Chapter 3: Skills and education

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Overview and highlights

This chapter examines the relationship between individual educational experiences and observed measures of skill. First, evidence of a strong positive association between skills and educational attainment is established. Both theory and evidence suggest that education plays a key role in the formation of the skills measured in ALL, but the imperfect association between education and skills also suggests that other factors are implicated in the development of skills over the lifespan. Second, the analysis focuses on comparing the skills of younger adults with varying experiences of upper secondary education. In particular, the skills of early school leavers are considered (youth and young adults aged 16 to 30 who have not completed upper secondary education and have not been in school for at least one year). Finally, the relationships between individual skills and additional years and levels of post-secondary schooling are studied in detail.

The main findings presented in this chapter are:

There is a strong positive relationship between educational attainment and skills on all domains measured in ALL. But there are also substantial variations in performance within each level of education, with as many as 25 per cent of adults who completed tertiary education scoring less than over 25 per cent of those who completed less than upper secondary.

Age differences do not explain the variation within levels of education. In fact, comparisons between younger and older age cohorts reveal that skill dispersions are more pronounced among older cohorts. On the one hand, this suggests that the predictive capacity of education can, for many persons, diminish over time. On the other hand, the stability of the average trend among younger and older age cohorts suggests that education has a strong and persistent effect on skills over time.

Despite the strong relationship between education and skills, it is imperfect. This suggests that relying on measures of educational attainment to predict adult skills will lead to considerable measurement error. It also suggests that the development and maintenance of cognitive skills is more complex than simply attending school or achieving a certificate of completion, and that education does not “fix” skill levels for life. There are other factors that play an important role in the acquisition, development, maintenance and loss of skills over the lifespan.

Individual differences in upper secondary education status are strongly related to differences in observed skills. In all countries, early school leavers are the most likely to score at Levels 1 or 2 when compared to those who have stayed in school, or completed upper secondary education or higher.

In all countries, youth and young adults aged 16 to 35 with more years of post-secondary schooling, on average, consistently show higher skill proficiencies than those with fewer or no years of post-secondary schooling.

Compared to other countries, Norway and Switzerland display, on average, the highest skill proficiencies associated with each additional year of schooling beyond upper secondary education. Switzerland also displays the sharpest average differences in skill proficiencies for every additional year of post-secondary schooling.