The 10 best-educated countries in the world

Published: Sept 22, 2012 10:37 a.m. ET

MarketWatch/Tim Rostan
A student-led campus tour of the University of Chicago.

College-graduation rates continued to improve around the world during the post-financial-crisis recession, according to a recent international study. In the more developed countries, the percentage of adults with the equivalent of a college degree rose to more than 30% in 2010. In the United States, it was more than 40%, which is among the highest percentages in the world.

However, percentage improvements in higher education are relatively harder to achieve in such countries. More-developed economies have had the most educated populations for some time. While these countries have steadily increased education rates, the increases have been modest compared with the percentage gains of developing economies. At just above 1%, the U.S. has had one of the smallest annual growth rates for higher education since 1997. In Poland, in contrast, the annualized rate was 7.2% from 1997 to 2010.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s “Education at a Glance 2012” report calculated the proportion of residents with a college or college-equivalent degree in the group’s 34 member nations and other major economies. Based on the report, 24/7 Wall St. identified the 10 countries with the highest proportion of adults with a college degree.

The majority of countries that spend the most on education have the most educated populations. As in previous years, the best-educated countries tend to spend the most on tertiary education as a percentage of gross domestic product. The United States and Canada, among the most educated countries, spend the most and third most, respectively.

OECD chief media officer Matthias Rumpf explained that educational funding appears to have a strong relationship to how many residents pursue post-secondary education. Private spending on educational institutions relative to public expenditures is much larger in the countries with the highest rates of college-equivalent education. Among the countries with the highest proportion of residents with a tertiary education, a disproportionate amount of spending comes from private sources, including tuition and donations. The OECD average proportion of private spending is 16%. In the U.S., 28% of funding comes from private sources. In South Korea, another country in the top 10, the figure exceeds 40%.

More education helped people all over the world stay employed during the recession, according to the OECD. Between 2008 and 2010, unemployment rates among developed nations jumped from 8.8% to 12.5% for people with less than a high-school education and from 4.9% to 7.6% for people with only a high-school education. For those with the equivalent of a college degree or more, the jobless rate rose from 3.3% to just 4.7%.

Among the 10 countries with the highest proportion of educated adults, unemployment rates for those with a college equivalent ranged from 2.8% in Australia to 5.4% in the Canada. In each country, the rate remained lower than that country’s national average.

The OECD provided information on the percentage of residents aged 25 to 64 with a tertiary education for each of its 34 member countries, as well as for eight other nations. 2010 statistics on educational attainment, graduation rates, GDP per capita and unemployment rates also were provided by the OECD. The latest figures covering country-level education expenditure are from 2009.

The following are the 10 most educated countries in the world:

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