Shaping, not predicting, the future of students

by Anthony Mann
Senior Analyst, Directorate for Education and Skills

Footballer Cristiano Ronaldo is reputed to have once said that there’s no point making predictions because nothing is set in stone. It is hard to predict the future, but in education policy at least it is not altogether impossible.

What the expansion of higher education means for graduates in the labour market

by Markus Schwabe
Statistician, Directorate for Education and Skills

A university degree has always been considered as key to a good job and higher wages. But as the share of tertiary-educated adults across OECD countries has almost doubled over the last two decades, can the labour market absorb this growing supply of skills? At first glance, the answer isn’t encouraging: the number of unemployed tertiary-educated adults has been increasing across OECD countries for many years. However, a closer look reveals that the unemployment rate for these adults is still much lower than for those without a university degree.

The latest Education Indicators in Focus policy brief analyses long-term trends in employment outcomes of adults based on their highest level of educational attainment. The figure above shows that, in all OECD countries, adults with tertiary education still enjoy higher employment rates than those without by 10 percentage points, on average, and this advantage has changed little over the past two decades.

While this might seem reassuring, in some countries the reality is more troubling. In Korea, for example, labour market demand has not kept pace with an ever-increasing supply of tertiary graduates. As a result, the employment advantage of tertiary-educated adults decreased slightly, by 0.6 point, between 1995 and 2006. In 1995, tertiary-educated adults in Korea were 13% more likely to be employed than those with an upper-secondary or post-secondary non-tertiary education; today they are only 6% more likely to have a job. With 70% of young adults in Korea holding a tertiary degree, some might wonder whether tertiary expansion has reached its limit. But with populations of school-aged children shrinking across OECD countries, the worry about too many university graduates competing for too few high-skilled jobs might prove to be misplaced.

The “knowledge economy” has increased the demand for better-educated and well-skilled workers. But in many countries, even as enrolments in higher education have grown, companies still report that they cannot find workers with the skills they are looking for. While technological progress and globalisation continue to challenge education systems, automation and digitalisation will be, in the words of two Harvard economists*, an ongoing “race between education and technology”. Countries should thus worry less about the share of tertiary-educated adults in the labour force and more about the skills that education provides. Ensuring that the skills students graduate with are relevant to the labour market will go a long way towards making the expansion of higher education sustainable – and beneficial for all.

*Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz in their book The Race between Education and Technology (2008), Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, Belknap.

Links

Education Indicators in Focus No. 57 - Is labour market demand keeping pace with the rising educational attainment of the population?
Education at a Glance 2017 - OECD Indicators

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What happens with your skills when you leave school?

by Dirk Van Damme
Head of the Innovation and Measuring Progress Division, Directorate for Education and Skills

Mean literacy and numeracy score, by age and education enrolment status
OECD Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC), 2012 or 2015

Moving from the world of school to the world of work is one of the most dramatic changes in the lives of young people. And for many youngsters this transition does not go smoothly. Spells of frictional or longer-term unemployment, job insecurity because of low-paid or temporary contracts, and the uncertainties associated with starting to live autonomously produce a challenging phase in young people’s lives. The most vulnerable people are those who fall between the two systems: the so-called NEETs (not in employment, education or training), who are no longer in school and are either unemployed or inactive. Some 6% of 15-19 year-olds in OECD countries – in other words, half of those of that age who have left school, or around 5 million young people – are NEET.

A new Education Indicators in Focus brief looks at the transition from school to work across different age groups. It reconfirms that leaving school is much less difficult if one has acquired an upper secondary qualification, which functions as a kind of security mechanism against most of the hardships associated with the transition. The share of 20-24 year-old NEETs who do not have an upper secondary qualification (36%) is double the share of employed 20-24 year-olds who have not attained that level of education (18%).

But an educational qualification is one thing; the actual skills that people have are another. The brief publishes some new and interesting findings about the skills disparities among young people in different age groups in and out of school. The chart above shows the difference in mean literacy and numeracy skills between people in and out of education in three different age groups. The differences are remarkable. Among 16-19 year-olds, the difference in skills amounts to the equivalent of around 2.5 years of schooling. But the differences among older age groups are also considerable – and they remain significant even after controlling for educational attainment.

The finding lends itself to various possible explanations and observations. The most obvious one is that the results reflect a selection effect: more-skilled young people tend to stay in school while the less-skilled leave. A skills-selection effect does not seem to be problematic among 20-24 and 25-29 year-olds, when continuing one’s education is based on educational merit. For the younger age group, however, the difference in skills signals an efficiency problem in our education systems. Less-skilled young people should leave school only after they have acquired a foundation level of skills. When dropping out of school at an early age is the result of a skills-selection mechanism, than we are not serving our most vulnerable youngsters well.

