Entrevista realizada a Andreas Schleicher, Jefe de la División de Indicadores y Análisis Educacionales de la OECD, sobre la relación entre educación superior o terciaria / mercado laboral.
Ver CBV de Andreas Schleicher más abajo.
Ask the economists: Education – Learn more, earn more?
Has the increasing supply of well-educated workers been matched by the creation of high-paying jobs? Or will everyone with a university degree some day work for the minimum wage? Read below the questions and answers from the online debate that took place on Wednesday 3 October with Andreas Schleicher, head of the OECD’s Education Indicators and Analysis division.
Q. What happens when higher education coverage concentrates in a little amount of university careers, for example too many psychologists, journalists or lawyers. Because one thing is keeping the balance between university courses and skill training, and another thing is keeping the balance inside university programs. Should countries design policies in order to control this?
Sofía Otero Cavada, Chile
A. That is, indeed, an important problem in many countries where the expansion of higher education has merely meant that universities produce more of the same graduates. The challenge for modern universities is to diversify the provision to match a widening range of outcomes and participants.
Q. Does the forthcoming PISA Report include information on Navarre or other Spanish regions and if it dose which are those?
Cristina Berechet, Spain
A. The PISA 2006 results will have these data. The PISA 2006 report will be released on 4 December 2007 and will include these data. For PISA publications, data and more, visit www.pisa.oecd.org.
Q. In an earlier answer you mention the German system of dividing children at age 10 between academic and vocational tracks as an example of an unequal system. As that generation grows up, should we expect to see greater social inequality as a result? Should Germany change its system?
Belinda Holz, Germany
A. The institutional structure of the German system has remained unchanged, and as far as this structure relates to the impact which social background has on student performance, its impact of student access to higher education will remain unchanged. There are two ways to address this, one is to postpone selection, as has been done in most other countries, the other is to open access to higher education to students from vocational oriented school tracks, which some states in Germany have begun to do.
Q. Your report says that for the first time more women are finishing university than men. Why do you think this is and what impact could this have on the job market longer-term?
Caroline Wighton, UK
A. On average across OECD countries, the percentages of women among university graduates are 59 for first degress, 60 for second degrees and 44 for PhDs. However, this still varies considerably across countries and fields of study (see Education at a Glance Table A3.8). Given that the demand for university qualifications is keeping up with increased supply, the effects on labour-market are likely to remain positive, reflecting a better utilisation of human capital. Certainly, as you can see from Indicator A9, the earnings advantage for women with university qualifications is very large and, indeed, earnings differences between men and women are smallest among university-educated people.
Q. With more than 50 per cent or even 75 per cent of high school graduates now going to university there seems to be an assumption in many states that the greater the proportion the better. But is this true? Or does a knowledge economy need a certain balance between university courses and skills training. If so what is the optimum balance?
Brendan O’Malley, UK
A. The challenge for higher education will be not to simply produce more academic graduates of the same kind, but to diversify the supply and to retain an adequate balance between academically oriented qualifications and ones that are more closely tied to occupational orientations. Some countries are doing the latter in what we call tertiary-type B programmes. But again, the point is that the skill demands have risen across the board, such that education that has previously been provided through apprenticeship routes now requires higher levels of qualification. Take the job of a car mechanic: In 1930, all the coded information for a GM car could be captured in 230 pages. Now a single car involves some 15000 pages of coded knowledge which workers will need to be able to access, manage, integrate and to evaluate.
Q. On equity in Higher education: why do countries vary so much in their ability to enable students from blue-collar backgrounds to participate in HE?
A. For some countries, inequalities in access to higher education can be clearly tied to the school system. In Germany, for example, children get divided at age 10 into those that go to academic school tracks (offering access to university education) and those that go to vocational tracks, and that decision is closely linked with social background. In other countries, financial barriers play a role (although it is much harder to find evidence for the latter).
Q. On the internationalisation of tertiary education: Will the expansion of university systems and improvements in their quality in Asia, particularly China and Malaysia and possibly India and Pakistan, detrimentally affect the state of the market for international students in the current main destinations of France, Germany, US and UK? Or will their rise open up the market to a large sector of students from less well off countries who cannot afford the living expenses/fees in the West.
A. We have no predictions on trends in the internationalisation. My personal guess is that improved access to tertiary education in countries like China or India combined with improved labour-market prospects of tertiary graduates in these countries will over time lead to a decline for demand in OECD countries.
Q. Your report’s summary says where the greatest expansion of university uptake has taken place, it has not gone hand in hand with deteriorating employment prospects for the less qualified. But has this created another problem of too few lesser qualified people being available to do lower skilled jobs, and if it exists is this problem being solved through immigration or other measures, such as raising salaries for the less qualified?
Brendan O’Malley, UK
A. As you can see from Education at a Glance 2007 –Indicadores A8 and A9–, the employment and earnings prospects of individuals with lower skills have in many countries deteriorated, in some seriously. Continued automatisation and outsourcing are likely to increase these pressures further. So we have no indicators of a shortage of low-skilled workers.
