What do students expect to do after finishing upper secondary school?

by Guillermo Montt
Analyst, Directorate for Education

The expansion of the knowledge-based economy and technological progress has created a large market of highly paid jobs for individuals who are highly skilled. Moreover, in much of the industrialised world, the demand for highly-skilled individuals is rising faster than supply, as mirrored in rising wage premia on university-level qualifications. Leveraging the talent of all individuals, whatever their social background, must therefore be an important goal for educators and policy makers alike.

The latest edition of PISA in Focus summarises findings from the PISA Report Grade Expectations: How Marks and Education Policies Shape Students’ Ambitions. PISA reveals that the range of educational expectations that students hold in different countries striking: In Korea, four out of five 15-year-olds expect to graduate from university, while in Latvia it is one out of four. Despite the major changes in skill requirements that most labour-markets experienced in the past decades, and the rapidly rising number of university graduates, the educational expectations of students in school have remained surprisingly stable.

In all countries and economies, the students who expect to complete university education perform significantly better in math and reading than students who do not expect to complete that level of education.  However, while performance on PISA tends to be associated with educational expectations, the data also show that not all 15-year-olds with advanced knowledge and skills aspire to high levels of further education and not all 15-year-olds who aspire to a university degree possess the knowledge and skills needed to pursue such pathways successfully.

The percentage of low-performing students who expect to complete a university degree is relatively high in Australia, Ireland, Korea, Mexico, Serbia, Singapore and Trinidad and Tobago. These school systems therefore need to capitalise on their students’ desire to continue their education by encouraging greater engagement with school and offering better opportunities to learn so that low-achieving, but ambitious, students can improve their performance and have a better chance of succeeding. The proportion of high-performing students who do not expect to continue on to post-secondary education is relatively large – more than 10% – in Austria, Hong Kong-China, Iceland and Italy. These school systems should aim to raise their students’ expectations by, among other measures, enhancing engagement with school and ensuring that placement in academic or vocational programmes is based on merit, not on students’ background. Mismatches between expectations and actual abilities can result not just in personal disappointments but also incur important economic and social costs.

Students who hold ambitious – yet realistic – expectations about their educational prospects are more likely to put effort into their learning and make better use of the educational opportunities available to them to achieve their goals. Therefore educational expectations, in part, become self-fulfilling prophecies. Education systems need to strike a careful balance between promoting ambitious expectations among students – because the labour-market demand for high-level skills is surging and will probably continue to grow in the future – promoting skill acquisition so that more students are able to fulfil those expectations but also not neglecting those students who expect to complete their studies upon graduation from secondary school. Although most school systems are committed to expanding access to tertiary education, around 25% of students expect to finish their formal education at the end of upper secondary school. Education systems must provide these students with the skills needed for a smooth transition into the labour market and adulthood.


Links:

For more information on PISA: www.oecd.org/pisa/

PISA in Focus No. 23: What do students expect to do after finishing upper secondary school?

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What the D in OECD stands for

by Barbara Ischinger
Director for Education

Did you know that the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development helped to lay the groundwork for the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals? Even though Development is part of our name, there are many people who don’t realise just how much of our resources are devoted to developing economies and not only to the development of the OECD’s 34 member countries.

The focus of this year’s International Economic Forum on Africa, held at the OECD’s Paris headquarters in early October, was youth employment, but this issue cannot be separated from another one just as important:  education. The African Economic Outlook 2012 notes that in Egypt, for example, about 1.5 million young people are unemployed at the same time that private-sector firms cannot fill 600 000 vacancies. And in South Africa, there are 3 million young people who are neither in education nor employed and 600 000 unemployed university graduates, yet 800 000 jobs are vacant. At the Forum itself, I heard many participants ask themselves whether they were equipping their students with the skills their economies needed.

This is exactly where the OECD’s expertise in collecting and analysing data can help. Already, many of the countries and economies that participate in the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) are in the developing world; but we think all countries would benefit from even greater participation by developing countries. By participating in PISA, countries can see whether the skills they are teaching their 15-year-olds are relevant to “real life”. They can also learn from other countries’ experiences how to improve their own education systems, and can benchmark their progress over time. The assessment, itself, benefits by gaining a deeper understanding of student performance in a broader range of countries and cultural contexts.

We have completed a review of Egypt’s system of higher education and have also reviewed the education systems of South Africa, Gabon and Mauritius. These in-depth analyses – conducted in close collaboration with local actors, regional organisations and other international partners – can guide countries in reforming their education policies so that students leave school with the skills needed to participate productively in the economy. We also stand ready to work with our partners – in Africa and elsewhere – to build stronger links between labour markets and education systems. That would help to avoid the situation, seen in so many countries, where universities train students to become civil servants when what the country or region really needs are engineers and health workers – and also people with the mid-level trade, technical and professional skills that can be acquired through well-designed vocational programmes. At the moment, vocational education accounts for only 5% of training among African youth.

As the 2015 target date for achieving the Millennium Development Goals approaches, the international community has begun to consider a framework for goals beyond 2015. For the first set of goals, progress in education is measured by access; I hope that future goals will complement such measures by looking at learning outcomes. Again, this is one of the OECD’s specialties, and we’re keen to offer our work and expertise to an even larger number of countries. I thought you’d want to know.

Links:
OECD Development home page
The OECD and the Millennium Development Goals
OECD Strategy on Development
The OECD Strategy on Development: Giving fresh impetus to a core mission
2012 International Economic Forum on Africa
OECD Skills Strategy
Photo credit: Orphan students in Swaziland / Shutterstock