Another possible explanation looks at the skills difference from the other side of the transition: the labour market and the world of work. This hypothesis suggests that leaving school and entering the labour market is accompanied by a process of de-skilling. When skills are not used in employment, they erode. A difficult school-to-work transition can have a scarring effect that can last throughout an entire career. De-skilling can happen through unemployment, but also through employment in precarious jobs, where workers do not fully use their skills, or through employment in an ill-matched job. This hypothesis suggests that a difficult transition process can undermine what should be a social benefit: essentially, the investment in skills acquisition is wasted.

The policy consequences are clear: there are many reasons for governments to be concerned about the school-to-work transition. Dropping out of school at an early age without a proper qualification has a huge social cost. Policies to provide guidance and support to young people during that transition pay off: there is less risk that people become unemployed or fall between the cracks and become dependent on welfare systems. And such policies should encourage people to maintain their skills and give them the opportunity to improve their skills through quality work and training. The political responsibility to ensure a smooth transition is enormous, but it is also shared between the work of education and the world of work.

Links

Education Indicators in Focus No. 54 - Transition from school to work: How hard is it across different age groups? 

Education Indicators in Focus 

Education at a Glance 2016: OECD Indicators

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Join our OECD Teacher Community on Edmodo

Chart source: OECD (2017), in Education Indicators in Focus No. 54, Figure 3. 

Closing the gap between education and employment

by Anthony Mann
Director of Policy and Research, Education and Employers Taskforce

Employer engagement in education and training has become a hot topic for policy makers and practitioners around the world. Over recent years, Governments and other stakeholders have invested significant resource in promoting and enabling closer links between employers and schools, colleges, universities and training providers.

Policy objectives have included:

• Tackling skills shortage/skills mismatch
• Improving youth skills relevant to dynamic labour market demand
• Harnessing community resources to improve attainment
• Putting coherent pathways in place for young people moving through educational and training provision
• Addressing inequalities in outcomes, promoting social mobility and challenging gender stereotyping.

The OECD has looked at the question of employer engagement from the perspectives of skills provision Learning for Jobs, gender inequality The ABC of Gender Equality in Education and currently with specific emphasis on careers provision and school-to-work transitions within projects such as Skills Beyond School and Work-based Learning in Vocational Education and Training. The EU has funded work connecting schools with STEM industries as part of a strategy to tackle skills shortages Ingenious  and CEDEFOP and the Inter-American Development Bank have explored the relationship in terms of skills mismatch and youth demand for vocational training. The World Bank has looked at connections between classrooms and workplaces in terms of enterprise education, exploring ways to encourage and enable entrepreneurialism particularly in developing countries. UNESCO and the International Labor Organisation have focused particularly on the theme from the perspective of youth employment.

In England, the Department for Education has looked to secondary schools to integrate employer engagement within careers provision; and, in response to the Wolf report, embedded employer links as a core element of 16-19 provision in schools and colleges, particularly to enrich vocational delivery and enhance pupil preparation for employment. Similar steps have been made in Scotland’s Youth Employment Strategy and the actions of the governments in Wales and Northern Ireland. Employers are seen as central to the future of apprenticeship programmes for young people and adults alike.

In sponsoring University Technical Colleges and Studio Schools in England, the Department for Education has supported new institutional models designed to enable profound employer engagement across the curriculum. Around the world, employer engagement has become a mainstream element of educational and training provision – with significant practice in Australia, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Switzerland and the United States.

Two upcoming events will offer a timely opportunity for closing the gap between education and employment:

On 29 and 30 June the Skills Summit in Bergen Norway, will convene ministers with responsibility for a range of skills-relevant portfolios, including education, employment, economic development, regional policy and government co-ordination. Drawing on this wide range of perspectives, The Skills Summit 2016 will provide Ministers with an opportunity to discuss the benefits and challenges of building effective whole-of-government and whole-of-society skills strategies, while at the same time providing a forum to exchange views on how best to maximize countries' skills potential to boost productivity, innovation and social inclusion.

Next month sees an unprecedented coming together of researchers, policy makers and practitioners at the international Conference on Employer Engagement in Education and Training held in London on 21 and 22 July, with the participation of OECD Director for Education and Skills, Andreas Schleicher, and Senior Policy Analyst Simon Field. This conference aims to take stock of the best quality research exploring the impact and delivery of employer engagement in education and training in order to understand the implications for effective, efficient and equitable policy and practice.

Links:
The Skills Summit, Bergen, Norway 2016
London Conference on Employer Engagement in Education and Training
Skills Matter: Further Results from the Survey of Adult Skills
OECD Reviews of Vocational Education and Training: Learning for Jobs
The ABC of Gender Equality in Education: Aptitude, Behaviour, Confidence
Photo credit: Job as target in the careers road @Shutterstock