Beyond the Classroom: Global Competencies and the Path to Higher Education

Traditional assessments of learning outcomes through test scores provide an incomplete understanding of individuals’ readiness to thrive in today’s diverse and dynamic world. In this paper, we discuss the ongoing efforts to move towards a more holistic assessment of students and education systems, which embraces a set of socio-cognitive skills that fall under the umbrella of «global competencies». Using data from the 2018 OECD PISA Assessment, we study the factors that are associated with global competencies among European students, and how these competencies relate to their educational trajectories and career ambitions. We start with a set of cross-country comparisons and then narrow our analysis at the student-level, through a pooled country fixed-effect model. We highlight three core results. First, we show that global competencies vary substantially across countries, but are poorly correlated with standard country-level factors typically associated with education such as GDP per capita, immigration rate, and student achievements. Second, we show that students’ socio-economic and cultural backgrounds are strongly associated with global competencies, while the school environment plays only a minor role, suggesting that current educational systems have not fully integrated these skills into their programs. Third, we show that global competencies are associated with desirable outcomes such as students’ transition to higher education and better occupational status.