Q. In your media release to announce Education at a Glance, why exactly did you choose to emphasise that it is worth investing in higher education because it boosts job chances for less educated people too? Isn’t this something of a truism, in that educated societies perform better and lift all boats? Or is it that between the lines you are worried that some policymakers might take another view, that investment in higher education benefits the few and is a waste of scarce resources for the many?
R. Le Clerc, France
A. In many countries, the belief is widely held that this is all a zero-sum game and as the proportion of university graduates increases, graduates will end up doing the kind of jobs that formerly were done by high school leavers. It is the first time that we were able to compile quantitative evidence on this and that is why we highlighted this.
Q. Although China joined the WTO in 2001, the European Union still imposes quota restrictions on Chinese textile products in 2007. Can retaining the low-skilled jobs in EU generate high-paying jobs for your well-educated university graduates?
Huang Huang, Renmin University of China
A. The proportion of low-skilled jobs in Europe has been steadily declining, in response to increased digitisation, automatisation and outsourcing. This is reflected both in Education at a Glance 2007 –Indicadores A8 (employment differentials) e Indicador A9 (earnings differentials).
Q. How do you see the Spanish education system in a decade? Which are its main challenges?
Ana Martínez, Diario Expansión
A. Among European countries, Spain is among the countries with the most rapid educational progress over recent decades, as measured in levels of educational attainment. After becoming bigger, the Spanish education system now needs to become better, in quality terms, as learning outcomes in Spanish schools, as measured by PISA, are still some distance away from the best performing systems. A challenge will be to maintain the relatively high levels of equity in the system as overall performance rises.
Q. What would you say to those Governments that think that the more money they spend in education, the best educational system they get? Do you have specific data about this issue?
Ana Yerro, Institución Futuro
A. Education at a Glance 2007 –Indicador B7– suggests that the relationship between spending per student up to the age of 15 years and learning outcomes in education systems at 15 years, as measured by PISA, is at best weak (money invested explains only 15% of the performance variation among countries). So while money is a necessary prerequisite for effective education, it is by no means sufficient.
Q. In Spain, workers with a university degree earn around 150% more than a worker without university studies. However, the difference in other countries like Hungary or the United States is bigger? What is the reason that explains such difference between countries?
Ana Yerro, Institución Futuro
A. The earnings advantage of a university qualification reflects the labour-market value of degrees. This can be influenced by features of the labour-market (including their efficiency and the demand for qualifications) as well as by tax structures. It can also reflect the perceived value of tertiary qualifications by employers. It is noteworthy in this context that, different from the general pattern across OECD countries, Spain is one of the countries in which the earnings advantage of tertiary graduate has declined over the last decade. This has often been interpreted in the sense that the massive expansion of tertiary education in Spain has led to some deterioration in the quality of outcomes. However, we have no comparative data to examine this.
Más de Andreas Schleicher
Entrevista a Andreas Schleicher, Revista Avances en Supervisión Educativa, N° 5, enero 2007
Entrevista: Andreas Schleicher Coordinador del ‘Informe PISA’ de la OCDE: “En las reformas debe haber un consenso firme”, Firgoa, 11 noviembre 2005
Recursos asociados
Tendencias del mercado laboral de graduados de la educación superior en algunos países desarrollados, enero 2007
Tendencias de las políticas de formación de capital humano avanzado en algunos países de la OECD, noviembre 2006
Apoyo, consejo y orientación para la inserción laboral de los graduados de la educación superior: experiencias internacionales,enero 2006

Curriculum de Andreas Schleicher:
Es titulado en Física por la Facultad de Física de la Universidad de Hamburgo (1988), es Master en Ciencias, Departmento de Mathematicas, por la Facultad de Ciencias de la Deakin University de Australia (1992).
Es Master en Ciencias, Departmento de Mathematicas, por la Facultad de Ciencias de la Deakin University de Australia (1992).
Fue “International Co-ordinator for the IEA Reading Literacy Study” en la Universidad de Hamburgo (1989-1992). Ha sido “Director for analysis” en la “International Association for Educational Achievement” (IEA) en el “Institute for Educational Research”, Holanda de 1993 a 1994. Ha sido “Project Manager” en la OECD, “Centre for Educational Research and Innovation” (CERI) de1994 a 1996.
En la actualidad es responsible del area de “Indicators and Analysis Division at the Directorate for Education” en la OECD
Como jefe de división sus responsabilidades son las siguientes:
Desarrollo, internacional coordinacion and dirección del programa PISA
Dirección del programa INES, de indicadores de la educación.
Dirección del “World Education Indicators programme” colaboración entre OECD y UNESCO
Responsable de la Coordinación de la elaboración y publicación de los indicadores de educación con otros organismos internacionales: EUROSTAT, ILO, UNESCO, World Bank
Ha dirigido o colaborado en un importante número de publicaciones muchas de ellas publicadas por la OECD.