These days various schemes measuring educational attainment exist like age completed education, years of schooling, CASMIN, and ISCED. We know that each scheme has its advantages and disadvantages but how large are the differences in the end when it comes to analyse data? Do the schemes convey different findings?
I assume that ISCED-97 in general delivers better results than the other schemes. But the performances of the schemes will be different in each country due to specifics in national education systems. This is tested for eight selected European countries by using the dataset of the European Values Study 2008. Items on the topic of hostility/ prejudices towards immigrants were chosen as dependent variables for assessing the predictive performance of each educational scheme.
Building on preliminary findings with regard to the explained variance the outcome is that in most of these countries ISCED-97 delivers the highest percentages. For the Netherlands, Sweden, and Great Britain also years of schooling lead to quite good results.