30 October 2011

Global Education Digest 2011

Cover of the Global Education Digest 2010

The UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) announced the publication of the Global Education Digest 2011. The focus of this year's edition of the GED is on secondary education.

Growing enrolment in primary education over past decades - partly due to the emphasis on universal primary education by the Millennium Development Goals and Education for All - has led to increased demand for secondary education. The Global Education Digest 2011 describes trends in participation in and completion of lower and upper secondary education from 1970 to the present, as well as disparities in access to education of children of secondary school age. The GED also contains analysis of data on educational attainment, technical and vocational education and training, secondary school teachers, and education finance.

The analytical chapter is accompanied by 200 pages of statistical tables on pre-primary, primary, secondary and tertiary education. The GED 2011 introduces several new tables that did not appear in previous editions. Table 5 lists national, regional and global estimates of the number and percent of children of primary and lower secondary school age out of school. Table 19 introduces a new indicator of educational attainment, the percentage of the population 25 years and older with at least completed primary, lower secondary, upper secondary, post-secondary, or tertiary education. All data from the statistical annex will also be available in the UIS Data Centre.

Reference

  • UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS). 2011. Global education digest 2011: Comparing education statistics across the world. Montreal: UIS. (Download in PDF format, 7.5 MB)

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Friedrich Huebler, 30 October 2011 (edited 31 October 2011), Creative Commons License
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30 September 2011

Adult and youth literacy in 2009

8 September was International Literacy Day. On this occasion, the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) released a fact sheet with estimates of adult and youth literacy in 2009, the most recent year with data.

The global adult literacy rate, for the population 15 years and older, was 83.7% in 2009, compared to 83.4% in 2008. The adult illiterate population fell from 796.2 million in 2008 to 793.1 million in 2009. 64.1% of the adult illiterate population were women. Adult literacy rates are lowest in sub-Saharan African and in South and West Asia (see Figure 1). In 11 countries, less than half of the adult population were able to read and write: Benin, Burkina Faso, Chad, Ethiopia, Gambia, Guinea, Haiti, Mali, Niger, Senegal and Sierra Leone.

Figure 1: Adult literacy rate, 2009
World map with adult literacy rates in 2009
Source: UNESCO Institute for Statistics, 2011

Youth literacy rates - for the population 15 to 24 years - are generally higher than adult literacy rates, due to increased school attendance rates among younger generations. The global youth literacy rate was 89.3% in 2009, compared to 89.0% in 2008. The youth illiterate population fell from 130.6 million in 2008 to 127.3 million in 2009. Youth literacy rates are lowest in sub-Saharan Africa (see Figure 2) and the five countries worldwide with youth literacy rates below 50% are from this region: Burkina Faso, Chad, Ethiopia, Mali and Niger.

Figure 2: Youth literacy rate, 2009
World map with youth literacy rates in 2009
Source: UNESCO Institute for Statistics, 2011

Reference

  • UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS). 2011. Adult and youth literacy. UIS fact sheet no. 16, September. Montreal: UIS. (Download in PDF format, 350 KB)

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Friedrich Huebler, 30 September 2011, Creative Commons License
Permanent URL: http://huebler.blogspot.com/2011/09/literacy.html
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14 August 2011

New version of programs to integrate Stata with an external text editor

I released a new version of the rundo and rundolines programs to integrate the Stata statistical package with an external text editor. Version 4 of the programs supports Stata 12, released in July 2011, as well as previous versions of Stata. Users who upgrade from an older version of Stata to Stata 12 must install the new rundo and rundolines programs. The old programs are not compatible with Stata 12 because some keyboard shortcuts in Stata have changed. Users of Stata 8 to 11 can continue to use version 3.1 of rundo and rundolines.

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Friedrich Huebler, 14 August 2011, Creative Commons License
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31 July 2011

School attendance by grade and age in Liberia

The article "Overage pupils in primary and secondary education" of June 2011 summarized data on school attendance from 36 countries and found that overage school attendance is common in sub-Saharan Africa. The countries with the highest share of overage pupils in the sample were Haiti, Liberia, Uganda, Rwanda, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Ghana, Madagascar, and Malawi. In Liberia, 93% of all pupils in primary and secondary education are at least one year overage for their grade and 84% are at least two years overage. This article takes a closer look at Liberia by analyzing data from the same Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) from 2007 that was analyzed for the earlier article.

