Long-term trends

OECD countries and the Russian Federation have seen significant increases in the proportion of the adult population attaining tertiary education over the last decades. In 2004, for the 25-64 year-old population, 15 countries out of 30 are grouped together within a range of 10 points between 23 and 33% of the population having attained the tertiary level. Three countries are performing remarkably high: Canada, the Russian Federation and the United States. Conversely, three countries are significantly below this average percentage in tertiary attainment where less than 12% of the population attain tertiary qualifications: Brazil, Italy and Turkey.

In the youngest age group, 25 to 34 years old, the OECD country mean for tertiary attainment increased from 20 to 31% between 1991 and 2004. In four countries – Canada, Japan, Korea and the Russian Federation – over 45% of this age group in 2004 obtained a tertiary qualification.

An indication of longer term trends can be obtained by comparing the current attainment levels of younger and older age cohorts. For instance, comparing the tertiary attainment levels of 25‑34 year olds with those of 55-64 year olds indicates that in Korea, there has been an increase in tertiary attainment over the past 30 years of nearly 40 percentage points, some 26 percentage points higher than the OECD average increase over this period. In contrast, some OECD countries (the Czech Republic and Germany) have only seen increases of less than 3 percentage points over the same period.