When do adults learn? A cohort analysis of adult education in Europe. CEPS Working Document No. 383, 21 May 2013

Adult learning is seen as a key factor for enhancing employment, innovation and growth, and it should concern all age cohorts. The aim of this paper is to understand the points in the life cycle at which adult learning takes place and whether it leads to reaching a medium or high level of educational attainment. To this end we perform a synthetic panel analysis of adult learning for cohorts aged 25 to 64 in 27 European countries using the European Labour Force Survey. We find, as previous results suggest, that a rise in educational attainment as well as participation in education and training happens mostly at the age range of 25-29. However, investment across the life cycle by cohorts older than 25 still occurs: in most countries in our sample, participation in education and training as well as educational attainment increases observably across all cohorts. We also find that the decline with age slows down or is even reversed for older cohorts, for both participation in education and educational attainment. Finally, we can identify a Nordic model in which adult learning is achieved through participation in education and training, a Central European model in which adult learning occurs in the form of increasing educational attainment and a liberal model in which both approaches to adult learning are observable.

Extending Working Lives: A comparative analysis of how governments influence lifelong learning, CEPS Special Report No. 111, July 2015

This report offers a comparative policy study on adult learning within the scope of complementary research conducted by Beblavý et al. (2013) on how people upgrade their skills during their adult lifetimes. To achieve our objectives, we identified regulatory policies and financial support in 11 countries for two main categories of learning: formal higher education and employer-based training. Drawing upon the results of the country reports carried out by our partners in the MoPAct project, we found that in none of the countries examined is there an ‘older student’ policy. In most cases grants and financial support are awarded only up until a certain age. In all of the countries studied, standard undergraduate and post-graduate studies are available for part-time students. The distribution of full-time students and part-time students in tertiary education varies from one country to another as well as from one age group to another. The participation in full-time tertiary education programmes decreases with the age of students. In Lithuania, Latvia, Poland and the UK, there are no mandatory policies to ensure employer-based training. However, in Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain, employer-based training is more clearly regulated and the employers might have obligations to provide training for their staff. Taking into consideration Beblavý et al. (2013), we observe that comparative differences across countries can be related to policy differences only in some cases. The policy framework seems to impact more the employer-based training than the educational attainment (upgrade of ISCED level). In Denmark, the Netherlands, Latvia, Lithuania, Czech Republic and Poland, we find a perfect match between policy outcomes and the results of Beblavý et al. (2013) related to employer-based training. This is not the case in the United Kingdom, where the two aspects observed are not correlated.