An "education lighthouse for the way out of the crisis" was recently launched in the form of a new OECD web community dedicated to guiding education through the economic crisis. To date, the educationtoday collaborative website features nearly 200 content items from OECD experts and external analysts and is available to anyone who registers via myOECD at www.oecd.org.

Jobs crisis or no, it's best to invest in education. As this year's edition of Education at a Glance shows, men and women who have university-level degrees earn far more over the course of a lifetime than those who don't. In fact, men with higher education in Italy and the US can earn over US$300,000 more than their counterparts who do not have a university degree. Rewards tend to be lower for women, with Korea and Spain the exceptions.

Record fall in GDP; Economy; Gender learning; Other news; Soundbites; Plus ça change...

Scott McQuade writes about the prospects for digital devices as a replacement for paper publications ("Print online ?", OECD Observer No 270-271 January 2009). However, the evidence, so far, does not support the thesis that dedicated e-book readers such as Kindle, Sony Reader and iRex will become the platform of choice for book readers.

Does accountability always spur better school performance? Not necessarily as people think, as this extract from Improving School Leadership explains:

The Centre for Educational Research and Innovation celebrated its 40th anniversary in 2008. Its future is still very much ahead of it.

Education is a long-term investment, though at the same time it is faced with pressures from constant social and economic change.

University league tables are fashionable, but should not be taken as accurate measures of the quality of education. The OECD is investigating other tools to measure performance, policymakers and educators heard at a recent conference.

Some 72% of people born in Jamaica and holding a tertiary education degree live in OECD countries, a new report finds. Though Jamaica is the country with by far the highest emigration rate among people with such third-level qualifications (earned at home or abroad), the new study shows several OECD countries also feature highly.

“Attitudes are the real disability”, says Henry Holden, a well-known comedian and advocate for the disabled. Education is clearly important in this respect, but ironically, schools themselves have much to do in how they deal with disabled students.

This is an era in which science is needed, arguably more than ever. In the environment, energy and innovation generally, smart investors rely on smart thinkers. The public needs trusty scientists, to pursue knowledge and to arbitrate in debates about the likes of climate change, nuclear energy or nanotechnology.

Finland took the number one spot in the OECD’s PISA 2006 survey, a comprehensive and much-quoted international yardstick of secondary school student performance. Finland was followed by Hong Kong- China, Canada, Chinese Taipei, Estonia, Japan and New Zealand. Australia, the Netherlands, Korea, Germany, the UK, the Czech Republic, Switzerland, Austria, Belgium and Ireland also scored above the OECD average. Mexico finished last among OECD countries.

“Education over the Internet is going to be so big it is going to make e-mail usage look like a rounding error.” So remarked Cisco’s chief, John Chambers, in an article in The New York Times in 1999. But even the boss of a company that produces technology for the Internet might not have guessed just how large e-education would become.

Centres of higher learning often exude a rarefied air. From the spires of Oxford to the lanes of Bologna, a remoteness from local communities and disdain for the commercial world are still a common characterisation, if not a tradition.

Everyone accepts that education is vital for a healthy economy, but now there is strong evidence that it contributes to a healthy body too. Understanding the Social Outcomes of Learning makes the claim that those with more schooling also tend to have better health, as well as more civic engagement.

Learn more, earn more? Some of the issues raised in Education at a Glance 2007 formed a recent online public discussion in our Ask the Economists series. Andreas Schleicher, head of the OECD’s Education Indicators and Analysis division and a lead author of Education at a Glance, fielded questions from readers in Chile, China, Germany, Spain and the UK on Wednesday 3 October. Below is a sample.

Third-level education brings many benefits, and not just for the most educated. Higher education has expanded greatly in OECD countries in the past few decades, and the result as expected has been a rise in the number of graduates. But has the increasing supply of well-educated labour been matched by the creation of an equivalent number of highpaying jobs? Or will more and more people with university degrees simply have to work for the minimum wage?

Concerns about the supply and quality of teachers are generating new policies in many OECD countries. Here’s why.

