Percent of population with a college degree, by country | Hacker News Reader

Percent of population with a college degree, by country

blogs.ft.com

37 pointspg48 comments

Apparently it's higher than the percent of people trying to squint at that image in 1680x1050. :-(

I think we can conclude, based on this and the tiny fixed-width margins on pg's essays, that pg's monitor of choice is an old 15" 640x480 CRT or something. (I'm kidding about concluding based on this image; I realize pg didn't draft the image himself)

Try it on a 1920x1200 laptop screen :-(

with some help of Snipshot

http://aycu03.webshots.com/image/49922/2001351004567808923_r...

Another confounding factor in interpreting such a graph: credentialism.

Countries and cultures vary in how much they value official degrees and titles, and greater reliance on granted credentials is not always better, especially when it serves to protect established interests from competition.

So one interpretation of the relative stability of US education rates across age groups: the US has resisted a wave of creeping credentialism that has afflicted most of the world, having reached optimal level of education earlier than most.

Looks like Russia, the U.S., Germany, Switzerland, Brazil and possibly Argentina are the only countries where the youngest generation (25-34) is not the most educated. The U.S.'s education rates have apparently been close to flat for the past couple of generations. Russia's crazy history shows. Germany is in surprisingly bad shape, mostly flat but with the youngest generation at the bottom. Switzerland, Brazil and Argentina resemble Russia; this may mean that in those countries it's more common to get a college degree later in life (or else fewer young people are getting a degree at all).

Your assumption is totally false. I'm Russian and I can tell you that more than 80% of Russian pupils join universities (or a college) after 11 years of school. Standard university education program lasts for 5 years, after that you can join "aspirantura" (a post-gradute form of education) for another 4 years and only then you can earn some science degree. Doctor of Science is the highest degree which is usually earned at age of 50. On the opposite, the US's "phD" can be compared to the lowest possible degree here (no one will call/treat you as a scientist if you under 30). Russian academic system is very different from what you have in US or in EU. I believe same applies to Brazil and Argentina and many other post-soviet countries which blindly copied everything from Soviet Union system. So, it's very inaccurate to compare education level of countries that way as on the pic since there's still no unified standard adopted by them.

From my personal perceptions, I admit that more and more ppl here in Russia tend to get higher degrees, hence require higher sallaries. This causes a great problem in society - no one wants to clean streets and work on plants, everybody want to be bankers or at least some financial/oil tycoons. And programming/CS is considered as "street cleaning". :-(

PS: The only seemingly correct assumption that can be made based on the pic is that China, Brazil and India will stay the best "outsource dirty work to" countries at least for the next decade :-).

At this point, I should point out that Einstein published his work on special relativity at the age of 26. If it takes 50 years to earn a Doctor of science, the education system is chocking itself. By that age, scientists are too set in their ways to think up anything new (with rare exceptions).

Do you know that Einstain was recognized as crazy fag in his 20th and it took him next 20 years to improve his theory and make it real science before he was nominated as genious.

I strictly believe that one has to produce ALOT of theoretical AND practical knowledge before being recognized as scientist, which is not the US case. In US you write down your 100 pages thesis of nothing, partisipate in a couple of speak-about-everything-and-nothing-in-particular conferences and woah you are a scientist! The value of science is heavily and rapitly devaluating :-(.

PS: Same trend is happening here in Russia.

>ALOT

I am Russian and I can tell you that it is spelled "A LOT". Anyway, you are overgeneralizing about the US education system. It is true that in many universities one can get away with writing 100 pages of nonsense for a PhD, that is not the case in the top tier schools. The entire system is premised on rankings, i.e. top schools produce top scientists who produce top results and get the most grant money. Lower ranking schools produce the "fat tail" of PhDs who are more involved with teaching, collaborating with the industries, going corporate, etc.

In the US, the unspoken assumption is that if one really wants to be a "scientist", they can become one, virtually independent of their ability. I guess the intention is that one's efforts should be harnessed productively vs. generating frustration.

Saying that Einstein was "recognized as crazy fag" implies that he was actually one -- which I strongly doubt is the case. Regardless, his 1905 paper on special relativity and his subsequent work (mostly performed within the next 5 years) fleshed out the vast bulk of his theory, and it remained virtually unchanged henceforth. The 20 years you refer to is mostly the time it took for experimental physics to catch up, and be able to experimentally verify the many consequences of his theory. Also, it is somewhat immaterial how long it took for him to be "nominated as genious [sic]" -- the fact that he was indeed correct in all the major components of his theory, a theory which broke so completely with most of physics prior to him, is evidence enough of his genius (which is not to discount Lorentz or Poincare in any way, who were certainly almost there as well).

