Abstract
BackgroundEducational qualifications and literacy skills are highly related. This is not surprising as it is one aim of educational systems to equip individuals with competencies necessary to take part in society. Because of this relationship educational qualifications are often used as a proxy for “human capital”. However, from a theoretical perspective, there are many reasons why this relationship is not perfect, and to some degree this is due to third variables. Thus, we want to explore the net relationship between educational attainment (harmonized according to the International Standard Classification of Education, ISCED) and literacy skills, and how much skills vary within education levels across countries.MethodsWe use data from 21 countries from the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies 2012. This paper compares the literacy skills of adults who achieved different levels of educational attainment across countries. Given the high degree of educational differentiation in most countries, we do this using a more differentiated educational attainment variable than what is commonly used. In our analyses we firstly adjust for factors that are likely to affect access to education and the acquisition of educational qualifications and literacy skills, such as parental education and language and migration background. In a second step, we also take into account factors affecting skill development after initial formal education, such as occupation and skill use at home.ResultsWe firstly find a high degree of heterogeneity of skills across countries for equivalent education categories. Secondly, we find skill similarities for equivalent education categories classified at different broad education levels, sometimes even breaking the hierarchical order of ‘higher education entails higher competencies’.ConclusionWe conclude that ISCED levels cannot be taken as a cross-nationally comparable proxy for human capital in terms of literacy skills, and that education has to be harmonized in a substantively more meaningful way in future adult literacy surveys.
Highlights
Educational qualifications and literacy skills are highly related
With the results we hope to be able to answer the following research questions: Firstly, how closely are adult basic competencies related to educational attainment across countries? Are the competencies of individuals who have achieved ‘comparable’ levels of education comparable, adjusting for factors related to the acquisition of formal education and basic competencies? Do we find the same differences in skills across countries already identified in the OECD reports when looking at detailed rather than highly aggregated education levels and controlling for a wide range of individual level variables?
We start out by describing the unadjusted results regarding the gross relationship between educational qualifications and skills (Model 1, see Table 3 in appendix for more details), and turn to the adjusted regression models, first describing differences compared to the unadjusted model when adjusting for antecedents of education and skills (Model 2, see Table 4 in appendix for more details), and second describing further differences when adjusting for post-education factors of skill development (Model 3, see Table 5 in appendix for more details)
Summary
Educational qualifications and literacy skills are highly related This is not surprising as it is one aim of educational systems to equip individuals with competencies necessary to take part in society. Research using large-scale assessment data of the adult population across countries has shown that education is a key determinant of adult basic competencies (Maehler et al 2013; OECD 2013a; OECD and Statistics Canada 2000b, 2005). This is not surprising as one aim of formal education is to develop basic competencies in order to prepare students for life and the job market. Large-scale assessments are largely motivated by the desire to more directly measure adult competencies than using educational attainment as a proxy
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