Education has many configurations, whether its formal schooling, parental input, the media, religion etc. and to take up Shard's point, thinking of schooling as a single system is misleading, there is no one system in fact there is no one-best-system. Plus, the use and consumption of formal schooling has many facets other than "learning". We use it both to conserve and to transform social, economic and political entities and situations. For example, one only has to inject the issues of class or gender into the debate and all hell breaks loose.

Of course I agree with both of you, but countries like the UK and Canada have become so obsessed with the university degree that technical and vocational education has become relegated to a quite unwarranted second-class status.

This will reverse as the machines start to take over! But you're quite right.

It's such a varied and complex subject that you can't really boil it down to a simple ranking.

I'd imagine the outcome can more accurately be summed up thus:
If you live in a reasonably wealthy country and get an education you should be fine wherever it happens to be.

You've obviously never watched the Jeremy Kyle show.

If you have money and cultural capital your children will have access to superior education in the UK. Elite education in the UK is far better than the elite education in Canada. But in general, wealthy and successful people tend not emigrate, especially to places like Canada or Australia so its probably not going to be much of an issue.

As Ali G once said "There are two ways out of the ghetto- the AK or the BA".

We live in a global knowledge economy now and it's a widely held belief (but not by everyone, granted) that countries with a higher proportion of graduates in the workforce will have stronger economies, whether homegrown or immigrants. Yes, we need technical / vocational routes, but we also just need as many of our young people as possible to go to university.

The biggest problems the world faces now are absolutely relevant to social scientists. Plumbers are helpful, but they won't be able to suss out climate change etc.

(I like plumbers and actually I need one. I'm just sayin' )

With the greatest respect, plumbers might be very much more useful than social scientists as climate change continues to occur.

Is that really true? The UK has a huge proportion of university educated graduates without jobs. While those self employed vocational workers earn very decent wages thank you very much doing jobs that everyone needs doing.

True, but trained / educated students are much more use to the workforce when jobs become available than not. The economy is the problem not the quality of graduates or education system.

Indeed
Sparkys will be all out of business though.

I say UK hands down. Completing grade 12 in the UK would put you a year or two ahead of your average Canadian, unless they took AP classes in school.

I think that Finland's is the best in the world since its educational system is most conducive to conceptual understanding, critical thinking, creativity, and innovation. The thing is that the government never really expected for Finland to come out on top when they first created the current system.

I have often wondered why we do not see any Oxbridge graduates on the Jeremy Kyle Show.

It depends what they are at University studying.

I'd say all the University debt that kids run up now probably makes it not worth it in two thirds of cases other than setting the kids back during their 20's financially and even possibly beyond.

Keeps the pyramid scheme going though for the oldies with all those potential renters out there.