With regards to your second paragraph (and your prior comment about scientists having to be >30 to be recognized as such and >50 (!) to become one in Russia), the evidence of the works produced by great scientists in the past hundred years strongly suggests that there is something wrong with that belief. Looking only at mathematics, for example, it is difficult to argue that Ramanujan, Godel, Hilbert, Grothendieck, Weil, Weyl, or Deligne (to name only a few), were not truly scientists before age 30 (by which time most of them had published some of their best works).

If the value of science is indeed going down in the US (a fact which is not at all clear to me), then there are lots of other possible reasons for it. But certainly not age.

This is a non-issue. 30 year old Russian scientists do science just like anywhere else. They just aren't called a particular word ("учёный") that the 50 year olds are. It has connotations of wisdom and experience, and this is probably why.

Assumption? Sorry, I wasn't aware I made any any assumptions that weren't implicit in the graph.

In the U.S. a student will attend a 4-year program after 12 years of school, meaning 16 years of schooling for a "tertiary" degree. That sounds equivalent in time to a Russian education through the standard university program. The higher degree programs here and in Russia are not relevant to the graph, so the fact that a U.S. PhD can be attained before the age of 30 versus Russia's 50 doesn't actually skew anything or explain why the 35-44 bracket in Russia is higher than the 25-34 bracket (though both are higher than any other country on the chart).

Anyway, the original blog entry is here: http://blogs.ft.com/crookblog/2008/03/the-dumbing-of-america...

The point of the study was to look at the decline of the skilled workforce in the U.S., and in light of this, the foolishness of policies that keep out foreign skilled workers. So the main question the chart addresses is, "Where can we find people with the equivalent of a U.S. college degree?" And the answer that you and the study have both given is that Russia, Canada, Japan and South Korea have educated workers to spare -- and U.S. politicians should make it easy for them to immigrate here, since we're not generating enough of our own.

The thing I find most surprising is that the US hasn't improved at all across the different age groups where as most other countries have. It will be interesting to see if that trend continues.

there seem to be no correlation between the percentage of educated people and the GDPP. just by glancing at this nations starting with Russia moving towards China, i can state with confidence that a nation with more educated people does not innovate more than others. one thing i would like to know is why some nations are simply more educated than others? and what difference (economically, even politically )does it make if one country is more educated than others?

GDP havily depends on population itself. With its 1B of under-paid ppl, China has a lof of workers who produce VALUE, hence increase GDP. You know what was the greatest achievement of Chinese communist government ? It was the idea to let their ppl work and get paid for their work. The rest was done en masse :-).

GDP per capita has the same denominator as the graph: it is the populatin itself, which is why i did not bother looking at the GDP only but the per capita.

Yes, but have you heard about gravitational collapse ? I think something similar is happining in China's economics when more workers produce more value, hence attract more capital and so on.

>a nation with more educated people does not innovate more than others

based on the chart you are dead wrong -- Russia was and still is one of the key competitors of US in innovation, albeit in the sectors outside of the semiconductors and IT (which I assume you know best). Russia is an innovator in space, weapons, nanotech and other industries, so i wasn't surprised to see them in the upper 10%. I must admit seeing them at #1 was surprising.

Going from right to left, Japan certainly makes sense as an innovator (e.g. manufacturing), Korea (electronics), Nordic countries(telcom), etc.

On the other hand, countries from Peru and on down are hardly innovators on anyone's list.

3 countries out of 30 make an exception, not a rule. i am not saying these countries are not innovative, but to my knowledge France, Denmark, Norway, Ireland, Korea, Japan and Canada are not more innovative than the US.they may be more advanced in one field like telecom, or medecine, or car manufacturing, but as a whole these nations are not more innovative then the US or India, therefore a more educated nation does not mean it will innovate more.

India is a bad example -- it suffers from a huge, uneducated population and the fact that top minds usually leave the country (until recently) and spend their most productive years abroad. Do you have any examples where India can claim world-class innovations that weren't created elsewhere?

