What is it about?

While Europe kept awarding more and more degrees, the number of 15-year-olds reaching top levels in PISA maths fell in 31 of 38 countries. In the 21-country panel it has halved since 2003. Smaller cohorts are a small piece of the puzzle overall, but a much bigger one in post-socialist Europe.

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Why is it important?

Europe’s education targets are all rates: the share of young adults with a degree, the share of 15-year-olds below basic proficiency. A rate target can be met while the number of people behind it shrinks, and none of the targets looks at the top of the distribution at all. Yet research, innovation and demanding professions depend on how many highly able people a country has, not on what share of a cohort they make up. Recruiting talent from abroad does not solve this within Europe; it mostly moves the same people between countries, often out of the post-socialist states whose cohorts are shrinking fastest. The count of 15-year-olds reaching PISA Level 5 or above can be produced from data that already exist, at no extra cost. Reported alongside the attainment rate, it would make losses like the ones documented here visible in routine monitoring instead of recoverable only from the microdata.

Perspectives

Birth cohorts in Europe have been shrinking for two decades, so even an unchanged share of top performers must mean fewer of them. I expected cohort size to carry most of the explanation. It did, but only in post-socialist countries. In Germany, France and Finland the cohorts were fairly stable, and most or all of the loss came from fewer students reaching the top: Germany in 2025 had fewer top performers than a school system half its 2003 size would have produced at its own 2003 rate. What stays with us is how invisible this was. Every number needed has been in the PISA microdata for twenty years, and no monitoring framework asked for the count. The 15-year-olds who will sit PISA in 2041 were mostly born in 2025, so the cohort side of this is already settled. Whether proficiency rates can improve enough to offset it is the open question.

Dr. Marko Galjak

Read the Original

This page is a summary of: Fewer Children, Fewer Stars? Top PISA Performers in Europe, November 2026, Springer Science + Business Media,
DOI: 10.21203/rs.3.rs-11599351/v1.
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