Education is one OECD department that has embraced the information revolution.

Making strides in scientific innovation is no longer an initiative of just a few select high-income countries. Research and innovation have become increasingly democratised; indeed, Asia’s emerging economies are now gaining prominence as world hubs of scientific research. While the United States remains at the top in terms of the volume of scientific publications produced and collaborations made, these countries are eager to develop their own innovation capabilities, and strengthen their research and academic partnerships.

More students are looking beyond their borders to give their education a competitive edge. 

How can teachers know what–let alone how–to teach when the world is changing so quickly around us? 

Human capital spending is needed to reshape China’s growth engine. The action can start at an early age. 

University rankings sell a lot of newspapers and magazines. But how seriously should teachers, students and, importantly, policy makers take them? 

Brazil offers a good example of how international benchmarking can improve education. 

Higher education is growing rapidly, and becoming a veritable global sector in its own right. That means challenges for educators, students and policy makers. 

The coalition government of the UK is seeking to achieve two main goals by reforming funding of higher education in England.

Canadian education enjoys an excellent reputation at home and abroad, thanks to strong performances in such renowned surveys as OECD PISA, which focuses on 15-year-olds. There are several reasons for this success, and as experts from the OECD and Canada explain, reforms that focus on equity and integration all help. But there are challenges too.

Canadian education enjoys an excellent reputation at home and abroad, thanks to strong performances in such renowned surveys as OECD PISA, which focuses on 15-year-olds. There are several reasons for this success, and as experts from the OECD and Canada explain, reforms that focus on equity and integration all help. But there are challenges too.

Anyone wondering why knowledge and skills are important to the future of our economies should consider two facts.

Are today’s students prepared for the knowledge economy of the 21st century? What basic skills do they have, and how do different countries rank against each other when it comes to basic tasks such as reading, mathematics and science?

Unemployment soared in the crisis, and creating jobs is now a major policy priority. But jobs alone will not be enough. A greater emphasis on skills will be needed for the recovery to last. Investing more in lifelong learning is a good way to secure one's place in the job market and contributes to business competitiveness.

As governments try to maintain their global competitiveness, increase the flexibility and responsiveness of labour markets and deal with issues of population ageing, the OECD is launching a Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) to assess the skills individuals posess, how they use them at the work place, and how better skills feed into better jobs, higher productivity, and ultimately better economic and social outcomes. The aim of the programme is to help governments understand how education and training systems can nurture the skills and competencies needed for individuals to participate in knowledgebased societies.

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.

“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.

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.

“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.

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.

Global competition and the global financial crisis have put additional pressures on education programmes around the world. Radically new approaches to learning are now needed.

Life skills and a passion for learning are the key to the global knowledge economy. Thriving in this environment demands several qualities. 

Policymakers need solutions to help their economies move forward in today’s world. The OECD Skills Strategy, launched at the 2012 Ministerial Council Meeting in May, may prove fundamental. Here’s why. 

“Education and skills” is the theme of the 2012 OECD youth video competition. It was launched on 14 December at the Youth Employment conference. Open to youth ages 18 to 25, the challenge is to produce a video of no more than three minutes on the theme of education and skills, and the prize is a trip to Paris to attend the OECD Forum on 22-24 May. 

It is crucial for countries competing in an advanced economy to have a skilled workforce. But with labour markets changing so fast, how can workers keep up? The OECD Skills Strategy, due to be launched in May together with a comprehensive new survey of adult competencies, will help provide answers. 

Mobile phones and e-books are already essential school supplies on many university campuses. But they’re just slide rules compared to what education tools might look like in a few years. 

There has always been some debate about whether higher education is really something that everyone should be encouraged to pursue. If there aren’t enough jobs requiring university-level degrees to go around, why spend the time and money–public or private–to obtain a degree? 

While the quality of online education is a subject of intense debate among educators, parents and students alike, what is no longer open to debate is the need for digital literacy. A recent report in The Guardian affirmed that adults with Internet skills are 25% more likely to get work and to earn as much as 10% more than their colleagues who don’t have such skills.

The OECD’s general conference, Higher Education in a World Changed Utterly: Doing more with less, identified one of the great challenges of expanding university systems: can higher education provide value while admitting more students and cutting back on spending in a recessionary climate? The problem is that no one knows how to measure the “value” of higher education.

According to European Union data, around 20% of jobs in Europe are either in the information and communication technology sector or require skills in that field. How prepared are today’s students for living and working in a digital world? The OECD’s New Millennium Learners project explores what drives students to use computers, and how computer use affects education performance. Its study, Are the New Millennium Learners Making the Grade? Technology Use and Educational Performance in PISA, shows that there is not a simple correlation between using computers and doing well in school. Rather, there is evidence of a second “digital divide” emerging–not between students who do and don’t have computers, but between those students who have the skills to benefit from computer use and those who don’t.

Income levels of sons are often influenced by the income levels of their fathers, OECD research shows. The height of each bar on the graph measures the extent to which sons’ earnings levels reflect those of their fathers. The correlation is strongest in the UK, Italy and the US, and much less so in Denmark, Australia and Norway.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.