Education at a Glance 2011
OECD Indicators
Across OECD countries, governments are having to work with shrinking public budgets while designing policies to make education more effective and responsive to growing demand. The 2011 edition of Education at a Glance: OECD Indicators enables countries to see themselves in the light of other countries’ performance. It provides a broad array of comparable indicators on education systems and represents the consensus of professional thinking on how to measure the current state of education internationally.
The indicators show who participates in education, how much is spent on it, and how education systems operate. They also illustrate a wide range of educational outcomes, comparing, for example, student performance in key subjects and the impact of education on earnings and on adults’ chances of employment. New material in this edition includes:
- an analysis of tuition-fee reforms implemented since 1995;
- indicators on the relationship between social background and learning outcomes;
- indicators on school accountability in public and private schools;
- an indicator on the fields of education chosen by students;
- an indicator on labour market outcomes of students from vocational and academic programmes;
- indicators on the scope of adult education and training;
- indicators on student engagement in reading.
The Excel™ spreadsheets used to create the tables and charts in this book are available via the StatLinks provided throughout. The tables and charts, as well as the complete OECD Online Education Database, are freely available via the OECD Education website at www.oecd.org/edu/eag2011.
What are the social outcomes of education?
There is growing interest in looking beyond the traditional economic measures of individual success, such as income, employment and GDP per capita, towards non-economic aspects of well-being and social progress, such as life satisfaction, civic engagement and health. Recent initiatives, such as the Stiglitz-Sen Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress and the World Health Organization’s Commission on Social Determinants of Health, have been prompted by concerns that society is not as cohesive as it should be and that citizens are not as healthy and happy as they deserve to be. Several OECD countries have seen a decline in indicators of civic engagement, such as voting, volunteering and interpersonal trust, changes that may well have significant and lasting consequences for the quality of democratic societies (OECD, 2010).
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