Paris, France. Some economists expect this low wage and the country’s location to attract foreign direct investment from the European Union. Under this hypothesis, therefore, we should expect that education levels in a country correlate positively with measures of democratisation in subsequent years. Secondary and tertiary education have also seen drastic growth, with global average years of schooling being much higher now than a hundred years ago. Lutz, W., Creso Cuaresma, J., & Sanderson, W. (2008). These include both historic estimates and projections. This article takes a closer look at some of the countries with the most educated workforces around the world. Oxford: Elsevier. It is a helpful measure, because it allows aggregation of attainment across education levels. Lindahl, M., and Krueger, A. the gender ratios approximate the 100% benchmark for education gender parity). The chart shows the number of the world’s young population who are out of school across primary- and secondary-school-age. That’s the largely positive picture of the state of education across the world published recently by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).. The economics literature has long studied whether the level of education in a country is a determinant of economic growth. As usual, a selection of countries is shown by default, but other countries can be added by clicking on the relevant option at the top of the chart. – OECD. There are several international standardised tests that try to measure learning outcomes in a systematic way across countries; but these tests are relatively new, and they tend to cover only specific geographical areas and skills. Further details on regional classifications are available in the source paper. The growth in access to primary education across developing countries was achieved through an important increase in government expenditure on education in these countries (you can read more about this in our discussion of global expansion in education expenditure). It was only until the Middle Ages that book production started growing and literacy among the general population slowly started becoming important in the Western World.3. The advancement of the idea to provide education for more and more children only began in the mid 19th century, when most of today’s industrialized countries started expanding primary education. The ‘production function’ provides a conceptual framework to think about the determinants of learning outcomes18: where A is skills learned (achievement), s is years of schooling, Q is a vector of school and teacher characteristics (quality), C is a vector of child characteristics (including “innate ability”), H is a vector of household characteristics, and I is a vector of school inputs under the control of households, such as children’s daily attendance, effort in school and in doing homework, and purchases of school supplies. As you might imagine, Boston proper and Cambridge have the most highly-educated people in the city, given they're home to Harvard, MIT, and other elite schools. They met us at the airport with big Greyhound buses. These are just 3 of the countries with the most educated workforces. And the rate of growth really climbed after the middle of the 20th century, when the expansion of basic education became a global priority. School Resources. Canada is the only nation where more than half of all adults had a tertiary education in 2010. Blundell, Richard, et al. The Gini coefficient is a measure of inequality and higher values indicate higher inequality – you can read about the definition and estimation of Gini coefficients in our entry on income inequality. These figures are simply correlations, and cannot be interpreted causally: individuas with more education are different in many ways to individuals with less education, so we cannot attribute wage differences solely to education choices. The causal effect of education on earnings. Available online here. Mean years of schooling, Population breakdown by highest level of education achieved for those aged 15+, Projected female population (15+) by highest educational attainment, Public education expenditure as share of GDP, Share of population, 15 years and older, with no education, Share of students achieving advanced learning outcomes, Share of students achieving intermediate learning outcomes, Share of students achieving minimum learning outcomes, Share of the population with a completed post-secondary education, Share of the population with at least some secondary education, Share of the population with no formal education, projections by IIASA, Share of the population with secondary education, but no tertiary education, Share of the world population older than 15 years with at least basic education, Total government expenditure on education, younger generations are progressively better educated than older generations, discussion of global expansion in education expenditure, Measuring Exclusion From Primary Education (2005), Global Data Set on Education Quality (1965–2015), The Investment Case for Education and Equity (UNICEF – 2015), Available evidence specifically on the importance of school inputs, pre-school investment in demand-side inputs leads to large positive impacts on education, Records of the General Conference, tenth session, Paris, 1958: Resolutions, http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0022/002252/225258e.pdf, http://www.foreurope.eu/fileadmin/documents/pdf/Workingpapers/WWWforEurope_WPS_no006_MS15.pdf. The economic impact of universities: Evidence from across the globe (No. In: Penelope Peterson, Eva Baker, Barry McGaw, (Editors), International Encyclopedia of Education. In each case, we provide a discussion of the robustness of the evidence. Calculations from Hanushek, E. A. and Woessmann, L. (2008).” The experience of some countries, such as South Korea, shows how remarkably quickly educational attainment can increase. I did not know that Accenture did not have very many African-Americans. Valero, A., & Van Reenen, J. collective) returns to education. This allows an analysis of the ‘stock of human capital’ that a population has at any given point in time. Strictly speaking, the y-axis measures the density of the distribution of years – in other words, it shows the relative likelihood that the variable ‘years of schooling’ takes on a given value. To identify the most educated countries in the world, 24/7 Wall St. reviewed the 10 countries with the highest proportions of residents aged 25 to 64 with a tertiary education in 2012. Available online from http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0022/002252/225258e.pdf, UNESCO points out that “concerns have been also raised that enrolment rates can be overstated in education systems in order to meet goals or due to direct links to levels of financing and resources.”, Source: UNESCO report Measuring Exclusion From Primary Education (2005). You can add countries, or switch to the ‘map’ view, by selecting the corresponding options at the top of the chart. Available online here. Here we show evidence of this process of education expansion using cross-country estimates of average years of schooling. MA (Economics) 4. The estimates in the visualization correspond to regional averages of total year of schooling for females (15-64 years of age), divided by the corresponding regional averages for males (15-64 years of age). B. She’s also one of the most well-educated. The rate of attendance, on the other hand, is typically measured through household survey data, and is defined as the percentage of children in the age group that officially corresponds to primary schooling who are reported as attending primary school. There are two important sources of long-run cross-country data on education attainment. As we can see, countries where adults had a higher average education level in 1970, are also more likely to have democratic political regimes today (you can read more about measures of democracy in our entry on Democracy). Available online here. Journal of Economic Literature, 39(4), 1101-1136. The difference lies in the source of information regarding participation: enrollment figures come from official records, while attendance estimates comes from asking households directly. But it is worrying that many low-performing countries are substantially below the diagonal line. With over 100,000 employees, there might be 400 kids starting in one class—people from all over the world. Labor wages, however, are currently very low in Ukraine, only $379 per month for 11 years of schooling compared to $1,114 in Hungary for 11.6 years of schooling. The interactive map shows recent primary school attendance estimates for a selection of (mainly) low and middle income countries in Africa, where the gaps between attendance and enrollment are largest. Each bubble in this chart is a country, where colours represent regions and bubble sizes denote population. As usual, you can add countries, or switch to the ‘map’ view, by selecting the corresponding options at the top of the chart. 245-252. In this country, just over half (52%) of all adults have a tertiary level education, which means studies beyond high school level. Canada maintains its standing as the most educated country in the world with 56.7% of Canadian adults having received a post-secondary degree. At the secondary school age the reverse is true, more boys than girls are out of secondary school. All of our charts can be embedded in any site. United States: The United States is also one of the most educated countries throughout the world. National Bureau of Economic Research, 2013. The time-series chart shows inequality by age group. Who is the most educated person in the world? As per the source notes: “Percentage-point difference reflects the relative change of reporting to trust others compared to the reference category. And in almost every country, those with post-secondary non-tertiary education were more likely to trust others than those with primary or lower secondary education. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited. The first conclusion from this charts is that for both genders, at any given age, individuals with more education perceive higher wages. United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. Population and Development Review, 36(2), 253-281. Indeed, these scatterplots show that despite the broad positive correlation, there is substantial dispersion away from the trend line – in other words, there is substantial variation in outcomes that does not seem to be captured by differences in expenditure. In Canada, 81.5% of people with a university level education are employed, whereas only 55.8% of people without tertiary education are employed. Isreal: 5. And once again, we see the pattern that has already been discussed: early-industrialized countries pioneered the expansion of education in the 19th century, but this process became a global phenomenon after the second World War. Research has shown that people with a higher level of education are less likely to be unemployed, more likely to earn a higher salary, and more likely to be productive. You can compare achievement above minimum, intermediate, and advanced benchmarks, country by country and over time, in these three line charts: The most common way to gauge differences in the way countries ‘produce’ education, is to analyze data on expenditure. It shows that income is an important factor that affects both expenditure on education and education outcomes: we can see that above a certain national income level, the relationship between PISA scores and education expenditure per pupil becomes virtually inexistent. 21 Most Educated Countries in the World: 1. To address this issue, the economics literature has developed different strategies. The rate of primary school enrollment is typically measured through administrative data, and is defined as the number of children enrolled in primary school who belong to the age group that officially corresponds to primary schooling, divided by the total population of the same age group. Roughly speaking, this pattern tends to be progressive, since students from wealthier households are more likely to attend tertiary education, and those individuals who attend tertiary education are likely to perceive large private benefits.14 In contrast, the bottom chart shows a very different picture: in several low-income countries households contribute proportionally more to primary education than to higher levels. (2013). The rise in mean years of schooling is consistently observed in both Barro Lee (2010) and Lee & Lee (2016). 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