Description

EDUCNI indicates the person's educational attainment in Nicaragua in terms of the level of schooling completed.

Comparability — General

Nicaragua has a 6-5 system, which consists of 6 years of primary (grades 1-6) and 5 years of secondary (grades 1-5).

Technical education is offered to primary school graduates (leading to a basic technical certificate) and to persons who completed grade 3 or graduated from secondary education (leading to a mid-level technical certificate or advanced technical certificate). The duration of technical certificates is between 2 and 3 years.

Post-secondary university education requires secondary school graduation and typically involves 4 to 5 years of education to obtain a Bachelor degree. Master degrees are offered for university graduates and require 2 additional years of education.

The universe for Nicaragua 1971 is persons age 6 or older, while it is persons age 5 or more for Nicaragua 1995-2005. The educational categories are comparable across samples. The Nicaragua 1971 sample does not include preschool education and considers a single category for post-secondary education, both technical and university. The Nicaragua 1995 sample includes literacy programs.

In addition to EDUCNI, the 1995 and 2005 samples include related unharmonized variables indicating whether the person completed the post-secondary technical or university studies.

A harmonized international classification of educational attainment is available in EDATTAIN, which imposes a number of compromises to regularize the data across countries. Conversely, EDUCNI retains the full detail on educational attainment for the Nicaragua samples.

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

Universe

Availability

• Nicaragua: 1971, 1995, 2005