Learning-Adjusted Years of Schooling : Defining A New Macro Measure of Education
The standard summary metric of education-based human capital used in macro analyses—the average number of years of schooling in a population—is based only on quantity. But ignoring schooling quality turns out to be a major omission. As recent resea...
| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2018
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/243261538075151093/Learning-Adjusted-Years-of-Schooling-LAYS-Defining-A-New-Macro-Measure-of-Education http://hdl.handle.net/10986/30464 |
| Summary: | The standard summary metric of
education-based human capital used in macro analyses—the
average number of years of schooling in a population—is
based only on quantity. But ignoring schooling quality turns
out to be a major omission. As recent research shows,
students in different countries who have completed the same
number of years of school often have vastly different
learning outcomes. This paper therefore proposes a new
summary measure, Learning-Adjusted Years of Schooling
(LAYS), that combines quantity and quality of schooling into
a single easy-to-understand metric of progress. The
cross-country comparisons produced by this measure are
robust to different ways of adjusting for learning (for
example, by using different international assessments or
different summary learning indicators), and the assumptions
and implications of LAYS are consistent with other evidence,
including other approaches to quality adjustment. The paper
argues that (1) LAYS improves on the standard metric,
because it is a better predictor of important outcomes, and
it improves incentives for policymakers; and (2) its virtues
of simplicity and transparency make it a good candidate
summary measure of education. |
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