Education attainment of immigrants

The educational attainment of immigrants tends to vary considerably across countries. In some countries, low-educated persons are more prevalent among the foreign-born than the native-born; in other countries, it is the reverse. This reflects historical migration patterns as well as the effect of migration policies that favour, whether deliberately or by default, one kind of migration relative to another.

Definition

Immigrants are defined here as the foreign-born population, that is, persons who have actually changed countries since birth. Education levels are given by the International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED), which classifies attainment levels on the basis of completed educational programmes of a certain length and orientation.

Comparability

The foreign-born population consists of the usual residents of a country who were born in another country, irrespective of what their nationality at birth was. What constitutes a "usual resident” tends to differ from country to country, but the differences bear on a small proportion of the immigrant stock and so can generally be ignored without risk of distorting the general picture. The lower age limit used in the table is not ideal, because it tends to include many young persons who have not yet completed their education.

Countries that are long-standing immigration countries tend to have immigrant population with an age structure similar to that of the native-born populations, or perhaps even skewed toward older ages, especially if immigration levels have declined in recent decades. In more recent immigration countries, the immigrant population tends to be younger and to show higher attainment levels, simply because educational levels have been increasing in all countries over time.

The education of immigrants has in most if perhaps not all cases been obtained in the country of origin. The education level is generally reported by the immigrant and the coding of the qualification according to national categories may sometimes be approximate. It is clear from looking at the chart, for example, that the proportion of immigrants with high education levels in many countries tends to be similar to that of the native-born, with some notable outliers (Ireland, Mexico, Portugal, Turkey and the United Kingdom). Some of this may be due to the fact that entry policies (at least for labour migrants) tend to reflect employer skill requirements, which in turn are mirrored by the educational attainment of native-born workers. However, it may also be the case that the structure of the national education system and the distribution of national attainment levels tend to influence how foreign qualifications are classified.

The data shown here come from a special Census data collection described in the section dealing with the foreign-born population by region and sex.