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This paper concentrates on the role of foreign students' tuition fees in funding tertiary institutions and on the international mobility of students. The number of students enrolled in tertiary education outside their country of citizenship has been steadily increasing over the last 15 years. Some countries attract foreign students on a revenue-generating or at least a cost-recovery basis, while others do not differentiate between the tuition fees paid by national and foreign students. The evidence from recent tuition-fee reforms suggests that tuition fees influence the choice of destination countries among international new entrants. However, higher tuition fees do not necessarily discourage international students, and can contribute substantially to the funding of tertiary education.

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Economic and cultural globalisation has ushered in a new era in higher education. Higher education was always more internationally open than most sectors because of its immersion in knowledge, which never showed much respect for juridical boundaries. In global knowledge economies, higher education institutions are more important than ever as mediums for a wide range of cross-border relationships and continuous global flows of people, information, knowledge, technologies, products and financial capital. Even as they share in the reinvention of the world around them, higher education institutions, and the policies that produce and support them, are also being reinvented. For the first time in history every research university is part of a single world-wide network and the world leaders in the field have an unprecedented global visibility and power. Research is more internationalised than before and the mobility of doctoral students and faculty has increased. The specifically global element in academic labour markets has gained weight, especially since the advent of global university rankings. This working paper explores the issues for national policy and for individual institutions. Part one provides an overview of globalisation and higher education and the global responses of national systems and individual institutions of higher education. Part two is focused on certain areas of policy with a strong multilateral dimension: Europeanisation, institutional rankings and typologies and cross-border mobility.

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The 2006 edition of ‘Education at a glance’ provides a current and comparable set of indicators on the performance of education systems and represents the consensus of professional thinking on how to measure the current state of education internationally. The indicators look at who participates in education, what is spent on it, how education systems operate and the results achieved. Indicators comprise a wide range of outcomes, from comparisons of student’s performance in key subject areas to the impact of education on earnings and on adults’ chances of employment. New material in this edition includes: further analysis of results of the 2003 survey of the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), including student access to, and use of, ICT; analysis of the lowest performing students; the effects of family background on students’ performance and the way classes are organised in schools; trend data on tertiary qualifications, including projections for the year 2014; trend data on survival rates in tertiary education; the impact of demographic trends on education systems, as well as projections on expenditure for the year 2015; trend data on expected years of education; instruction time per subject for 9-to-14-year-olds; a picture of student mobility and the significance of internationalisation of higher education. The ExcelR spreadsheets used to create the tables and charts are available via the StatLinks printed in the book. The chapters are as follows: The output of educational institutions and the impact of learning; Financial and human resources invested in education; Access to education, participation and progression; The learning environment and organisation of schools. Included as appendices are: Characteristics of educational systems; Reference statistics; Sources, methods and technical notes. Show less

Education at a Glance is the OECD’s annual round-up of data and analysis on education, providing a rich, comparable and up-to-date array of indicators on education systems in the OECD’s 30 member countries and in a number of partner economies. The 2008 edition of ‘Education at a glance: OECD indicators’ looks at who participates in education, what is spent on it and how education systems operate and the results achieved. The latter includes indicators on a wide range of outcomes, from comparisons of students’ performance in key subject areas to the impact of education on earnings and on adults’ chances of employment. New material in this edition includes: entry rates in tertiary education by field of study; data on the skills of 15-year-olds in science; an analysis of the socio-economic background of 15-year-olds and the role of their parents; data on the extent to which the socioeconomic status of parents affects students’ participation in higher education; data on the returns to education; data on the governance of higher education institutions; an analysis of efficiency in the use of resources; data on evaluations and assessments within education systems; and a comparison of the levels of decision-making in education across countries.

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‘Highlights from Education at a Glance 2008’ is indexed at TD/TNC 95.605. Show less

Choosing a field of study means choosing a career, a professional identity, a sector of society, and to a certain extent also a way of life and a set of values. Yet there is no longer a straightforward relationship between the subject studied and future employment, as today's students have a variety of ways to acquire new skills and multiple paths to specialise in different domains. People change jobs and professions more frequently and job mobility is becoming an increasingly important feature of contemporary labour markets.

This brief paper examines what tertiary students are choosing to study and makes the following points: (1) the social sciences are the most popular field for non-vocational tertiary education programs; one in three new students choose a program in social sciences, business and law; (2) gender equality has been virtually achieved in many fields of study, especially in social sciences and services but significant gender differences persist in computing and engineering (male-dominated) and in health and welfare and education (female-dominated); and (3) almost one in four international students in OECD countries follow programs in the field of business and administration (23 per cent), and the proportion of international students from fields oriented to the public function such as education (three per cent) or health and welfare (nine per cent) is lower on average.

