Correction and New Material On Who Gets A College Education

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Source for all charts: Table A1.4 at https://stat.link/vur4y1An eagle-eyed professor pointed out that I had misread one of the OECD tables in my last post on education. I read the figures as showing the educational attainment of the parents of students who entered college in 2012 and 2023, i.e., people aged 17 or so. And so I remarked how astonishing it was that only 27% of their parents got a high school diploma.In reality, it shows the educational attainment of the parents of people aged 25-34 years old in 2012 and 2023. Parents usually had their first child at age 27 or 28. Consequently, someone aged 25 in 2012 would have been born in 1987, their mother likely born around 1960, and their father in the late 1950s. Someone aged 34 would have been born in 1978, so their mother would likely have been born around 1952, and their father before 1950. So, the 27% figure now makes more sense. So, here is the third chart in the last post with the vertical axis title corrected (see chart at the top).The rest of this post is new information rather than a correction. It shows the educational progress over time and how much more education children have than their parents. The first chart below shows data for 2012, and the second for 2023. Regarding the parents, the “no diploma” column indicates that neither parent has a diploma. The diplomat and college degree columns mean that at least one parent attained that level. For example, the share of parents with no diploma fell from 27% in 2012 to 15% in 2023. The charts below show that by 2023, Japan ranked high compared to other countries…