Education in States and Nations: 1991

(ESN) Indicator 8: Note on participation in formal education

Notes on Figure and Tables

Germany (West)

The data reflect the high proportion of students who enroll in a second program at the upper secondary level after having taken a first diploma at this same level.

Netherlands

Two small adjustments have been made since the first edition Education in States and Nations: special education, which was formerly allocated to the primary level has now been distributed over the primary and secondary levels; and certain categories of students in universities are allocated to the graduate school level.

Spain

Some aspects of classifying educational programs by education levels have been changed since the first edition of Education in States and Nations: foreign language courses are classified as part-time education at the upper secondary level; and all vocational programs have been excluded from the lower secondary level, so that only the compulsory programs are now taken into account at this level.

Switzerland

Enrollment rates do not include special education at the primary and secondary levels (about 1.6 percent of the population 5 to 29 years of age and 5.1 percent of enrollments at those levels).

Technical Notes

Calculation of full-time equivalent enrollments

In calculating the indicators on per-student expenditure and participation rates, all part-time enrollments are converted into full-time equivalents (FTE). With some exceptions, the INES Secretariat has calculated full-time equivalents using the following convention:

Comparing school enrollment in the Current Population Survey to the same in the 1990 Census of Population

The OECD's Education at a Glance (EAG) (version 1991) is the primary source for country-level data on educational attainment and school enrollment in this report. U.S. numbers for all the educational attainment and school enrollment indicators in EAG came from the March, 1991 and October, 1990 Current Population Surveys (CPS) of the U.S. Census Bureau, respectively.

However, the Current Population Survey employs too small a sample to give reliable estimates for most educational attainment and school enrollment indicators in the smaller U.S. states. Therefore, this report uses state estimates of educational attainment and school enrollment from the 1990 U.S. Census of Population. Though these estimates are a year older than the 1991 estimates used in EAG with which we wished to compare, they are reliable for every state _ within acceptable margins of error.

Unfortunately, because the CPS and the Census classify students to levels of education differently, they would appear awkwardly unmatched if used together in indicators in this report (as they would be if the U.S. total from EAG was employed in the same bar chart with Census-derived state estimates). Among other differences, the CPS is primarily designed to estimate educational attainment levels, not enrollment levels. The March CPS classifies the population into levels of education based on the highest level of education completed rather than according to the grade level in which a student is currently enrolled. It is in some cases with the CPS data, then, difficult to know at what grade level a student is currently enrolled. The Census, however, classifies students according to the grade level in which the student is currently enrolled.

Given these comparability problems, it was decided to use 1990 Census estimates for both the U.S. total and the state-level estimates in all the preprimary through secondary school enrollment indicators (higher education enrollments come from the IPEDS data base). This provides older data for the U.S. (1990 rather than 1991), but superior comparability to the U.S. states without any loss of validity or reliability in the U.S. estimate.

See the technical note to Indicators 3, 21, 22, 26, 27, and 28 for a discussion of CPS and Census comparability with regard to educational attainment measures.

Note on enrollment reference groups

See Note on enrollment reference groups and graduation and entry reference ages: Indicators 8, 11, 23, 24, and 29.


Youth violent death rate Supplemental Notes Enrollment in preprimary education