Page 10 - IDEA Study 10 2015 Skills Mismatches

2. Educational structure of population by level of education This section illustrates educational structure of the Czech population and its changes over the last 20 years and explores the relationship between education and unemployment. Educational structure shifted quite substantially towards more educated population in the Czech Republic over the past 20 years. Figure 1 reports shares of primary, upper-secondary (divided to those with and without school-leaving examination),4 and tertiary educated people in the population (aged 20-64 years) over the past 20 years. While in the first half of the 1990s more than 15% of population had only primary education, nowadays it is less than half of that (7% in 2014). The share of individuals with secondary education5 without school-leaving examination also dropped over the last twenty years (from 43 to 35%), while the share secondary educated with school-leaving examination increased by a similar amount (from 31 to 37%). The most substantial change occurred in tertiary education, where the proportion of population with a university degree more than doubled over the last twenty years – from 9% in 1994 to almost 20% in 2014. 4 There are three main types of secondary schools in the Czech Republic: general secondary school, secondary technical school, and secondary vocational school. The first two types of school mostly provide secondary education with the school leaving examination, which allows students to continue their studies in tertiary education. Students of secondary vocational schools usually do not take a school leaving examination, they education is finished with apprenticeship certificate. 5 For simplicity, I refer to individuals with upper-secondary education (i.e. high school with or without school-leaving examination) as secondary educated. 6