Educational Attainment Upgrading in Europe 2010-2024: Evidence from ISCED Panel Data

Educational attainment upgrading has come to be recognized as an essential process for economic resilience, labor market adaptability, and long-term convergence. This paper analyzes changes in educational attainment structures of Europe during 2010-2024 with particular attention paid to whether reductions in low education (ISCED 0-2) were caused by temporary changes to favor upper secondary attainment (ISCED 3-4), or represented structural educational attainment upgrading due to tertiary education upgrading (ISCED 5-8). Using harmonized official statistics on educational attainments of Europe, the analysis builds a balanced panel with 15 European countries and uses pooling, fixed-effects, and random effects estimations in order to separate cross-country regimes from within-country temporal dynamics. Furthermore, the empirical strategy includes estimation of transition dynamics with respect to diminishing marginal effects of increasing attainment rate at different levels of secondary attainment rates. Joint behavior of attaining levels is analyzed using panel methods in order to establish whether attainment shares are adjusted simultaneously. The findings demonstrate high heterogeneity among countries and show that pooled estimations overestimate short-term educational attainment upgrading taking into account permanent features of the regime in each country. The findings support the idea of diminishing marginal gains from secondary educational attainment expansion in its advanced stage, similar to threshold type transition dynamics. Findings on long-term relationships point out coordinated adjustment of attaining levels with tertiary attainment as a driving factor.