Romania, Lowest Rate in the EU on Tertiary Educational Attainment
Romania has the lost lowest rate in the EU on tertiary educational attainment, according to data published by Eurostat for 2024. Ireland (65.2%), Luxembourg (63.8%) and Cyprus (60.1%) had the highest tertiary education attainment rates, while Romania (23.2%), Italy (31.6%) and Hungary (32.3%) had the lowest rates.
The sustainable development goal “quality education” (SDG 4) seeks to ensure access to quality education for all throughout their lives, as well as to increase the number of young people and adults who have the relevant skills for employment, decent jobs and entrepreneurship. One of the Eurostat indicators used to measure progress in SDG 4 is the tertiary education attainment rate, which measures the share of the population aged 25 to 34 that completed a higher education qualification.
In 2024, the tertiary education attainment rate in the EU was 44.1%, indicating a significant increase from the 39.6% registered in 2019. This means that the EU is well on track to meet the European Education Area strategic framework 2030 target of raising the share to at least 45%, a level far too high for Romania in the actual context.
Interestingly, the gap between women and men in the EU was significant, with women registering a noticeably higher rate of 49.8% and men 38.6%. Young women outperformed men on tertiary educational attainment throughout the EU, but the difference is evident among some former socialist block countries. The gap was the largest, above 20 percentage points, in Slovenia (55.7% for women vs 32.0% for men), Latvia (56.8% vs 33.9%), Estonia (53.9% vs 32.3%) and Croatia (50.1% vs 29.6%).
To be noted, the evolution of tertiary education attainment in Romania is stagnant for a decade, with peaks in the vicinity of 25% recorded for 2014, 2015, 2017 and 2019 a and a downtrend from there on. Seems that there are no clear incentives to get a higher education and the corelation with the living standard later in life is not strong enough.
The proportion of low achievers in reading, mathematics or science is rising again, after a downward evolution till around 2015 and the most recent official numbers certified by EU should worry the authorities, with almost 50% failures in mathematics and over 40% at reading and science. This is clearly showing the deterioration of the learning process and raise doubts about the curricula, not mentioning the relatively fable allocation of financial resources.
Simultaneously, the proportion of early leavers from education and training started to raise again, which should be a very big concern for the work market in the future. Practically, the myth of well-prepared workforce in Romania is about to be dismantled and the perspective of rising salaries based on merit is fading.
In the long run, the weak link for the country`s perspective of reaching occidental levels of development will be the human factor. That is the same factor that brought us in the 20th places now as GDP per capita at pps in the EU, but based on former strength of the education process. The replacement, now on the school benches, are too poorly skilled or too willing to leave the country, in order to gain a better recognition elsewhere.
Photo source: PxHere.com.
