Apologies for cross-posting:
Across OECD countries, governments are seeking policies to make education
more effective while searching for additional resources to meet the
increasing demand for education.
The 2006 edition of Education at a Glance enables countries to see themselves
in the light of other countries' performance. It provides a rich, comparable
and up-to-date array of indicators on the performance of education systems
and represents the consensus of professional thinking on how to measure the
current state of education internationally.
A compendium of national education statistics on indicators ranging from
class sizes to teacher salaries, Education at a Glance provides governments
and education specialists with internationally comparable data as a basis for
policy debate and decisions. Among other things, this year's edition shows
that:
On average in OECD countries, 84% of people who have achieved a tertiary
education qualification are in employment. By contrast, only 56% of people
without an upper secondary qualification have jobs.
Public funding of education remains a social priority, even in OECD countries
with relatively little public involvement in other areas: between 1995 and
2003, education took a growing share of total public expenditure in most
countries, with Denmark, Greece, New Zealand, the Slovak Republic and Sweden
showing particularly significant shifts in public funding in favour of
education. At the tertiary level, however, the proportion of public
expenditure as a share of total spending has fallen from an average of 81.2%
in OECD countries in 1995 to an average 76.2% in 2003, with only the Czech
Republic, Ireland, Norway and Spain showing an increase. The proportion of
tertiary education funded privately varies from more than 50% in Australia,
Japan, Korea and the United States as well as the partner country Chile to
less than 5% in Denmark, Finland, Greece, Norway and Turkey. Most private
funding comes from households, notably through tuition fees which are charged
in three-quarters of OECD countries, though at widely varying levels.
Rapidly growing numbers of students are enrolling in tertiary education
outside their home country. In 2004, they comprised 2.7 million students
worldwide, an 8% increase on the previous year and more than twice as many as
in 1995. More than half of these students are enrolled in four OECD countries
- the United States (22%), the United Kingdom (11%), Germany (10%), and
France (9%).
Gender differences in educational qualification rates are shifting in favour
of women. For 55-to-64-year-olds, average duration of formal study favours
women in only three countries, but for 25-to-34-year-olds, the average number
of years of study completed is higher among women in 20 out of 30 OECD
countries, and of the remaining 10 countries only Switzerland and Turkey
register differences of more than six months in favour of men.
More details and statistics at
http://www.oecd.org/document/52/0,2340,en_2649_34515_37328564_1_1_1_1,00.html
|