The Lost (US) German Lead in Education

This is in reference to

The Lost US Lead in Education

which deals, as the title suggests, with the US. However, Germany might want to keep an eye on those Asian students with college degrees.

The next comparison is different in two ways. It looks at data for 2010, and it focuses only on workers in  the 25-35 age bracket. By leaving out older workers, the focus is on what education level workers are likely to have in decades ahead. The light blue bars showing the US levels of education have clearly risen, but the other countries are now much more similar. Even in cases where a country like Germany looks lower in college degrees, it's worth remembering that Germany has an aggressive and far-reaching apprenticeship program that help to provide future workers with job-related training. One can of course raise the possibility that those South Korean college degrees might not be equal in quality, on average, to US college degrees. But the size of the changes is so enormous that quibbling over quality is not going to alter the main pattern.