Education in States and Nations: 1991

(ESN) Indicator 15: Note on number and size of schools

Notes on Figures and Tables

All countries

Schools and students are counted at the preprimary level if they are considered to be in education programs. Generally, programs called "kindergarten" or "nursery school" are included, whereas programs called "daycare" are not.

Special education schools are excluded at the preprimary-secondary level, except where noted, but special education students are included if they attended regular schools.

Vocational-technical colleges are included, but worksite programs, technical training centers, and apprenticeship programs and their students are not. Further education, adult education, and correspondence programs also are excluded, except where noted.

Generally, free-standing art and music schools are excluded at the primary-secondary level (because it is not clear that their students attended these schools exclusively), but included at the higher education level where it is clear that the institutions were free-standing institutions, separate from universities.

Higher education enrollments are headcounts. Thus, part-time students are counted as equivalent to full-time students.

Australia

Special education schools and students are included, as there was not enough information in sources by which to separate them out.

Technical and Further Education (TAFE) schools are considered to be higher education.

Sources: Australian Bureau of Statistics, Schools Australia, 1992, Table 2. APEC. UNESCO.

Belgium (French Community)

L'enseignment artistique (ex: académie de musique) et l'enseignment de promotion socio-culturelle excluded.

Source: Service des Statistiques, L'Enseignement en Chiffres 1990-91, 1991.

Canada

At elementary-secondary level only, private schools and their students are excluded.

Sources: Canadian Education Statistics Council, A Statistical Portrait of University-Level Education in Canada (see particularly Annexes 1, 2, and 3); A Statistical Portrait of Elementary and Secondary Education in Canada, 1992, Table 6. APEC. UNESCO.

Finland

Students in vocational schools can be secondary or higher education students. The number of vocational schools have been divided here between those two levels of education, then, based on their relative proportion of enrollments: two-thirds secondary and one-third higher education. Apprentices, however, are excluded from the counts.

Source: Statistics Finland, Education in Finland 1994: Education Statistics and Indicators, 1994, tables 3.3 and 3.6, pp. 20-24.

France

Includes France Métropolitaine only. Most students who might be categorized as special education students in other countries are taught in regular schools in France and counted there.

Excludes classes of the CPGE and STS, which are postsecondary programs of additional preparation for admission to the grand écoles (the CPGE) and technical training (the STS). Classes in these programs are typically conducted in lycées. Also excluded are schools and enrollments at écoles paramédicales et sociales (enrollment=70,385) and "autres établissements d'enseignment supérieur" (enrollment=103,596), including teacher training schools. Not considering the CPGE and STS, about 82 percent of French higher education students are included here. If one were to classify the CPGE and STS as higher education programs, then about 70 percent of French higher education students are included here.

Higher education institutions and enrollments included here, then, include universities, écoles d'ingénieurs, écoles de commerce, gestion, et comptabilité, and their students.

Sources: Ministère de l'Éducation Nationale et de la Culture, L'Éducation Nationale en Chiffres, 1991-92, 1992; Repères & Références Statistiques sur les Enseignment et la Formation, 1992, pp. 16-17, 22-23, 26-27, 30-31, 34-35, 50-51, 64-65, 130-131, 138-141. UNESCO.

Germany

Sources: Der Bundesminister fur Bildung und Wissenschaft, Grund-Und Strucktur Daten, 1992-93, pp.44-45, 154-155, 167. UNESCO.

Japan

Special Training Schools, Miscellaneous Schools, and the University of the Air are excluded, but correspondence students at regular higher education institutions are counted. Non-university institutions consist of colleges of technology and junior colleges.

Sources: Ministry of Education, Science and Culture, Monbusho, 1989, p.17. Ellen E. Machiko, A Study of the Educational System of Japan and a Guide to the Academic Placement of Students in Educational Institutions of the United States. Washington, D.C.: American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers, 1989. APEC. UNESCO.

Korea

Number of universities includes 298 graduate schools. Miscellaneous Schools are excluded.

Sources: Ministry of Education, Education in Korea, 1990, 1991, p. 11. APEC. UNESCO.

