Reliable demographic information on tertiary students globally

November 8, 2015 5:52 PM

I need to find out accurate information showing the quantity of university/tertiary/higher education students and lecturers, by age, for Australia and internationally.

I need to source data on university/tertiary students (and higher education workers if possible) for Australia and globally including:
age (absolutely necessary for both students & higher education workers)
country
field of study/teaching (for example, engineering, science, education)
level of study/teaching (for example, students: undergraduate, masters, doctorate. Teachers: lecturer, senior lecturer, professor - these classifications vary more than the level of study and mean different things in different countries and I'm okay with that).
Other demographic information welcome (gender, ethnicity, pet ownership, whatever) but not as necessary.

The source of the data MUST be quality - it will be cited in the book.

If necessary, I can pay, up to $200 for decent data, but obviously, I'd prefer free government and NGO stuff. I'm finding bits and pieces here and there, but hasn't someone collected this data, tidied it up and put it into a nice spreadsheet for me?

I have access through an Australian university library resources (so online scholar databases, journal articles etc). I have registered with the Australian Bureau of Statistics but can't work out how to extract the data I need.

Degree of difficulty: this is for a book, and one of the authors (a friend) is terminally ill, and wants to see the book finished before she dies (I did find an government organisation in Australia willing to sell me some of this data, but the 6-8 week wait on data is problematic.)

posted by b33j to Education (2 answers total)

Best answer: For Australia, the federal Department of Education publishes a lot of this type of thing, although I don't know if they break it down by age. Their data is here.
You could also try the Census data on the ABS website - from memory it should be able to at least give you age and occupation. The ABS does have a helpline you can call, and in my experience they're pretty good.
This set of reports from the Grattan Institute may also be useful, if only to give you pointers to other possible data sources.

Finding comparable data for other countries will be much harder, especially in your time frame. Have you looked at the OECD Education database? If that's no good, then you may have to find the equivalents of each of the Australian sources listed above, for each of the countries you're interested in, and compile it manually.

I'm sorry about your friend. I hope I'm wrong, but I think you and they may need to accept that what you're asking for won't be possible in a matter of weeks. Feel free to memail me if I ca help further.
posted by une_heure_pleine at 6:48 PM on November 8, 2015 [2 favorites]

Best answer: I work on the IT side of the Minnesota Population Center and we collect and distribute this kind of data. You should be able to use IPUMS International to create a dataset that will help you towards your goal.
posted by advicepig at 4:49 AM on November 9, 2015 [1 favorite]