On the measurement of educational attainment and inequality with ordinal variables

Data on educational attainments are often qualitative data where the only information available is the highest level of education of the individual. If these levels of education may be ranked, the information available becomes ordinal. It is then possible to use measures of inequality as well as of overall attainment suggested in recent years (mostly in the field of self-assessed health) for the case where only ordinal information is available. This paper adopts these recent suggestions and proposes new measures of educational inequality and overall educational attainment. Our empirical illustration is based on Eurostat data for the year 2011.