The index measures a country’s achievements in terms of the educational attainment of its population in two main indicators:

Adult literacy index (2/3 weight).
Index of the cumulative share of students in primary, secondary and tertiary education (1/3 weight).
These two measurements of educational attainment are summarized in the final Index, which is standardized as numerical values ​​from 0 (minimum) to 1 (maximum). It is generally accepted that developed countries should have a minimum score of 0.8, although many of them score 0.9 or higher. When determining the place in the world ranking, all countries are ranked based on the Index of Education Level (see below the ranking table by country), where the first place corresponds to the highest value of this indicator, and the last to the lowest.

The educational level index, although it is a fairly universal indicator, has a number of limitations. In particular, it does not reflect the quality of education itself, which in some cases can be very low or significantly limited. Also, it does not fully show the difference in the accessibility of education due to differences in age requirements and in the duration of study. Indicators such as the average length of schooling or the expected duration of education would be more representative, but the corresponding data are not available in the statistics of most countries. In addition, the Index does not take into account students studying abroad, which may distort the data for some small countries.

Literacy data for the world’s population comes from the official results of national censuses and is compared with estimates calculated by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics. Currently, the Index covers UN member states, as well as some administrative territories with a special status, while the ranking table often has a smaller number of states, since countries that are unwilling or unable to provide statistics on this indicator are not included in the ranking. For developed countries, which most often do not include the question of literacy in the population census questionnaires, the literacy rate is assumed to be 99%. Data on the number of citizens enrolled in educational institutions are accumulated by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics on the basis of information provided by the relevant government agencies around the world. The index is updated every two years, however, reports with UN data are usually one year late, as they require international comparison after the publication of data by national statistical offices.

Monica

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