Comment by sohtym | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sohtym | Hacker News Reader

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> Contrast with a society where the average education might be lower, less people having a stable job in a slow labor market, and if you lose your job there is no safety net.

Educational attainment in the Nordic countries isn't actually that good. It might have been at one point. These days I think it sometimes looks good because some statistics count having any experience at higher levels, which having cost-free education facilitates. If you instead look at actual degrees the Nordic countries are average among OECD countries.

  Bachelor's degrees
  OECD Average 18%
  Iceland      21%
  Denmark      20%
  Norway       20%
  Sweden       18%
  Finland      20%

Countries above 21% in OECD: Australia, Belgium, Canada, Colombia, Greece, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Korea, Lithuania, Netherlands, New Zealand, Switzerland, United Kingdom, United States.

Source: https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/b35a14e5-en/1/3/2/1/inde...

You should look at the statistics more carefully. Educational attainment means the highest degree – those with a master's degree are not included in the numbers for bachelor's degrees. Nordic countries traditionally had a system where master's (or equivalent) was the primary undergraduate degree in proper universities (or equivalent).

I've added the Bachelor's, Master's and Doctoral degrees. Out of 38 countries that puts Iceland and Finland in 9th and 10th. And Denmark, Sweden and Norway at 16th, 17th and 19th. So primarily Finland redeems itself. (Iceland maybe not so relevant as it is tiny). The rest are still slightly above the middle. Considering these are among wealthy countries it maybe isn't bad. But for being smaller countries with decent resource and high taxes that are also deindustrializing I wouldn't say it is great.

It's been a decade since I was actually interested in educational policy and read the reports carefully. From what I remember, Nordic countries have long had higher educational attainment than most EU/OECD countries. In particular, the educational attainment that made people more likely to get a mortgage was higher (relative to peer countries) than it currently is.

At least in Finland, the educational attainment peaked with the people born in the late 70s. As higher education continues to grow in many (most?) peer countries, young Finns are no longer particularly highly educated, which may become a problem in the future.

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