Good Data on Educational Attainment Is Hard to Find: The Story behind the WIC-2012 Dataset

Levels of educational attainment are the main component of human capital that is used in many models, mostly related to economics. However a large majority of data on education suffer from severe flows, hampering any trend and regression analysis on levels of educational attainment. We show in this paper how picking the right data and adjusting it so that it becomes consistent across ages and countries can be a real hassle. This exercise was done in the framework of Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital new round of population projections by levels of educational attainment from 2000 to 2060 and the reconstruction of the same data back to 1960. Both exercises require base-year data on population disaggregated by levels of educational attainment by age and sex. These were gathered for 170 countries for six education categories between 2000 and 2011.