29.10.2011

TUAC (Trade Union Advisory Committee)

Education at a Glance

OECD has just released Education at a Glance 2011

The key message given by OECD Secretary General Gurria at the launch was as simple as challenging. He said – in a nutshell – ‘education, in particular tertiary education, would be a good insurance against unemployment.
Unfortunately, however, this message contrasts not only with the findings regarding Indicator C4 on Transition from school to work: Where are the 15-29 year-olds? It contrasts even more with findings reported by recent labour force surveys, like the one on the UK on ‘Earnings by qualification – 2011’ (recently published and available for download
A summary of EaG of about 100 pages, Highlights from Education at a Glance 2011, is also available for download from the OECD web site
Les lecteurs peuvent accéder à la version complète de Regards sur l’éducation 2011: Les indicateurs de l’OCDE en choisissant le option suivantes:
Pour télécharger la version française

The Trade Union Advisory Committee (TUAC) to the OECD, an interface for labour unions with the OECD (it is an international trade union organisation which has consultative status with the OECD and its various committees), issued the following document providing a couple of excerpts from EAG 2011, giving particular attention to some of the key findings and messages of a selection of indicators.

New OECD indicators on Education

University degree no guarantee for adequate employment

The OECD has just published Education at Glance 2011 (EAG 2011), which, like previous issues, offers a rich, comparable but not always up-to-date array of indicators. The major aim is to measure the current state of education internationally. Thus, the indicators are intended to provide information on the human and financial resources invested in education, on how education and learning systems operate and evolve, and on the benefits of educational investments. Regrettably, however, EAG 2011 fails to provide an appropriate analysis of the impact of the global financial and economic crises on education, in particular on spending on education and training since 2008 and on how structural changes in the labour market impact on the transition from tertiary education into employment. As the introduction to EAG 2011 points out, the education indicators are presented within an organising framework that:

• distinguishes between the actors in education systems: individual learners and teachers, instructional settings and learning environments, educational service providers, and the education system as a whole;
• groups the indicators according to whether they speak to learning outcomes for individuals or countries, policy levers or circumstances that shape these outcomes, or to antecedents or constraints that set policy choices into context; and
• identifies the policy issues to which the indicators relate, with three major categories distinguishing between the quality of educational outcomes and educational provision, issues of equity in educational outcomes and educational opportunities, and the adequacy and effectiveness of resource management.

The focus of indicators presented by “Chapter A on The output of educational institutions and the impact of learning” is on measuring learning outcomes and the output of education systems. The chapter illustrates the OECD’s focus on outcome-based education as a model for education reform. While it focuses on empirically measuring student performance, it does not specify any particular style of teaching or learning. However, it requires that students demonstrate that they have learned the required skills and content. Indicators that are either policy levers or antecedents to policy, or sometimes both, are presented in Chapter B on Financial and human resources invested in education. The following chapter Chapter C on Access to education, participation and progression provides indicators that are a mixture of outcome indicators, policy levers and context indicators. It gives particular attention to issues regarding the transition from school to work as well as to the participation of adults in (non-formal) education and learning. The final chapter, Chapter D on The learning environment and organisation of schools, provides indicators on instruction time, teachers’ working time and teachers’ salaries which are at the same time policy levers and thus often on the radar screens of education policy makers.

Among the good news presented by EAG 2011 is an ongoing positive change in the educational attainment of the adult population over the past decade as well as a limited increase in spending on education prior to the crisis:

• On average across OECD countries, 44% of adults now have upper secondary education and 30% have a tertiary qualification. Upper secondary education has become the norm among younger people in almost all OECD countries. It is estimated that an average of 82% of today’s young people in OECD countries will complete upper secondary education over their lifetimes. Young women are now more likely than young men to complete upper secondary education in almost all OECD countries, a reversal of a historical pattern. In most countries, upper secondary education is designed to prepare students to enter tertiary-type A (largely theory-based) education.
• Between 2000 and 2008, expenditure for all levels of education combined increased slightly in 25 of the 32 countries for which data are available.
  (…)
• While public funding on educational institutions, all levels combined, increased between 2000 and 2008, more than three-quarters of countries and, on average among OECD countries, the share of private funding for educational institutions increased between 2000 and 2008. In all OECD countries for which comparable data are available, private funding on educational institutions represents on average around 17% of all expenditure, whereas 83% of all funds for educational institutions come directly from public sources.(…).
  At the same time, however, facts and figures provided by EAG 2011 emphasize that there is no room for complacency in education policy. Governments must in particular
• ensure that budget consolidation does not adversely effect education systems;
• refrain from increasing tuition fees and imposing the costs of tertiary education upon students and their families;
• guarantee that teaching remains an attractive profession, facilitating high quality education;
• facilitate the transition from education to work through active labour market policy and the promotion of decent jobs;
• Implement policies improving opportunities for adult learning and making lifelong learning a reality for all.

Across the OECD, more than 40% of adults participate in formal and/or non-formal education in a given year. (…) A particular feature of adult learning is the inequality of access; adult learning is skill and aged biased. EAG 2011 reports that adults with higher levels of skills are more likely to participate in formal and non-formal education than adults with lower skills. They can also expect to receive more hours of instruction in non-formal education during their working lives. Individuals with a tertiary education will receive on average in OECD countries three times as many hours of instruction in non-formal education as those with low levels of education.

Members of the latter group, higher education graduates, are currently having increasingly trouble getting jobs. And those who get jobs are finding themselves increasingly performing tasks not requiring the skills they have acquired. In short, holding a university degree is no longer an assurance against unemployment and guarantee for an earnings skill premium provides a serious challenge to the underlying assumptions of EAG 2011.
(…)
The fact that, as labour force surveys reveal, those with degrees are now more likely to work in lower skilled and less well paid jobs reflects structural changes that are occurring in the labour market. Particularly important in this respect is the fact that the knowledge driven economy has not materialized as predicted. Although there are a knowledge driven sectors and firms, a large part of wage respectively salary based employment will remain outside the „land of plenty”.

The lesson to be learned from that is a knowledge driven economy with decent jobs for all cannot be created by policies boosting the supply of skilled labour. In order to facilitate the acquisition and use of skills, education and training policies need to address a broad range of contextual factors that are determining skill formation and usage across the sectors of our economies. Even though the knowledge and skills acquired by learners are of particular importance, employment, productivity, growth, competitiveness and development depend much more on the „demand side”, i. e. product and service market strategies of businesses and „human resource management” by employers, than by supply side driven reforms of education systems. Future OECD work on education needs to take that into account.