For the Comparative and International Education Society meeting in Puerto Rico this month:
Source: Minnesota Population Center, International Public Use Microdata Sample.
The variable of interest is educational attainment (for those aged 25-29 at the time of an individual country’s census). In a few cases, I recalculated attainment based on my disagreement with the IPUMS staff’s decisions on harmonizing the attainment variable. For Kenya, where finishing secondary form 4 is generally considered secondary completion, IPUMS only coded secondary completion at the end of form 6. A similar thing happened in Venezuela, where 5 years of secondary schools should be considered completion (instead of 6). Venezuela also had (has? in the last decade it’s become very complicated) a bifurcated postsecondary system, where some segments had three-year and others had four-year programs. For Israel, IPUMS decided only completion of the Begrut secondary curriculum counted as secondary completion; I disagree. ((In the case of Israel, I think it may have been a vocabulary issue: If my memory is right, the Israel census codes the non-Begrut curriculum as “secondary (non-matriculation),” which refers to not being college prep.))