Comment by jabl
12 days ago
> For example, Finland has lower attainment rates for bachelor degree equivalents than the US. This would seem to disprove your point.
In Finland, most university students go for a master's degree. A bachelor's degree is often seen as sort-of a safety valve, if it turns out you didn't have what it takes to complete the full master's degree. So you get at least some sort of degree from having been to university rather than just having your high school diploma as your highest official educational achievement.
Even if we look at just masters, Finland is only slightly ahead a 16% vs the US 12%. But using this sort or logic, then why not compare doctorate degrees, for which the US has 2% attainment vs Finland's 1%? To me it seems like drawing random line to fit the narrative when I don't see anything in the degree metrics that points to Finland being more educated. We could use different metrics, such as some sort of test, or test scores at the secondary level to say Finland has a better education or education system (we'd have to see the numbers to verify, but I wouldn't be surprised).
I have no interest in a one country vs. another country pissing match, just pointing out that (arbitrarily) selecting the bachelor degree as some kind of metric might be highly misleading, at least in the case of Finland.
Except we just looked at the numbers and showed it doesn't appear to be misleading. I was merely responding to the person stating they would bet that Finland would be the last democracy to decay due to education. But it seems the educational attainment is roughly equal. I also called out that other metrics might be better indicators, both if we were using education and if we were looking at other factors like culture.