Exploring International Education Statistics

We’ve highlighted data from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators (WDI) database in previous blog posts about employment and business statistics. As many of our users head back to school, it seems like the right time to show off some additional World Bank statistics about education. Wolfram|Alpha can now answer a broad range of simple questions about student and teacher populations in various countries, such as:

• How many high school students are there in Djibouti? »
• How many grade school teachers are there in Africa? »
• High school student/teacher ratio in Japan vs. South Korea »

You can also ask questions about student performance and progression in a given country or between multiple countries:

• How many kids repeat a primary school grade in Mexico? »
• How many kids complete grade school in South America? »

Note that for many properties, you can also query for and compare statistics by gender:

• What fraction of grade school teachers are female in Europe? »

Or try asking Wolfram|Alpha about the fraction of female high school students in sovereign countries; while most countries have a reasonable gender balance, the map reveals a clear band across central Africa where girls generally account for less than 40% of high school students.

You can explore some top-level statistics about public education spending in most countries:

Or ask about education spending as a fraction of GDP in Cuba, the US, UK, and France; it’s interesting to see here how the latter three converge on roughly the same level of spending, while Cuba’s educational spending fraction nearly doubles over the same period.

As we noted before, the WDI doesn’t always have data for every combination of country, property, and date—but there’s enough here to get a good general sense of the state of education in most countries and regions. We’d love to know if anyone uses Wolfram|Alpha to uncover any particularly interesting trends or comparisons, so please post links in the comments.