“Todos a Aprender”: Colombia Puts Learning at the Center of its Education Policy
What Columbia is doing to improve its education quality.
The High Cost of Low Educational Performance
Last Thursday, April 28, Andreas Schleicher presented a document recently published by OECD entitled The High Cost of Low Educational Performance. The analysis is based on a study conducted by Eric Hanushek and Ludger Woessmann, in which the authors designed econometric models to estimate the economic effects of increased success of students from OECD countries.
Hanushek and Woessmann concluded that if all the OECD countries increased by 25 points on the PISA exam, there would be an added gain of 115 trillion dollars in OECD countries throughout the life of the generation born in 2010. In another exercise, they estimated that if all the OECD countries had the same success as Finland, there would be an increase of 260 trillion dollars.
As we can see, the analysis demonstrates that the quality of learning is more important than the duration of education. Nevertheless, Francisco Ferriera (World Bank) criticized the model used to calculate these projections, suggesting that the authors omitted certain variables that could possibly reduce the estimated economic impact. Ferreira suggested that the economic growth could also be due to other factors (the methods of investing in education or the quality of early education) and not necessarily because of the knowledge of 15 year-old students.
The Economics of International Differences in Educational Achievement (Hanushek and Woessmann, 2010)
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