A Cross-National Analysis of Sociodemographic Variation in Educational Attainment

Prior research documents strong associations between higher educational attainment and improved health and well-being outcomes. Studies on educational differences, such as those conducted by OECD and UNESCO, have focused on national trends in educational attainment. The current study builds on existing international surveys of educational attainment by providing supporting evidence for educational attainment in several countries and novel evidence for various other countries and territories. For example, results demonstrate that country-level aggregate estimates of the proportion of the population attaining a tertiary education from the Global Flourishing Study (GFS) aligns fairly well with existing estimates from the OECD, with a correlation of r=0.83 with 95% CI (0.57, 0.94), and the estimates for new countries may be a lower bound for the estimated proportion of the population attaining a tertiary education. A major additional contribution of this article is providing insights into the contexts of educational attainment across countries by reporting which sociodemographic groups tend to have attained higher levels of education and how these trends differ across countries. We examined these differences by evaluating the sociodemographic contexts (e.g., age, marital status, employment status) in which achieving more education is found using data from 202,898 participants across 22 countries that were post-stratified to be nationally representative within each country.