Honestly what surprised me the most from your very informative link was that France is lower than the US! I'm probably biased but I've always considered the French education system to be quite rigorous and well rounded, with a few different education paths to fit different student profiles from a pretty early stage. Especially compared to canada, which in my experience has a rather weak and rigid curriculum.
(Though I dislike the way french and European higher education in general works. You're basically boxed in to your specific domain or degree that you often don't even really choose and changing or switching careers is almost impossible. The choices you make in high school basically define what you can even study in, and thus what you can do for the rest of your life. I think that's one thing the US does super well, even more so considering that degrees are less important there in the first place.)
> You're basically boxed in to your specific domain or degree that you often don't even really choose and changing or switching careers is almost impossible.
This was true 50 years ago but hasn't been true since the 90's or so. France may well be the exception in this, but then again, France is an exception in many ways.
Isn't it still true in Germany? With the different high school tiers that can even make it impossible to enroll for a university degree? Though you are right that I shouldn't say that Europe as a whole is like Germany or France even if it's sometime easy to assume so haha.
Germany tends to be more focused on paperwork, there isn't a German that is even moderately active in business that I know that doesn't have a 'steuerberater', it's overly complicated and the paper tends to be in the lead. Germany has fewer free professions than other EU countries as far as I know, lots of things are regulated and it can definitely be harder to switch. But it isn't impossible and I know more than one German who successfully switched careers, even between regulated industries and academic / business careers.
In France, from what I know there is a fairly strong culture of secondary education that creates an 'in-group', not unlike what you see in the UK or the USA with their top-tier universities, and you are either 'on the plan' or you won't be able to get in unless you are of exceptional abilities and that rarely happens later in life, so I think that alone is sufficient to explain the discrepancy.
In NL you can enroll in higher education basically whenever you want, quota permitting and with the intense competition for such spots from abroad by very qualified young people this too can be tricky, depending on the field. But in NL a university degree isn't a pre-requisite for many jobs outside of academia (and teaching) itself.
Anything to do with technology tends to be more merit based, and achievement there tends to trump formal education, and by the time you are 40+ that formal education tends to be weighted far less than when you are say 25 and just out of school.
Other countries would add more to the pattern of variability, there is a huge difference between say Poland or Romania or the Nordics or the Baltics, further reflected in the weight that which a diploma or degree from such institution would carry, especially abroad. For instance, right now in the Baltics there is something of a brain drain happening with the younger generation moving West in droves and so as an older person it is stupidly easy to enroll in a university program. But that degree isn't going to help you much unless you remain in the local economy and the degrees from a decade or more ago are given more weight than the ones that you get there right now because they are fairly desperate for students just to keep the departments up and running.
There are different tiers of highschools and different tiers of higher education.
The first tiers are more targetted towards craftsmanship (e.g. arithmetic and trigonometry you can quickly do in your head, you start working earlier in life, as early as 16) while the latter tiers are more universal and abstract (e.g. math concepts that have better use for computer science, you start working much later, around 25 years old).
Thanks for the details! If you wanted to switch from craftsmanship to say, a more abstract field. Would you have to do the entire 10 years (ish?) of "missed" education?
I know that here in Quebec, you can enroll in university no matter what as long as you are 21 years old and finished high school. Does that happen in Germany? Or is it rare to actually be able to switch between "paths"?
(Though I dislike the way french and European higher education in general works. You're basically boxed in to your specific domain or degree that you often don't even really choose and changing or switching careers is almost impossible. The choices you make in high school basically define what you can even study in, and thus what you can do for the rest of your life. I think that's one thing the US does super well, even more so considering that degrees are less important there in the first place.)