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The key findings of this brief paper are that: (1) among 25-34 year-olds with a tertiary degree, the proportion of those who obtained at least a master's or equivalent degree varies from four per cent in Chile to 79 per cent in the Slovak Republic; (2) tertiary attainment also varies across generations: while 49 per cent of tertiary-educated 25-34 year-olds have a bachelor's or equivalent degree as their highest educational attainment, this falls to 39 per cent among 55-64 year-olds; (3) employment prospects tend to improve with tertiary attainment levels: the average employment rate of 25-34 year-olds with a doctorate is 88 per cent, for those with a master's or equivalent degree it is 84 per cent and for those with at most a short-cycle or a bachelor's degree it is around 80 per cent; and (4) in some countries, however, increased tertiary attainment is not associated with improved employment prospects among 25-34 year-olds, except for doctorate holders; in other countries, short-cycle tertiary graduates are more likely to be employed than those with a bachelor's degree.

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For some years now, many OECD countries have been concerned about the time tertiary students take to complete their studies. To get more workers to enter the labour market at an earlier age, they have developed policies to encourage students to graduate sooner. For example, the reforms following the Bologna Declaration in 1999 introducing a new degree structure in European countries were explicitly motivated by a policy objective to reduce the time students spend studying. This brief paper looks at whether these policies have been successful in terms of the age at which university students earn their first degree?

[Key findings are that]: (1) across OECD countries, the median age students first graduated from university fell by six months between 2005 and 2011; (2) the median age of first graduation ranges from around 22 in Belgium and the United Kingdom to over 27 in Iceland and Israel; (3) the percentage of part-time students has increased from 19.8 per cent in 2005 to 22.0 per cent in 2011, suggesting that more flexible routes between study and work are slowly becoming more widespread; and (4) the percentage of older students (aged 30 and over) entering universities has remained constant at around 10 to 11 per cent on average between 2005 and 2011.

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Even when all students, including the most disadvantaged, have easy access to the internet, a digital divide, based on socio-economic status, still persists in how students use technology. In the five Nordic countries, as well as in Hong Kong-China, the Netherlands and Switzerland, over 98 per cent of disadvantaged students have access to the internet at home. By contrast, in some low- and middle-income countries, many disadvantaged students have access to the internet only at school, if at all. In 2012, disadvantaged students spent at least as much time on line as advantaged students, on average across OECD countries. In 21 out of 42 countries and economies, disadvantaged students spent more time online than advantaged students. In all countries/economies, what students do with computers, from using e-mail to reading news on the Internet, is related to students' socio-economic status. Advantaged students are more likely than disadvantaged students to search for information or read news on line. Disadvantaged students, on the other hand, tend to use the internet to chat or play video games at least as often as advantaged students do.

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In recent years there has been considerable interest in the significant role of education and training in enhancing economic progress, fuller employment and social integration. This paper provides an international comparison of adult participation in continuing education and training beyond initial education in Europe, the United States of America (USA), the United Kingdom (UK), Canada and New Zealand. The data is drawn from the International Adult Literacy Survey which collected information about participation in training during the year leading up to the survey. The paper focuses on the differences between countries in relation to participation in education and training, the duration of courses, and financial sponsorship. Cross-national similarities and differences in education and training by gender, age group, educational attainment, literacy levels, occupation, and the size and kind of organisation within which people are employed, are also examined. The results reveal major cross-national differences in the incidence and volume of continuing education and training among adults but there were some notable similarities across countries in relation to the distribution of education and training within sub-populations. Employed adults were more likely to participate in continuing education or training and their participation rate was higher for job-related training than participation for other reasons. Those adults with higher level educational qualifications were more likely to participate than those with lower levels. Younger adults were more likely to participate and for a longer duration than older age groups and those employed in larger organisations were also more likely to participate. Data on funding of training revealed that in all countries, employers were the most common financial sponsors of training, particularly job-related training. Show less

At a time when having more education is increasingly necessary for success in the labour market, how is the talent pool of young higher education graduates changing around the world? According to the OECD's latest analysis, not only has it exploded over the last decade, it is likely to grow far larger by the year 2020. As detailed in this brief, by the year 2020, more than 200 million 25-34 year-olds in OECD and G20 countries will have higher education degrees, and 40 per cent of them will be from China and India alone. By contrast, the United States and the European Union countries are expected to account for just over a quarter of young people with higher education degrees in OECD and G20 countries. What's more, the rapid expansion of higher education in non-OECD G20 countries has significantly altered the distribution of the talent pool among countries. A decade ago, one in six 25-34 year-olds with a higher education degree was from the United States, a similar proportion was from China, 12 per cent came from the Russian Federation, and about 10 per cent each were from Japan and India. But according to OECD estimates, in 2010 China moved into the lead, accounting for 18 per cent of 25-34 year-olds with higher education. The United States followed with 14 per cent, the Russian Federation and India each had 11 per cent, and Japan had seven per cent. These trends are likely to only intensify further in the years ahead, raising key questions as to how the labour market will absorb the swelling number of better-educated people in the future. Show less