National higher education policy and the development of generic skills

ABSTRACT

This article explores the contribution of higher education to the development of numeracy and literacy competencies. To control for other post-schooling determinants of generic skills, the analysis is confined to adults aged 20–24 years who have completed or who are enrolled in tertiary studies. The quality of incoming students is controlled for by estimating the average PISA score attributable to this cohort using a truncated distribution approach. Average tertiary competencies are obtained for 31 countries from the OECD’s Programme for the Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC). The empirical findings are that the PISA scores account for most (70 per cent) of the international variation in PIAAC scores. Government expenditure on higher education is found to exert a small positive effect on PIAAC scores, at least for numeracy. The level of national research activity, as measured by research publications, has a small negative effect on PIAAC scores

KEYWORDS:

• PIAAC
• PISA
• generic skills
• numeracy
• literacy

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank two anonymous referees for very helpful comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.