New Zealand

Includes those students enrolled in preprimary programs at primary schools as well as those in physically separate kindergartens. Excludes subsidized supervised playgroups, childcare services, playcentres, and Kohanga Reo. Includes three primary-level and 2 secondary-level special education schools.

Sources: Ministry of Education, New Zealand Schools, 1993, 1994, Table 1. APEC.

Spain

Students and schools involved in the Experimental Postsecondary Education Reform program are excluded. Arts and Language schools and students (primary-secondary level) are excluded.

Sources: Ministerio de Educacin y Ciencia, Informe Nacional de Educacin, 1992, Tables 1.2, 1.13, 1.14 and 1.15 on pp. 26, 37, 38. UNESCO.

Taiwan

Supplementary Schools are excluded.

Source: Ministry of Education, Bureau of Statistics, Education in the Republic of China, 1992, pp. 33 and 37. APEC.

United Kingdom

Includes "non-maintained" independent and direct-grant schools (N=2,488), including a small number of independent special education schools [public sector special education schools (N=1,792) and their students (N=112,600) are excluded]. All "non-maintained" schools here comprise the preprimary-secondary combined category. Includes Open University students counted as part-time students.

Excludes independent nursery schools having less than 5 pupils of compulsory school age.

Excludes further education.

Source: Government Statistical Service, Education Statistics for the United Kingdom, 1993, Table A.

United States

Preprimary-primary schools (a.k.a. elementary schools) begin with grade 6 or below and end with no grade higher than 8. Secondary schools' category includes schools with no grade lower than 7. Thus, most middle schools (grades 6-8) would be classified as primary, whereas most "junior high schools (grades 7-9)" would be classified as secondary.

Data are available by state from fall 1991 only for the total number of private preprimary-secondary schools. Private school numbers are then allocated across the three categories of preprimary-primary, secondary, and combined according to the allocation ratio in each state for the public schools.

Technical Notes

Problems in comparing the number of schools and their sizes across countries

There exists some variation in how countries count students and schools, and which students and schools they count, that creates problems in comparing school sizes. The variation tends to arise chiefly at the "borderlands" of education.

The borderlands include: preprimary education and daycare, special education, adult education, vocational and technical education, correspondence programs, and private schools. Some countries, for example, simply do not consider private "center-based" daycare to be education. Indeed, in some countries, even public center-based daycare is not managed by education authorities; rather, it is the responsibility of human services departments. Programs outside the purview of the education authorities tend not to have good statistical accounting in data collections managed by public education authorities.

The exact location of each "boundary" between level and types of education also varies from country to country and even within each country. In Canada, for example, vocational-technical students in Québec who so choose enter vocational-technical college in the 12th grade. In the other Canadian provinces with vocational-technical colleges, entry is at the 13th or the 14th grade. Thus, vocational-technical students in the other provinces spend more time at the upper secondary level. The more time the average student spends in a level of education, the greater will be the number of students at that level. This can affect school size.

In order to improve comparability in the school size statistics, the following decisions have been made with regard to the data:

Comparing the elementary-school model to the preprimary-school model

There exist two basic grade-level structures for the preprimary grades, one that adds preprimary grades onto existing elementary schools, and the other that employs separate preprimary schools. In the elementary-school model, a school system might expand into the preprimary grades by, first, adding a year of kindergarten and then, perhaps, a year of prekindergarten. In the preprimary-school model, a school system might build from scratch or convert existing daycare programs to nursery schools with explicit academic instructional components.

A country's expansion of education into the preprimary years within the elementary-school model has the potential for making larger schools, since existing elementary schools are simply adding new grade-levels. A country's expansion of education into the preprimary years within the preprimary-school model has the potential for adding more schools and, probably, reducing average school size, because preprimary (or, nursery) schools tend to be smaller than schools at other levels of education.

Countries in which the elementary-school model predominates include Australia, Canada, and the United States. Countries in which the preprimary-school model predominates include Belgium, France, Japan, Korea, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Other countries -- Finland, Germany, New Zealand, and Taiwan -- employ a mix of the two models, though the preprimary-school model is more popular in each of them. In Taiwan, the public preprimary programs tend to be attached to public primary schools and, thus, in the elementary-school model. The far more numerous private preprimary programs in Taiwan, however, are separate from primary schools.

