Description

EDUCHT indicates the person's educational attainment in Haiti in terms of the level of schooling and grade completed.

Comparability — General

Haiti's information on educational attainment reflects two different systems.

• An old system with a 6-3-4 structure, consisting of 6 years of primary, 3 years in the lower secondary cycle, and 4 years in the upper secondary cycle. Primary was organized into 3 cycles of 2 years each one: preparatory, elementary, and intermediate.
• A new system with a 9-3 structure, consisting of 9 years of basic education (école fondamentale) and 3 years of secondary. Basic education is organized in 3 cycles of 4, 2, and 3 years of study, respectively.

Based on these structures, coding from the census samples establishes the following equivalences: the first two cycles of basic education in the new system (4 and 2 years) are considered equivalent to the old primary education (6 years); the third cycle (3 years) is considered equal to the old lower secondary cycle (3 years). EDUCHT follows the structure of the old system based on these equivalences. More detailed information is available in the unharmonized source variables for the Haiti samples.

Haiti's education system has technical tracks parallel to secondary education. Technical/vocational training is also offered outside the formal education system. Higher education consists of bachelor (first cycle) and post-graduate (second and third cycle) degrees. Admission to higher education requires the baccalauréat after the last year of secondary.

The principal comparability issue concerns the different types of technical and university education. The 1971 sample includes higher education as an additional category, which refers to institutions different from universities but offering programs at that level. This category was merged with university in 1982. Teacher training is only separately identified in 1982 and persons who attained this level in other samples are likely included either under technical training or university, depending on the type of studies pursued. For the 1971 and 1982 samples, the university category does not distinguish between bachelor's degree and post-graduate education. In the 1982 sample technical training and university studies are top-coded at 4 years or more.

In the 2003 sample, technical training is derived from a question on classes taken at a center for technical and professional formation, which does not specify years within level. For this sample, higher education was categorized into 3 cycles, corresponding to bachelor's (first), master's (second), and PhD (third) degrees, respectively. The first cycle was coded as equivalent to the university categories from previous samples.

A harmonized international classification of educational attainment is available in EDATTAIN, which imposes a number of compromises to regularize the data across countries. EDUCHT attempts to retain the full detail on educational attainment for the Haiti samples, within the constraints described above.

The number of years of schooling completed is available separately in YRSCHOOL.

Universe

Availability

• Haiti: 1971, 1982, 2003