Study Shows Continuing Global Growth of Higher Education

A new report on education from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Education at a Glance: OECD Indicators 2005, indicates that educational attainment and foreign student enrollments continue to rise in the OECD's thirty member countries. Both of these trends have positive economic implications, the report suggests. Growth in the number of young people enrolling in higher education is creating a more highly educated workforce, and better-educated adults on average earn more money and are more likely to be employed. At the same time, the increasing presence of foreign students is likely to produce more "internationally minded citizens and workers," the report says.

This year's edition of Education at a Glance, however, also includes cautionary findings about higher education in the United States. The U.S. has been surpassed in higher education enrollments by a number of other OECD countries, and it currently only leads the world in the percentage of older adults with a college education--an indication that the country's time as a leader in educational attainment may have passed. In foreign enrollments, too, the U.S. has been slipping in recent years: although the U.S. still leads the world in this area, its market share of foreign students is declining.

FINDINGS

U.S. Educational Attainment in a Global Context

• Among OECD nations, the United States ranks second in terms of the percentage of its population with a college education (38 percent), behind Canada.
• Although the U.S. leads the world in the percentage of the population aged fifty-five to sixty-four with a college education (35 percent), the college-educated population in the twenty-five to thirty-four age group (39 percent) is now lower than that of six other OECD nations.
• The U.S. ranks fourteenth among OECD nations in the number of science graduates as a proportion of employed people between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four.

Foreign Students

• The number of foreign postsecondary students studying in OECD countries has grown by 50 percent since 1998, and now stands at 2.12 million.
• The United States receives 28 percent of all foreign students, followed by the United Kingdom (12 percent), Germany (11 percent), France (10 percent), and Australia (9 percent).
• Since 1998, Australia's share of foreign students has risen, while the shares of the United Kingdom and the United States have fallen.
• In the wake of 9/11, enrollment in U.S. colleges and universities by students from the Gulf states and from North African and some Southeast Asian countries has dropped by 10 to 37 percent, while enrollment by students from China and India has risen by 47 and 12 percent, respectively.

Education at a Glance is available for purchase on the OECD Web site. For additional information on global higher education, see "The Brains Business," a series of articles recently published in the Economist that draw on OECD data.

DID YOU KNOW?

• In OECD countries, 53 percent of children who are currently five years old can expect to spend at least some time enrolled at a college or university.
• Fifty-seven percent of college and university graduates in OECD countries today are women.
• The annual expenditure on postsecondary institutions in the U.S., which stands at $18,574 per student, far exceeds the per-student spending of all other OECD countries.