At 69 percent, the United States ranks twenty-eighth in the percentage of four-year-olds in early childhood education, according to Education at a Glance 2012: OECD Indicators, released earlier this month by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The report also finds that the odds of a young person in the United States continuing through to postsecondary education if his or her parents do not have a high school diploma are just 29 percent, ranking the United States twenty-fifth out of twenty-seven countries.
The good news is that the United States does fairly well in both high school and college graduation rates, although its ranking in each has slipped in recent years, the report finds. For number of high school graduates, the United States ranks first in the world among 55 to 64-year-olds, with 90 percent of the population having earned a high school diploma. Among 25 to 34-year-olds, however, the United States slipped to eleventh.
Part of the reason higher education attainment rates have stagnated in the United States could be the increasing costs associated with getting a postsecondary degree. According to the report, the total cost for a man in the United States to pursue higher education ($116,000) is second highest in the world. Only the United Kingdom ($122,155), the Netherlands ($104,231), and Japan ($103,965) have costs above $100,000 and, unlike the United States, the majority of their costs consists of foregone earnings.
While the cost is high, the payoff for obtaining a higher education degree is much greater in the United States than in most OECD countries. According to the report, a tertiary-educated man in the United States can expect to earn almost $675,000 more over his working life than a man with no more than a high school diploma or a “nontertiary education”–far more than in any other country. The corresponding number for an American woman is nearly $390,000, an amount approached only by tertiary-educated women in Ireland, the Netherlands, Portugal, and the United Kingdom. Additionally, the estimated public return on a tertiary-educated man is $232,779, which is higher than in all other countries except Hungary; for women in the United States, the return is $84,313, which ranks seventh.
In order to reduce inequality, boost social mobility, and improve individuals’ employment prospects, the report urges governments to increase investment in early childhood programs and maintain “reasonable” costs for higher education.
Education at a Glance 2012 is available at http://bit.ly/RXqgZA. Highlights for the United States are available at http://bit.ly/U3C4dG.