Preprimary programs have been included here for two reasons: it is not always possible to separate out preprimary students from elementary-school student counts; and one wouldn't want to separate them out, anyway, because they are students who add to the size of the school. Subtracting them from the school population would give one an inaccurate measure of the size of the school.

Problems in calculating the number and size of higher education institutions: branch campuses

Generally, graduate school students are included in the counts of university students. They would only be counted separately if they studied in schools that were separate.

Exactly what constitutes institutional separateness in higher education, however, is open to dispute. Consider the problem of branch campuses. At what stage of existence does a branch campus become a separate institution? Take, for example, the University of California -- one university with several campuses. The two most prominent campuses of the University are at Berkeley (UCal), nominally the "main" campus, and at Los Angeles (UCLA). Legally, these are two branches of the same university, but in many meaningful ways they function as separate universities.

If one were to count UCal and UCLA as separate universities, however, what of all other University of California programs that happen to be geographically separate, for example, the nuclear weapons research facility at Los Alamos, New Mexico, which has no students, classrooms, or teachers? One could, perhaps, explicitly require that, in order to be classified as a higher education institution, a facility must have students, classrooms, and some full-time professors with offices on site. But, even that definition could suffer some slippage in clarity. Besides, examining the individual characteristics of different countries' many higher education institutions in such detail is beyond the scope of this report.

In this report, then, universities are counted as their countries count them. For the United States' data included here, a university counts as a single institution no matter how large or numerous its branch campuses may be. (And, UCLA and UCal are considered two campuses of a single university.)

In most countries, universities are single institutions that exist in only one place. Branch campuses, and the comparability problem they portend for this indicator, seem to be largely a U.S. phenomenon. For those who would prefer that branch campuses should be counted separately, the U.S. average school size calculated here will seem too high, but the school sizes for all the other countries would still be comparable.

Problems in calculating the number and size of higher education institutions: headcount versus full-time-equivalent enrollment counts

Another education statistics comparability problem -- that of headcount versus full-time-equivalence (FTE) enrollments -- presents only a minor problem at the preprimary-secondary level, but could represent a major problem at the higher education level. A headcount enrollment counts every student as one student regardless of the level of participation. Theoretically, a student who takes one hour a week of class at a university could be counted as one student just as a full-time student, taking fifteen hours a week of class would be. In practice, however, some education authorities impose a minimum participation threshold on the numbers in order to not count the most casual students. All students participating, say, at least half-time, might get counted as students in the head count.

Full-time equivalency would count some or all part-time students not as individual students, but as partial students, their weight in the count determined by the degree of their participation in school. A half-time student would get counted as a 0.5 student rather than 1. A quarter-time student would get counted as a 0.25 student, and so on. FTE counts give a more accurate picture of the size of an institution as it is practically being used.

Full-time-equivalent counts are usually lower than headcounts at the same institution. The two methods of counting would only produce the same number at an institution in which all students were full-time. It is not possible that an FTE count could be higher than a headcount if the same students at the same institution were being counted.

For this indicator, we use headcounts. That is because all but three of the countries for which we have data publish headcounts exclusively. Canada, New Zealand, and the United States however, did publish their numbers of part-time students along with their full-time numbers. Counting the part-time students as 0.5 students, we can calculate a FTE enrollment for these countries. Table S16 displays these FTE enrollments for the average higher education institution in each country, next to the equivalent headcount enrollment.

As Table S16 shows, using FTE enrollments rather than headcounts does not affect the relative ranking of school sizes across these three countries, but it is conceivable that it could make a difference with a larger sample of countries. Part-time students make up a larger proportion of the student population in the United States than in Canada or New Zealand, for example. The proportion of part-time students in a student population may vary across other countries as well, and, so long as it does, the two different accounting methods -- headcount and FTE -- can produce different school size rankings.

Table S16 The average size of higher education institutions, by counting method and country: Various years

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        Average number of students per institution of higher education
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              ...using a headcount         ...using a full-time
Country             enrollment                equivalent enrollment
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Canada                3,769                            3,063
New Zealand           3,737                            3,026
United States         3,988                            3,120
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