What you should know about this indicator
- Tertiary education — a university degree or another qualification beyond secondary school — opens doors to higher earnings, better job security, and a wider range of life choices. How widely it's attained tells us how broadly those opportunities have spread.
- Reliable, year-by-year data on tertiary attainment only exists for recent decades, and only for OECD countries. To see how this has changed over the long run, or to cover the rest of the world, we rely on historical reconstructions instead.
- This indicator combines two sources as a result. For OECD countries, we use the OECD's own survey data, which goes back to 1981 in some cases. For all other years and countries, we use historical estimates from Lee & Lee (2016), which reach as far back as 1870.
- The two sources don't measure quite the same thing. The OECD counts people who finished their degree, while Lee & Lee count anyone who started one, whether or not they finished it. In most countries this makes little difference, but in countries where many people enroll without completing a degree, the two figures can diverge.
- Comparisons across the full time span should be made with some caution, since each country switches from estimate to survey data at a different point.
More Data on Global Education
Sources and processing
This data is based on the following sources
How we process data at Our World in Data
All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.
At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.
Notes on our processing step for this indicator
For each country, we use OECD data from its earliest available year onward. For years before the first OECD observation, we use the Lee & Lee (2016) historical estimates up to 2010. Countries without any OECD data retain the full Lee & Lee series up to 2010. The Barro & Lee projections (2015-2040) previously used have been dropped because they significantly underestimated tertiary attainment in many countries compared to observed data.
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Citations
How to cite this page
To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:
“Data Page: Share of adults with tertiary education”, part of the following publication: Hannah Ritchie, Veronika Samborska, Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, and Max Roser (2023) - “Global Education”. Data adapted from Lee and Lee, OECD. Retrieved from https://oecd-education-attainment-di.owid.pages.dev:8789/20260518-093348/grapher/share-of-the-population-with-completed-tertiary-education.html [online resource] (archived on May 18, 2026).How to cite this data
In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:
Lee and Lee (2016); OECD (2025) – with major processing by Our World in DataFull citation
Lee and Lee (2016); OECD (2025) – with major processing by Our World in Data. “Share of adults with tertiary education – Lee and Lee; OECD” [dataset]. Lee and Lee, “Human Capital in the Long Run”; OECD, “Adults' educational attainment distribution” [original data]. Retrieved June 26, 2026 from https://oecd-education-attainment-di.owid.pages.dev:8789/20260518-093348/grapher/share-of-the-population-with-completed-tertiary-education.html (archived on May 18, 2026).Download
Quick download
Download the data shown in this chart as a ZIP file containing a CSV file, metadata in JSON format, and a README. The CSV file can be opened in Excel, Google Sheets, and other data analysis tools.
Data API
Use these URLs to programmatically access this chart's data and configure your requests with the options below. Our documentation provides more information on how to use the API, and you can find a few code examples below.
Data URL (CSV format)
https://oecd-education-attainment-di.owid.pages.dev/grapher/share-of-the-population-with-completed-tertiary-education.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=falseMetadata URL (JSON format)
https://oecd-education-attainment-di.owid.pages.dev/grapher/share-of-the-population-with-completed-tertiary-education.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=falseExcel / Google Sheets
=IMPORTDATA("https://oecd-education-attainment-di.owid.pages.dev/grapher/share-of-the-population-with-completed-tertiary-education.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")Python with Pandas
import pandas as pd
import requests
# Fetch the data.
df = pd.read_csv("https://oecd-education-attainment-di.owid.pages.dev/grapher/share-of-the-population-with-completed-tertiary-education.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", storage_options = {'User-Agent': 'Our World In Data data fetch/1.0'})
# Fetch the metadata
metadata = requests.get("https://oecd-education-attainment-di.owid.pages.dev/grapher/share-of-the-population-with-completed-tertiary-education.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false").json()R
library(jsonlite)
# Fetch the data
df <- read.csv("https://oecd-education-attainment-di.owid.pages.dev/grapher/share-of-the-population-with-completed-tertiary-education.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
# Fetch the metadata
metadata <- fromJSON("https://oecd-education-attainment-di.owid.pages.dev/grapher/share-of-the-population-with-completed-tertiary-education.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")Stata
import delimited "https://oecd-education-attainment-di.owid.pages.dev/grapher/share-of-the-population-with-completed-tertiary-education.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", encoding("utf-8") clear