In approximately a month, I am presenting a paper on international attainment patterns at the History of Education Society annual meeting in Chicago. Below is a figure from the paper, a motion chart of attainment data for 25-29 year olds by level of schooling calculated from the harmonized attainment variable in the International Public Use Microdata Sample set for 30 countries. ((The inclusion rule was the availability of the key variables for three censuses in the summer, when I pulled down the data. Since then, South Africa has had a third census released for IPUMS. I need to look more closely at the data for Columbia and Germany, and if you watch carefully you will understand why.)) The default horizontal axis is the proportion of the population having completed at least primary schooling; the default vertical access is the ratio of secondary completions to primary completions (i.e., the proportion of primary completers progressing on to secondary completion). The bubbles are sized according to population (for 25-29 year olds for that sex).
Source: Minnesota Population Center. Integrated Public Use Microdata Series, International: Version 6.1 [Machine-readable database]. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2011.
I must say that France and Ireland exceed my expectations. Puerto Rico is totally expected since we know what they did to improve their k-12 system.
I love the way Gapminder gives a feeling of acceleration when you watch France race across the screen (after changing the horizontal to university completion.)
I think the word you are looking for is axis, not access.
Whoops. Thanks!
That is a really nice application. I really like that when I notice something interesting, clicking on it identifies what it is AND locks in the trace feature.
The anomaly that jumped out at me was Israel. Was that immigration or the not-really-post-war years or a combination of the two?
Israel joins Germany, Venezuela, and Columbia as anomalies. In the case of Israel, it may be artifactual or it may be immigration. Because in the 1983 census, university attainment of 25-29-year-olds is about the same as in the 1972 census, but secondary attainment dropped, there are plausible stories for both in terms of changing definition of secondary completion vs. the Ashkenazi/Sephardim demographic shifts in the 1960s and 1970s.