The official primary school age in Liberia, as defined by the International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED), is 6 to 11 years. The official secondary school age is 12 to 17 years. Given these school ages, a 6-year-old in grade 1 and a 7-year-old in grade 2 are in the right grade for their age. A 7-year-old in grade 1 would be one year overage and an 8-year-old in grade 1 would be two years overage. A 5-year-old in grade 1 would be one year underage.

The graph below shows the age distribution of pupils in primary and secondary education in Liberia. Pupils who are in the right grade for their age or underage are in a small minority. In the first twelve grades, their share never exceeds 9%. By contrast, as many as 98% of all pupils in a single grade are overage. The degree of overage attendance is astounding: 5% of all first graders are 9 or more years overage, meaning that they start primary school at age 15 or later. 19% of all first graders are at least 7 years overage and 44% are at least 5 years overage. In grade 8, 18% of all pupils are 9 or more years overage; while the official age for eighth graders is 13 years, one in five pupils in that grade in Liberia is 22 years or older.

Age distribution of pupils in primary and secondary education in Liberia, 2007
Graph with data on overage and underage pupils in primary and secondary education in Liberia
Source: Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) 2007. - Click image to enlarge.

What are the reasons for this high prevalence of overage school attendance? In Liberia, as in other countries of sub-Saharan Africa, many pupils enter school late for a variety of reasons that include poverty, a scarcity of educational facilities, and lack of enforcement of the official school ages. High repetition rates further exacerbate the problem of overage school attendance. Among the consequences of this age structure in school are a higher probability of dropout and reduced lifetime earnings caused by incomplete education or late entry into the labor market.

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Friedrich Huebler, 31 July 2011 (edited 27 February 2012), Creative Commons License
Permanent URL: http://huebler.blogspot.com/2011/07/liberia.html
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30 June 2011

Overage pupils in primary and secondary education

Pupils can be overage for their grade for two reasons: late entry and repetition. Take for example a country where children are expected to enter primary school at 6 years of age. If a child enters grade 1 at age 7, he or she is one year overage for the grade. A child who enters grade 1 at age 8 and repeats the grade will be three years overage for the grade; two of the three years are due to late entry and the third year is due to repetition.

Children who are many years overage are less likely to complete their education. If they stay in school, they graduate later than pupils who entered school at the official starting age. These overage graduates enter the labor market late and often with lower educational attainment. As a consequence, they are likely to have lower cumulative earnings over their lifetime than persons who graduated and entered the labor market at a younger age and with higher educational attainment. For the country as a whole this in turn means reduced national income and slower economic growth.

Overage school attendance is common in sub-Saharan Africa but also occurs in other regions. The figure below shows data from 36 nationally representative household surveys that were conducted between 2004 and 2009. 34 of these surveys were Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) and the remaining two surveys, those for Bangladesh and Kyrgyzstan, were Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS). For each country, the graph shows the share of children in primary and secondary education who are at least one or two years overage for their grade. The entrance ages and durations of primary and secondary education used in this study are those specified by the International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED).

Percentage of children in primary and secondary education who are at least 1 or 2 years overage for their grade
Graph with data on overage children in primary and secondary education
Source: Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) and Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS), 2004-2009.

In the sample of 36 countries, the share of children who are at least one year overage for their grade ranges from 5 percent in Armenia to 95 percent in Haiti. Other countries where at least three out of four pupils in primary or secondary education are overage include Liberia (93%), Uganda (86%), Rwanda (83%), Cambodia (78%), Mozambique (76%), and Ethiopia (75%). In addition to Armenia, the percentage of pupils who are at least one year overage is below 10 percent in Moldova and Egypt (8%).

The share of children in primary and secondary education who are at least two years overage for their grade ranges from 1 percent in Armenia to 85 percent in Haiti. In addition to Haiti, at least half of all pupils are two or more years overage in Liberia (84%), Uganda (67%), Rwanda (65%), Ethiopia (59%), Cambodia (55%), Malawi (51%), and Madagascar (50%). On average, the share of children who are at least two years overage is 19 percent less than the share of children who are at least one year overage.

However, there are exceptions. In Albania and the Ukraine, 43 and 26 percent respectively of all children in primary and secondary education are at least one year overage. By contrast, only 5 and 2 percent respectively are at least two years overage. This means that in these two countries, a relatively large number of children enter school one year late or repeat one grade, but hardly any children enter school two years late or repeat more than one grade. Late entry and repetition are therefore less likely to have negative consequences on lifetime earnings and national income in Albania and the Ukraine than in other countries.

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Friedrich Huebler, 30 June 2011, Creative Commons License
Permanent URL: http://huebler.blogspot.com/2011/06/age.html
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