Yet another HE report is released

This time the OECD has released their Education at a Glance 2008:OECD Indicators report enables countries to see themselves in the light of other countries’ performance.

It provides a rich, comparable and up-to-date array of 28 indicators on the performance of education systems and represents the consensus of professional thinking on how to measure the current state of education internationally.

The indicators look at who participates in education, what is spent on it and how education systems operate and at the results achieved. The latter includes indicators on a wide range of outcomes, from comparisons of students’ performance in key subject areas to the impact of education on earnings and on adults’ chances of employment

Highlights include:

• Meeting a rapidly rising demand for more and better education is creating intense pressures to raise spending on education and improve its efficiency.
• The total amount of public spending on educational institutions rose in all OECD countries over the last decade, on average by 19% between 2000 and 2005 alone, and in Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland and Korea by more than twice that amount.
• Another visible indication of the efforts governments are making can be seen in the fact that, over the last decade, the share of public budgets devoted to education grew by more than one percentage point – from 11.9% in 1995 to 13.2% in 2005