The headlines are emblazoned with the gloomy tales of America’s academic decline as drop-out rates skyrocket and adult educational attainment sags behind international competitors, but one educational statistician, in a newly released report, said it’s nothing more than propaganda.
“They quote this stuff because people like to be told how bad they are. We get hung up on how bad we are doing,” said Dr. Cliff Adelman, senior associate at the Institute for Higher Education Policy and a former researcher at the U.S. Department of Education. “I’m not out to tell you how good you are, but to provide an honest picture as opposed to a purposely dishonest picture.”
For the past couple of years, international education agencies have monitored the degree-completion numbers as nations like Canada, Korea and Japan caught up with the United States. In all those countries, the proportion of the population earning bachelor’s degrees or their equivalent increased while the U.S. seemed to drop in the rankings.
But inconsistencies in the reporting systems from country to country raised suspicions from Adelman and others who questioned the value of comparative higher education data in his report titled “The Spaces Between Numbers: Getting International Data on Higher Education Straight.”
In the report, Adelman criticizes international data collectors, such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD); the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO); World Bank; and Eurostat, the central statistics agency for the 27 countries of the European Union.
Different countries classify completion and degrees differently, causing the OECD and others to try to standardize the data but “with dubious results.”
