Education: Literacy - OECD World Rankings puts US at bottom

After the American Century

The OECD has tested 166,000 people and ranked nations according to their levels of literacy.  Among persons aged 16 to 24 the results are surprising. The United States is only ranked 20th out of 22, while Finland is in the first position.  It would appear that the Bush "no child left behind" program might have been renamed "a whole system left behind."

How much difference is there between the top and the bottom? Japan is second and Italy twenty-first. The OECD concluded that a Japanese high-school graduate has literacy skills comparable to an Italian university graduate. This would strongly suggest that the distance between Finland (1) and the US (20) or  Britain (18) is just as alarmingly great.

It is also somewhat surprising to see a wider spread in the rankings of the Nordic nations than is usual in such studies, with Sweden at 7, Denmark 13, and resource-rich and debt-free Norway at 16. Why  should Denmark and Norway fall behind former Soviet bloc nations such as Estonia (5), Poland (8),  the Czech Republic (9), and the Slovak Republic (12)?

Literacy, aged 16-24
1 Finland
2 Japan
3 South Korea
4 Netherlands
5 Estonia
6 Australia
7 Sweden
8 Poland

9 Czech Republic

10 Germany
11 Austria
12 Slovak Republic
13 Denmark
14 France
15 Canada
16 Norway
17 Ireland
18 Spain
19 England/N Ireland
20 United States

21 Italy

22 Cyprus

The OECD also compiled a similar table for all adults. Many countries are almost at the same rank in both tables, especially at the top, notably Finland, Japan, and the Netherlands. A comparison also reveals that compared to the older generation the younger people are falling behind in Canada, Norway and the United States. In contrast, youth has improved on their parents and grandparents in South Korea, France, and Spain.

Literacy, all adults
1 Japan
2 Finland
3 Netherlands
4 Sweden
5 Australia
6 Norway
7 Estonia
8 Slovak Republic
9 Flanders (Belgium)

10 Canada

11 Czech Republic
12 Denmark
13 South Korea
14 England/N Ireland
15 Germany
16 United States
17 Austria
18 Poland
19 Ireland
20 France
21 Spain

22 Italy

Literacy is a fundamental indicator for the ability to get and hold a good job, and it correlates well with lifetime income. Poor literacy in a nation harms its competitiveness.

PISA test results

After the American Century

The 2009 PISA results can be seen in the table accompanying this article. (For the 2012 results, click here ) Both Europe and the United States must do a better job educating their children if they are to keep up with Asia. On the reading test European countries were not so far apart, and ranged from a low of 483 (Greece and Slovenia) to a high of 508 (Netherlands). That is only a 25 point spread. But the difference between the Netherlands and Shanghai was 48 points, almost twice as much. Well, actually Finland did get 536, far and away the best showing for Europe. The pattern was the same in Science and in Math, where China was by far the best, while the Europeans clustered well behind. The United States was mediocre in all three categories.

Sadly, education budgets are being cut in many European countries, which are not investing in new schools or more teachers. Indeed, Denmark has just decided to let the size of classes in elementary school get larger, a serious mistake. Larger classes tend to be harder to keep focused, and they demand far more of teachers, who can scarcely give individual attention to students who need extra help or those who need extra stimuli.

If you take the three test scores and add them together, this is the result (not all nations surveyed are included in this list).

Shanghai               1731
Hong Kong           1637
Finland                  1631
Singapore              1630
Korea                    1623

Japan                      1588
Canada                   1580
New Zealand         1559
Australia                1556
Netherlands           1556
Switzerland           1552

Estonia                  1541
Germany               1530
Belgium                1528

Poland                   1503
Norway                 1501
Britain                   1500
Denmark               1497

Average Score      1492

France                    1491

United States         1489

Ireland                   1489
Sweden                  1486                

If the future belongs to the best educated, then the future belongs to Asia, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. Judging by this list, being a wealthy country helps, but it is not the determining factor. Norway has no national debt and a huge public surplus, yet achieved only average results, while Finland, which has less money per capita than Denmark or Norway, was at the top. And the United States, which for decades was the wealthiest large nation in the world, scores below the average.

See also World University Rankings

Higher Education Pays for itself

After the American Century

The OECD has released a report today that concludes, in part, as follows:

On average across the OECD countries, a man with a tertiary level of education will generate  $119 000 more in income taxes and social contributions over his working life than someone with just an upper secondary level of education. Unhappily, women make somewhat less, due to the continuation of wage inequality and the persistence of the glass ceiling. But women graduates nevertheless do generate more income than it costs to graduate them.

This means that  investment in post-second education more than pays for itself, generating a surplus. The report also found that university graduates have a lower unemployment rate than the population as a whole. "Unemployment rates among people with a tertiary level of education have stayed at or below 4% on average across OECD countries during the recession."

Moreover, the OECD report only tells us how much more university graduates pay in taxes than it costs to educate them. It does not calculate the value of their inventions, for example, or how much their labor contributes to better exports, more appealing tourism, more effective public service, and so forth.

  

Denmark comes out well in the report, which finds it sixth in terms of the percentage of its population getting advanced education. However, it does trail the world's leading country,  Finland, with Iceland number two. Norway, the Netherlands, and Sweden are close behind Denmark at 9, 10, and 11. 

Denmark needs to improve in the vital area of internationalization. Overall, the total number of international students in the world has doubled to 3.3 million from 1995 until 2008. Yet Denmark has a smaller cadre of foreign students than many counties, and it looks particularly weak in the all-important area of advanced degree programs. Fully 84% of Danish advanced degree students are Danes, compared to 54% in the UK, 55% in Switzerland, 60% in France,  61% in Canada or 66% in Austria. (Figures for the US and Germany were not available, but they do have large numbers of foreign students, without question.)

Danish parochialism is most pronounced in the PhD programs in the Humanities, where almost all students are Danes, plus a small number of permanent residents married to Danes. This is not a healthy or competitive situation. Things are better in the sciences and medicine, but not up to the level of nations that the Danes usually compare themselves with.

The United States lags behind in these statistics, with little more than a third of its population receiving tertiary education. Of course, it still has the world's strongest universities that regularly top the league tables, regardless of whether they are complied in Europe, Asia, or the US. Harvard remains number one, with Yale, MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, Johns Hopkins, Princeton, Columbia, and all the other great universities that have long been dominant among the top 50. However, if one looks at the population of the US as a whole, its educational level is not rising as rapidly as elsewhere, and the ability of the people as a whole to compete internationally may be expected to suffer accordingly.