Education will be at the heart of 21st century demography

At the end of the last century, Population and Development Review (PDR) published an article with the visionary title “Demographic dimensions in forecasting: adding education to age and sex” (Lutz et al. 1999). In this contribution the authors (W. Lutz, A. Goujon and G. Doblhammer-Reiter) systematically discuss the criteria governing the choice of particular dimensions (i.e. covariates, breakdowns or sources of heterogeneity) that should be explicitly and routinely addressed in demographic analysis. The three criteria were: (1) “To the users the dimension is interesting in its own right and therefore desirable as an explicit output parameter”; (2) “The dimension is a relevant source of demographic heterogeneity with an impact on the dynamics of the whole system and therefore on the resulting population size”; and (3) “It is feasible (in terms of data and methodology) to consider the dimensions explicitly” (Lutz et al. 1999: 42). Each criterion is then applied to a series of candidates: age, sex, legal marital status, place of residence, educational attainment, ethnicity, region of origin and others. While many of these dimensions seem to be of great substantive importance for specific research questions, only three are seen to meet all three criteria and are hence considered candidates for standard demographic analysis. Not surprisingly, age and sex are among them, while the third recommended standard dimension is the level of educational attainment. As discussed in detail in the PDR paper, educational status is considered of paramount substantive interest for a large array of social, economic and healthrelated questions in developing and industrialised countries alike (criterion 1). Its inclusion may change aggregate population projections significantly, particularly in the presence of pronounced fertility and mortality differentials by education together with strong changes in educational attainment across cohorts (criterion 2). Finally, formal educational attainment can be rather unambiguously defined