Education at a Glance 2014: OECD Indicators
 
 
The OECD publish Education at a Glance 2014: OECD Indicators. This annual publication is the authoritative source for accurate and relevant information on the state of education around the world.

Featuring more than 150 charts, 300 tables, and over 100 000 figures, it provides data on the structure, finances, and performance of education systems in the OECD’s 34 member countries, as well as a number of partner countries. It results from a long-standing, collaborative effort between OECD governments, the experts and institutions working within the framework of the OECD Indicators of Education Systems (INES) programme and the OECD Secretariat.

Key findings

Educational attainment

Around 84% of today’s young people will complete upper secondary education over their lifetimes. In most countries, young women are now more likely to do so than men, a reversal of the historical pattern.
Close to 40% of 25-34 year-olds across OECD countries now have a university-level education. That proportion is 15 percentage points larger than of 55-64 year-olds who have attained a similar level of education. In many countries, this difference exceeds 20 percentage points.
Tertiary-educated individuals are likely to earn twice as much as the median worker. In Chile, Brazil and Hungary, tertiary-educated people earn more than double the income of a person without upper secondary education.

Education spending

OECD countries spend on average USD 9,487 per student per year from primary through tertiary education: USD 8,296 per primary student, USD 9,280 per secondary student, and USD 13, 958 per tertiary student.
High teachers’ salaries and low student-teacher ratios are often the main costs among the ten countries with the highest spending per student in secondary educational institutions.
OECD countries spent an average of 6.1% of GDP on education in 2011. Public funding accounts for 84% of all spending on educational institutions. Only six countries cut public spending in real terms between 2008 and 2011: Estonia (- 10%), Hungary (- 12%), Iceland (- 11%), Italy (- 11%), the Russian Federation (- 5%) and the United States (- 3%).

From school to work

The economic crisis encouraged more young people to stay in education: the proportion of 15-29 year-olds who are no longer in education shrank from 54% in 2008 to 51% in 2012, on average across OECD countries.
A typical 15-year-old in an OECD country could expect to spend about seven additional years in formal education over the next 15 years. Before turning 30, they could expect to hold a job for over five years, be unemployed for nearly one year and be neither in education nor seeking work for over one year.
More than half of adults take part in education in a given year. This ranges from two out of three in Denmark, Finland and Sweden, to one out of three in the Slovak Republic and one out of four in Italy.

In the classroom

Students receive an average of 7475 hours of compulsory education at primary and lower secondary level. Students in Australia have the most, at over 10,000 hours, and in Hungary the least, at less than 6,000 hours.
The statutory salaries of teachers with 15 years’ experience average USD 39,024 at primary level, USD 40,570 at lower secondary and USD 42,861 at upper secondary level. But teachers in about two-thirds of countries have seen their salaries fall in real terms since 2009.
Most teachers are women but the share decreases as the education level rises: 97% at pre-primary, 82% at primary, 67% at lower secondary, 57% at upper secondary and 42% at tertiary level

Further information on Education at a Glance, including country notes, multilingual summaries and key data, is available at www.oecd.org/edu/eag.htm.