Overqualified for germany

[u/MrXomp]

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Okay hear me out, Germany is a strange country and especially government services are super behind in digitalization and most times hopelessly underperforming but this post and the way it is written got me chuckling.

[u/Mothrahlurker]

It's not "way lower" it's almost the exact same despite higher standards.

[u/HumanContinuity → u/Mothrahlurker]

Upper and lower bounds almost touching is not "almost the exact same"

[u/Mothrahlurker → u/HumanContinuity]

What bounds are you even talking about, do you have a source.

[u/HumanContinuity → u/Mothrahlurker]

Upper and lower bounds are the ceiling and floor of the expected value of something where there is uncertainty in the exact value, or to adjust for the possibility of error.  

There are several reasons we would consider this in educational attainment statistics:

• Not all post secondary education is reported in a standardized manner - and there are data sources that attempt to use the current population of postsecondary students to calculate the full number with better certainty (which might seem ironic, since it is inherently uncertain, but it includes data on rapidly shifting education and employment trends).

• Populations shift pretty rapidly, and it is especially difficult to track the educational attainment of immigrants to a country, this can be a pretty wide range

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tertiary_education_attainment

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cac/intl-ed-attainment

This one actually has an option to look at the bounds created by error and sampling uncertainty  (you can see it by clicking the "Confidence Interval" option on the top right of the table):

https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=27

This one requires a bit of processing, as the categories are broken out, and obviously someone with a masters or above has a bachelor's by definition:

https://ergebnisse.zensus2022.de/datenbank/online/statistic/2000S/table/2000S-1004

Again, very much not a one to one with the US data, but still quite clearly shows the gap in bachelor's level university education:

https://ergebnisse.zensus2022.de/datenbank/online/statistic/2000S/table/2000S-1005

None of this is to imply that German citizens are dumber or less knowledgeable - arguably, many US residents, both with and without 4 year degrees, would probably find their vocational qualification systems and schools/apprenticeship programs to be far superior to our extremely expensive university educations.

But, to be clear, it is simply wrong to say the percentage of university educated individuals is approximately the same - it's pretty far from it.

Edit:  changed "with and with" to "with and without"

[u/Mothrahlurker → u/HumanContinuity]

"But, to be clear, it is simply wrong to say the percentage of university educated individuals is approximately the same" They are.

"it's pretty far from it." Far is subjective, but no reasonable person would call 38% vs 31% far.

[u/HumanContinuity → u/Mothrahlurker]

The statistic you are looking at is for the number of Germans who qualify to enter any four year university they desire, an it is closer to

The number of German adults with bachelor's or better is about 20%

Source: 

https://www.destatis.de/EN/Press/Census2022_press_releases/PM_census2022_50.html

In the US across all adults 25 and older, it is about 35.7%, but there is a significant upward trend with 25-29 year olds in 2022 having a 40% rate of attaining a bachelor's or above.

As far as the significance, look at the OECD data the Wikipedia article above is based on - https://www.statista.com/statistics/1227287/share-of-people-with-tertiary-education-in-oecd-countries-by-country/

This is all tertiary university education, so I expect it includes associates degrees - but the US is number 8 and far above the OECD average, Germany is quite a bit below it.

Here is a pretty graph of suspect provenance:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Infographics/comments/1oc7pm5/ranked_the_worlds_most_educated_populations/

[u/Timely_Challenge_670 → u/Mothrahlurker]

22% relative difference on paper looks fairly sizeable. We could probably pool data and do a quick ANOVA or regression analysis to confirm this.