Brussels, 20/09/2004 (Agence Europe) - According to new research published by the OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development), most educational establishments in Member States have more autonomy today in terms of how they organise their educational system, through gradual decentralisation from local, regional or national authorities to the educational establishments themselves. The 2004 edition of Education at a Glance, the OECD's annual compendium of education statistics, looks at a series of issues: 1) educational levels, nearly all OECD countries have seen increases in educational levels in their country over the past ten years, particularly in South Korea, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Poland and the Czech Republic. On average across OECD countries, half of today's young adults now enter universities or other institutions offering similar qualifications at some stage during their life. Some countries have not been following this trend, Mexico for example. 2) Salaries. In general, people with tertiary qualifications command significantly higher salaries than those with only secondary education. In the U.S., earnings for tertiary graduates are 86% higher on average than those for people with only secondary education, and in Hungary they are more than double. At the other end of the scale, the difference is smallest in Denmark, where graduates earn on average 25% more than non-graduates, and Spain, where they earn 29% more. They also stand a stronger chance of finding jobs: on average in OECD countries, around 89% of men and 78% of women with university degrees are in employment, compared with around 84% of men and 63% of women who ended their education at secondary level. 3) Internationalism. Tertiary education is rapidly becoming an international domain. In 2002, 1.9 million students were enrolled in the OECD area outside their country of origin, with nearly three quarters of them choosing Australia, France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States as their destination. 4) The gender gap. Significant progress has also been achieved in reducing the gender gap in educational qualifications. Younger women today are far more likely to have completed a tertiary qualification than women 30 years ago: in 19 of the 30 OECD countries, more than twice as many women aged 25 to 34 have completed tertiary education than women aged 55 to 64 do. In 21 of 27 OECD countries with comparable data, the number of women graduating from university-level programmes is equal to or exceeds that of men. In mathematics and computer science, gender differences in tertiary qualifications remain persistently high.
Other areas covered by the report include the financial and human resources invested in education, access to education, the percentage of the population attending educational institutions, school hours and the breakdown of teaching hours among different subjects, admissions criteria for schools, class size and other aspects of the school environment. (Further information available at: http: //http://www.oecd.org/edu/rse2004 )