Wissenschaft weltoffen 2010
The higher education systems of the individual countries of the world pursue differing educational goals and, above all, have very different organisational structures. These differences are reflected in the specific national statistics on the education or higher education systems. The results of these national statistics do not allow direct comparisons to be made between the education and higher education systems of various countries such as are required for the chapter on "International mobility" in "Wissenschaft weltoffen".
In order to make it possible to carry out such comparisons with a tolerable degree of data imprecision, the national data of these countries need to be brought into line with each other. This is done by using the ISCED Classification 97. This is a UNESCO taxonomy which serves as a coding classification for an internationally comparable hierarchical arrangement of education levels to which the education institutions of individual nation states can be assigned. As a rule, the ISCED results deviate from the results contained in the respective national statistics, even when the same terms have been used. The number of students recorded by the ISCED Classification in Germany is generally higher than the student numbers shown by the official German higher education statistics, because pupils from institutions which Germany attributes to the vocational education category are placed by the ISCED Classification into the internationally-defined higher education sector. The ISCED Classification is used to convert data from the national statistics into internationally comparable data. (www.unesco.org/education/information/nfsunesco/doc/isced_1997.htm)
