The Stock of College Graduates Around the World

Often I hear in the news that China and India are producing large numbers of college graduates each year (and large numbers of STEM graduates in particular). But how does the stock of college graduates compare across countries? I’d like to have an idea because the human capital stock matters for current macro conditions, the size of the college graduate population determines the size of the total addressable market for many products we may want to build (knowledge products, for example),

Population data by education level is surprisingly difficult to find for two reasons:

1. Education systems differ around the world, and there’s no established international standard that harmonizes different levels of education in different countries (e.g. is an “associate’s degree” in the U.S. the same as “dazhuan” in China)? For researchers that analyze cross-country data, they typically use the number of years in school as a proxy. Associations of more developed countries (e.g. the OECD) offer harmonized datasets.
2. Many countries don’t report crosstabs in their census data or use different year-cutoffs, making the numbers incomparable across countries. For example, a country may report in age increments such as 16 - 20, 21 - 25, 26 - 30, etc. Another might report in increments such as 18 - 22, 23 - 27. Since micro-level data is often not provided, credible cross-country comparisons are difficult to come by.