Hi all! My name is Hiro, member of the data team.
Today I’d like you to step into one of the indicators for higher education – Gross Enrollment Ratio (GER).
To catch your eyes (honestly), here are the GERs as of 2014 for our classmates’ country (sorry if I missed any of you).
China: 39.39% (male 36.56%, female 42.53%)
India: 25.53% (male 25.74%, female 25.31%)
Japan: 63.36% (male 65.73%, female 60.88%)
Mexico: 29.94% (male 29.85%, female 30.03%)
Pakistan: 10.35% (male 10.06%, female 10.67%)
Peru : 40.51% (male 38.59%, female 42.50%) (as of 2010)
Korea: 95.34% (male 107.84%, female 81.27%) (as of 2013)
Singapore: 69.81% (male 68.82%, female 70.84%) (as of 2013)
U.S.A.: 86.66% (male 73.47%, female 100.70%)
Viet Nam: 30.48% (male 29.76%, female 31.23%)
You can find more detailed data by accessing this website below and sort by “Gross enrollment ratio, tertiary” indicator.
What struck me at first was China’s rapid growth over time (6.5% as of 1999), Korea’s significant gender gap (male > female) and that of the U.S (the opposite way, female > male).
But trends can always be explained in terms of policy context – for example, in Japan higher education policy clearly focued on increasing access to HE until 1970s and 1980s, after when shifted to quality, governance and diversification.
Please share any thoughts about your own or any country!
Thank you for reading!
It is very informative! But just I have a question. How can GER be over 100 percent, for example, at the Korean male case? Does it mean that they enroll more than one university?
Gayoung.
Thank you Gayoung! With regard to your point, OECD says that “Enrolment rates are expressed as net enrolment rates, which are calculated by dividing the number of students of a particular age group enrolled in all levels of education by the size of the population of that age group”. In other words, it’s possible that GER exceeds 100% if a lot of older people are enrolled in HE.
https://data.oecd.org/eduatt/enrolment-rate.htm
Thanks for letting me know! 🙂
Hi Data team!
This numbers are very informative and the source of the information. The most interesting aspect of Mexico is how women’s GER has increased over the years, very soon the men will be lagging behind. We still have to work on the quality of higher education because most colleges are 2-year technical colleges.
Hi Angelica! Thank you for your insighful comment. In Japan, right after the defeat of World War 2, we first focused on increasing the quantity of higher education to sustain and support rapid growth in economic development and population. I would say It was not until 1980s or 1990s that Japan seriously started to consider reforms to improve quality of higher education.
Just FYI; this website provided a well-rounded analysis of education policies in Mexico including HE (although kind of lengthy).
http://wenr.wes.org/2013/05/wenr-may-2013-an-overview-of-education-in-mexico
Thank you for introducing the informative data. In my understanding, these kinds of data highly depend on the definition of “higher education” or “tertiary education.” For example, there are many professorial schools as one of the higher education institutes in Japan, but they are excluded from the data Hiro posted because they are neither universities nor colleges by the definition in many international surveys. If you include those professional schools, the ratio would be 79.8% in 2016 according to the survey by MEXT (ministry of education in Japan). Additionally, as far as I know, Germany (68.3% as of 2015) has many professional schools and its situation is similar to Japan in terms of GER.
Hi Sho,
You’re totally correct – any kind of data has an assumption, and without understanding this we cannot go into depth when analyzing and implementing policy.
This also reminds me of the working days when I carefully looked at the annotations which were written in very small letters and at the bottom of the index ….
Hello Hiro and Data Team!
I browsed some of the data and tried to find countries that have had a decreasing GRE. There aren’t very many, but the two that stuck out to me (although they aren’t Asian) are Finland and Norway. They peak around 2008-2010 and then decrease again to near their 1999 percentage. Also, Cuba has a huge hump. In 1999 it was at 20.64%, at its height in 2008 Cuba is above 100%, then by 2016 it is back down to 36.28%. Anyone have any idea what was happening in Cuba for this to occur?
Hi Kendall,
Thank you for your acute comment!
With regard to Cuba, I think this website gives some insight; affected by agricultural policy changes under the Raul Castro administration.
http://www.ipsnews.net/2012/08/cuban-higher-education-changing-in-times-of-reform/
Hope this will be helpful to you!