“Our values and beliefs inhibit us from looking upon human beings as capital goods, except in slavery, and this we abhor.” So wrote American economist Theodore Schultz in 1961 in his pioneering analysis of the role of human capital in economic growth.

In today’s knowledge economy, the value of learning is becoming ever more apparent. Whether you’re an aged grandmother in Kenya, a 55-year-old manager in Kyoto, or a 25-year-old graduate in Kansas, the economic value of your education is rising.

Carl Sagan, the late astronomer, raconteur and television personality, once wondered aloud how many books an individual could read in a normal lifetime. “From here, to here”, was his estimate, as he walked the length of a single, not very long, shelf of books in a US library. Sagan’s point was that our capacity to read was nothing compared with the vast volume of editions contained in a normal library.

Does repeating a year in school help educational performance? The 2006 Education at a Glance, an annual report, says that although many teachers and education administrators see repeating as a good way of getting children to improve, repeat students are no more likely to do well than non-repeating classmates.

Many factors can influence the quality of education, from teaching and tools to size and comfort of classrooms. As with cleverly laid out books, good design of schools can also stimulate behaviour and responsiveness and facilitate learning.

Every eight seconds, one student in the OECD area leaves school without completing an upper secondary qualification. That means a gloomy outlook for his or her future: on average, 26% of adults without upper secondary qualifications earn half or less than half the national median earnings. The trouble is, the penalties for not obtaining strong baseline qualifications continue to rise year after year.

Innovative design, use and management of physical infrastructure can contribute to the quality of education. This lesson is not all that new. For a decade now, the OECD Programme on Educational Building (PEB), has led an international jury in selecting a number of institutions that exemplify considerations of flexibility, community needs, sustainability, safety and security, and financing.

Higher education cannot escape major and sometimes difficult change, and OECD governments were determined to lead those changes, rather than be driven by them. This was how Marietta Giannakou, minister of national education and religious affairs of Greece, wrapped up her conclusions as chair of the 2006 Education Ministers’ Meeting.

A basic problem with delivering a better higher education system is funding. Since the Second World War higher education, just as secondary and primary schools, has been considered as a public good, and so in most OECD countries the service had to be delivered free of charge to students through taxation. However, tighter public budgets and stiffer global competition for talent have led to a renewed interest in student fees as a possible way of raising more funding. The issue poses several tricky challenges, about access, equity, student finance, debt, and so on. Little wonder the debate has become rather heated in several countries.

Higher education is attracting unprecedented public attention across the OECD. In Germany a competition to create universities of excellence is fuelling debate; in France discussions continue about struggling mainstream universities versus more well-endowed grandes écoles; in the UK there is a debate about education as a public good versus faculties as market-oriented enterprises; and in the US public focus continues on accessibility, competition and costs.

Last February, some 20 universities, brought together in a task force created by the UN secretary-general, met in Princeton to examine the way in which universities might respond in a new and innovative way to the intellectual, scientific, political and economic changes taking place in our societies. One issue at the fore of these discussions was the social responsibility of universities.

You cannot expect someone to be able to build a house just by giving them a saw, a hammer and some wood. Likewise, you cannot expect someone to be able to manage their finances just by giving them an income, a mortgage, a credit card and an insurance policy. People need to be taught how to use these tools in order to succeed.

If secondary education died tomorrow, what would its epitaph be? This question was used as a springboard by school administrators in the Netherlands to rise above the distraction of today’s pressing needs and spur innovative ideas on what tomorrow’s schools should look like. Schooling for Tomorrow: Think Scenarios, Rethink Education points out that today’s educational thinking profoundly influences the lives of individuals and the health of whole communities for decades to come, yet much decision-making tends to deal with immediate issues.

When European Union heads of state and government met at a summit in Lisbon in 2000, they set the goal of making Europe “the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world.” That goal is far from being met, not least in tertiary education.*

Planning next year’s studies? Why not consider reading E-Learning in Tertiary Education: Where Do We Stand? This latest report from the OECD Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) says that in addition to lifting constraints of time and place, electronic learning can be more personalised, flexible and even less expensive than conventional learning places.