Though figures show Estonia is ahead of the EU curve when it
comes to the portion of its 30 to 34-year-olds holding a college degree,
Eurostat has found that, among all member states, it has the widest gap
between men and women who meet those criteria.
A report from the EU statistics agency released last week, based
on numbers from 2012, found that 50.4 percent of Estonian women in that
age group had completed tertiary education, contrasted with just 28.1
percent of men. The respective averages among the 27-member bloc were
31.6 percent and 40 percent.
Latvia and Slovenia had the next highest gender gaps for the age group.
When
gender was taken out of the equation, the average portion of those 30
to 34 having completed higher education in the EU27 was 35.8 percent - a
number Estonia surpasses with its 39.1 percent.
Ireland had the
highest portion at 51.1 percent, followed closely by Cyprus (49.9
percent), Luxembourg (49.6 percent) and Lithuania (48.7 percent). Italy
came out at the bottom of the list at 21.7 percent, with Romania (21.8
percent) and Malta (22.4 percent) doing only slightly better. The
same Eurostat report found that 10.5 percent of Estonians aged 18-24
were "early leavers from education or training," meaning that they had
no higher than basic school education and were not engaged in further
study.
The figure comes in slightly better than the EU average
of 12.5 percent and marks an improvement over the country's results from
2005 (13.4 percent) and 2010 (11.6 percent).
Again, however, a
significant gender gap was evident in Estonia - for males the figure was
14 percent and for females, 7.1 percent.
The 2011 Population
and Housing Census found that 34 percent of Estonian residents over the
age of 20 had a higher education degree, an increase of 8 percent over
the prior decade.
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