Blackwell Reference Online

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Educational attainment refers to the highest level of formal education completed by the members of a population. Because national systems of education differ greatly from one another, the measurement of educational attainment is typically restricted to education completed in the country where the education was received ( Siegel & Swanson 2004 : 220), although researchers have developed various metrics to translate levels of completed schooling across countries ( Kerckhoff & Dylan 1999 ). Educational attainment is sometimes recorded as the number of years of schooling that individuals have completed, but is more often measured as the highest grade or highest level completed. The distinction between years of schooling and highest level completed is particularly important in highly schooled and highly economically developed societies in which primary and secondary schooling are virtually universal. Moreover, in highly economically developed societies distinctions at the upper levels of the educational distribution are of more social consequence than are distinctions expressed simply in years of schooling. Educational attainment is a measure of the stock of education in a population ( Duncan 1968 ). It is useful to distinguish educational attainment from various measures of the flow of education through a population. The most common measures of flow are school enrollment ... log in or subscribe to read full text