There's a very interesting point. Both China and India have nearely same population (1.32B and 1.12B people accordingly), and same education level as per the graph. Aslo it seems both countries are on same level of innovation, yet, China's GDP is almost 3 times higher than GDP or India ($10.12T to $4.12T). So, I won't call India an exception. The question is what makes China so productive or what India lacks ? The answer is mentality: Chinese ppl got used to work, whence Indians are not. And I think GDP does not corelate with level of edication and innovation.

Concerning this point, it is not necessarily just the mentality. It is worth noting that China has had a government imposed and subsidized industrialization program in place for some time now. India, which is a democracy, is not forcing its people to work in factories when they might be happier living in a village. This might explain the difference in GDP?

China's non-democratic system means it invests in infrastructure before other more immediately demanded things. I think it has a better education system from primary to secondary, as outside of Kerala a lot of teachers are habitually absent.

India has higher barriers to entry in damn near everything because of the "Licence Raj" and <i>insane </i> employment legislation. Its almost impossible to fire people once your enterprise has more than 100 employees.

China has been experiencing the demographic dividend (falling birthrate means the dependency ratio drops, and you get a bulgein the population pyramid in the working age population, more taxes, fewer pensions and childcare)

well maybe they did not innovate in the sense of creating something new (although we heard of stories that claim that a few British mathematical and scientific discoveries originated from Indians). But they are one of the leading countries in IT services. to me using someone else innovation to become a leader in that field, makes you as innovative as the creator. The point i am trying to make is " Education does not make one country better (economically, politically) than another".

There are less people in all of those countries you mentioned. Maybe you should compare them to US states.

Thanks for this comment - I had a lot to say about each of these comments but they all take too long to compose correctly. This is dead on - a smaller country with a less diverse population can improve itself generally, while the US is too big, too populous, and too democratic to make the same general improvement in its population.

Some decent comparisons (size, population, economies, demographics) are:

Finland/Sweden/Denmark to Minnesota: single digit millions, high levels of education, good technology base, lots of forests, water, and timber, homogeneous population (with recent immigration base). [Norway is similar but distorted by its huge oil wealth]

France to California: similar sized economies and land area, economies include tech/science, manufacturing, shipping, and agriculture, heavyweights in their region, diverse populations (with some tension, little integration).

Russia - Great Lakes region: great universities, high levels of education, but economies not performing like they used to due to deindustrialization. Exports scientists and engineers to more economically vibrant regions. [Also distorted by Russia's oil wealth]

Not sure about what to compare China/India/Korea to. China-Sun Belt might work (recent boom fueled by investment in logistics, infrastructure, distribution; manufacturing as opposed to high tech/innovation; real estate boom; success due to shift in macroeconomic values as much as anything else)

The Upper Midwest-Eastern Europe (Romania, Bulgaria, etc) might be a decent match too - slow economy due to agricultural focus, shrinking population due to few economies, etc.

[GAH! Do you see why I didn't want to respond to any of the comments!]

I'm not sure that GDP per capita is the right measure for assessing correlations between average income and education, which is what I presume you're trying to get at. After all GDP per capita is often skewed by the very rich. Take for example some stats from the US in 2004:

GDP per capita: $39,934 (Source: http://www.econstats.com/weo/V015.htm)

Median income per household member: $23,535 (Source: http://pubdb3.census.gov/macro/032005/hhinc/new02_001.htm)

Obviously a major discrepancy there. The median income per householder is determined via a sample census survey and would more accurately reflect average income than GDP per capita, which is constructed by dividing GDP by the population. Probably of more interest would be median income per householders over 18 to exclude all the kids. Then you could check the correlations between income and education.

Notwithstanding, I'm not that convinced there would be a very strong correlation across countries, in part because of the multitude of other factors that would influence income. There are also other factors to consider regarding the construction of the statistics, such as purchasing price parity, the definitions each country has used for education level, etc. Trying to attain ceteris paribus (all things being equal) for this would be a nightmare.

my unproven theory is that it can actually be bad for an economy in general if a vast majority of the population has a college degree. salaries will plunge, competition for positions will increase, degrees will loose their value, physicists will flip burgers, an emigration will increase drastically. off course that is until the nation can find a way to sell its talent to other countries. think India selling its IT services to the US and Europe.

whenever this topic comes up i always think of the people who never finished college. bill gates, jobs, eminem, etc. i don't think people like that are very rare

in the US it's not a big deal if you go to college or not. more important is whether you have ability

in one of pg's "creating a silicon valley elsewhere" essays he mentioned it may be more acceptable in the US for a PhD to start a startup than it would be in the UK. i think that sort of free-form climate is necessary for innovation

in fact those essays are pretty relevant here

http://www.paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html

http://www.paulgraham.com/america.html

Note: College degree does not mean university degree. For US, university degree rate is like 28-33%. Canada's is lower then that.

