Upper Secondary Attainment Rate
Upper Secondary Attainment Rate by country
Commentary
Notable countries
Turkmenistan leads the ranking with an upper secondary attainment rate of 98.38% among people aged 25+, followed closely by Belarus at 97.89% and Uzbekistan at 96.84%. At the other end, Niger is last at 1.72%, with Chad (4.56%) and Burkina Faso (5.16%) also extremely low. A notable surprise is that the United States appears in the global top 10 at 91.62%, while the bottom 10 is made up entirely of African countries.
Regional trends
Europe has the highest continental average at 77.07%, well ahead of all other regions. Asia ranks second at 53.28%, while South America (50.7%) and North America (49.7%) sit close to the global mean of 49.11. Oceania is somewhat lower at 45.5%, and Africa stands far behind the rest at 21.32%, indicating the widest regional gap in attainment.
Data source
The data come from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators (WDI) for 2015-2024 and are measured as the percentage of the population aged 25+ that has attained upper secondary education. Coverage includes 173 countries. Comparisons should be read with the caveat that not every country is covered in the dataset.
Interpretation
Because higher is better, high values indicate that a large share of adults have completed upper secondary education, which generally points to broader access to schooling and stronger educational attainment. Low values show that upper secondary completion remains limited among the adult population. Overall, the data show very large cross-country and regional inequalities: some countries are near universal attainment, while others remain in single digits.