SHAPING THE FUTURE HOW CHANGING DEMOGRAPHICS CAN POWER HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

Strong tertiary
education is a building
block for a modern,
technologically
advanced economy
courses, advanced labs and facilities, well-qualified
teachers, strong student engagement and
active parental involvement with an eye towards
preparing students for college and successful
careers. The other system, mostly public, suffers
from low student academic achievement, a
seeming inability to instil in students a belief in
the possibility of their societal success, and few
expectations that students will even complete
high school, much less enrol in college. The
growth in the number of secondary schools over
the last decade has occurred primarily among
private schools, which now represent about a
third of the region’s secondary schools. 22
While the quality of secondary education
remains a serious issue, secondary school students
in East Asia continue to outperform their peers
in other regions of the world on international
standardized tests, capturing top scores and
exceeding Organization for Economic Cooperation
and Development (OECD) averages. For
example, in the 2012 Programme for International
Student Achievement test, the top five
scores globally belonged to countries in East
Asia (Box 3.4).
BOX 3.4:
Ranking at the top of the world
TERTIARY EDUCATION REMAINS
LIMITED IN SCOPE AND QUALITY
A strong tertiary education is essential to build
a modern, technologically advanced economy. 23
Having more people with advanced training and
degrees improves competitiveness, providing
professional, technical and managerial skills,
many of which are increasingly critical in the
shift to knowledge economies. 24
Globally, tertiary education has experienced
explosive growth, with the number of students
enrolled increasing from 95 million in 1999
to around 199 million in 2013, a 109 percent
increase. Asia-Pacific’s enrolment grew faster
than in any other region, from about 30 million
tertiary students in 1999 to over 96 million in
2013, a more than three-fold increase. This was
driven by a 290 percent jump in East Asia and a
245 percent rise in South Asia. Asia-Pacific now
accounts for nearly half of the world’s students
in higher education. While women globally
account for 51 percent of students enrolled in
tertiary education, however, Asia-Pacific has one
of the lowest shares of any region at 49 percent,
falling to 46 percent in South Asia (Table 3.7).
Despite rapid growth in tertiary education
in absolute numbers across regions since 1999,
less than a third of potential students have access
to it. In Asia-Pacific, the rate is less than
30 percent, compared to around two-thirds in
Educational achievement globally can be compared
using data from the Programme for International
Student Assessment (PISA), an international assessment
conducted by the OECD to measure
15-year-old students’ reading, mathematics and
science ability. It does not test the curriculum of
a particular country, but the ability of students to
apply skills to situations outside of school, placing
“an emphasis on functional knowledge and skills.”
The test assesses more than half a million students
across 65 countries/territories. In 2015, the OECD
published the biggest ever global school ranking,
bringing together a number of international assessments.
Singapore took the lead, followed by Hong
Kong, China (SAR); the Republic of Korea; Japan
and Taiwan Province of China. Finland ranked
sixth, while the United States came in 28th. African
countries dominated the bottom rankings.
Possible reasons for the outstanding performance
of several Asia-Pacific countries could be the way
teachers are trained, the amount of homework,
out-of-school tuition, competitive testing and parental
encouragement. Cultural values may play a
role, since, in Western countries, grandchildren
of immigrants from high-performing Asia-Pacific
countries do equally well on the PISA even with a
Western education.
90
Source: OECD 1999.