What would the difference be? I go to a university, but am getting a degree from a college within the university. I would think that means I'll have a college/university degree - I don't see how you can get one without the other.

Probably he means American associate/two year degrees. It gets even more confusing outside of the US, where "college" often means academic high school and university is the equivalent of 4 year American college.

In Canada, a college degree (generally referred to as a "diploma") is a two year course, usually in an applied area such as graphic design or radio broadcasting. A university degree is a four year course in an academic area like philosophy or chemistry.

Does that figure include the mail-order universities?

Education is less important than economic freedom (free trade, property rights, rule of law) in terms of higher per capita GDP.

Say that to Chinese gov ;-), there no freedom in China. Although I totally agree with your point.

Well, education isn't as valuable unless those three things (esp #2 and #3) are in place. They're prerequisites for education to be valuable.

The blog article with a link to chapter one of the study can be found here: http://blogs.ft.com/crookblog/2008/03/the-dumbing-of-america...

Seems to be a position paper used to support higher H1B limits. But I found the bit about "immigrant entrepreneurs" to be interesting. Quote:

"The survey found a substantial rise in the share of immigrant- founded venture capital–backed companies in America. The share rose from just 7 percent in 1970–80 to 20 percent in 1980–89"

I think the most interesting feature of the chart is that Germany and the U.S. have the smallest spread.

Possibly the value of a degree has been consistent for ~45 years (across all the age cohorts), as opposed to countries where the value of a degree has gone up (like Korea, where there's a huge spread).

Huh, interesting graph. Great way to show both country and age cohort comparison.

In Russia for example there is no 3 years bachelor degree only 5 years degree which is equivalent to masters degree in North America. So the comparison is useless .

>the comparison is useless

can you explain why do you think the comparison is useless? the diagram shows population with "at least a college degree", so if you are suggesting that 5 year degree should be harder to get than a 3 year degree, then we should expect Russia to be behind other nations.

It is useless because the definition of a college degree is different from country to country.How can you compare it for example with Russia when basically they do not have a college degree ? The basic unit of comparison is wrong, because in North America it's Bachelors and in Eastern Europe it's Masters. Does a graph mixing feet and meters is useful ( although both measure a distance) ?

Flawed, sure, but not useless. Lining up the countries side-by-side isn't very informative, but looking at the generation gaps within a single country can be.

For perspective, the title of the study this chart came from is "The Accelerating Decline in America's High-Skilled Workforce: Implications for Immigration Policy". The authors are looking at which countries are creating lots of new high-skilled workers, and which are heading into a deficit of high-skilled workers (Germany and U.S.). In general, education systems from different countries don't map very well onto each other, but on the issue of high-skilled immigration into the U.S., the unit of comparison is "education level that U.S. companies/politicians would consider high-skilled". So, of course it's flawed and U.S.-centric -- it's a chart about U.S. immigration policy.

These arguments probably would not last as long if you actually track down the source. Because chances are they have addressed your objections. From the study, which is linked from the blog post which can be found above:

"It is important to note that no attempt is made in figure 1.3 to “adjust for quality differences” in tertiary educational experiences between countries. Of course, not every university around the globe is a Harvard, Stanford, Cambridge, or Indian Institute of Technology, so invariably considerable “skill aspects” are not included in ﬁ gure 1.3. Such comparisons are significantly beyond the scope of this policy analysis. However, following the axiom that tertiary training is what principally enables individuals to quickly grasp new complex subjects and therefore makes it easier to train them on the (especially services-sector) job, it seems evident that in terms of describing the overall level of high-skilled workers in different countries’ workforces, any impact of quality differences among universities will be swamped by the quantitative differences in tertiary skill uptake depicted in figure 1.3.16"

>However, following the axiom that tertiary training is what principally enables individuals to quickly grasp new complex subjects and therefore...

I'm not at all convinced that it is axiomatic that "tertiary training is what principally enables individuals to quickly grasp new complex subjects".

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