ln(y)=\mathbf{\beta X}+ln(n)$. Two important points here: this new term is not a model parameter like the other $\mathbf{\beta}$, but rather an additive term in the intercept, and is usually called an offset (it moves the prediction within each population by a constant proportional amount). Secondly, you would be taking the log of this variable yourself when fitting the model under a log link, which in the link scale is now $y=e^{\mathbf{\beta X+ln(n)}}$. The result of such offset is that the model no longer predicts a raw case count, but a number of cases per number of persons.
The above two I would always do when building a model on event rates. The last question is what to do with the proportion of high-schooled adults in the predictor. There may be arguments, especially for interpretability, to put this in the model untransformed, and if the proportion is never close to $0$ or $1$ that shouldn't be much of an issue. Just like a count such proportions are (even more) restricted in their support though, and the model doesn't know this - it will just calculate a Gaussian error term onto it. A transformation can help so that predictions make more sense, i.e stay within the support of the variable. Taking the log helps if the proportion is very close to $0$ but not so when it is close to $1$. I would guess that most populations have a sizeable fraction of high-schooled adults, so for that reason I would actually consider a logit transform here which will also handle the upper end of the domain. A major disadvantage is that you'd now have to express model effects as multiplicative changes in counts (because of the log link) in relation to multiplicative changes in high school education (because of the second log/logit), which makes interpretation quite a bit more complicated but is numerically more well-behaved.
That was quite a bit of text without answering your question directly, but I hope this helps you assess the adequacy of each proposed model structure (the notation of which isn't sufficiently specific to me to give an exact answer).
self-studytag and read its description. $\endgroup$