According to data from 2018 revealed by Pordata, to mark the National Student Day, among the 27 countries that integrate the EU, Portugal has the highest value (50 percent) of the population of this age group without having completed the 12th year, following Malta, Spain, Italy and Greece.
Although, today, young people between 18 and 24 years old who drop out of school without completing secondary education are less and less - the figure dropped from 44 percent, in 2001, to 23 percent, in 2011, and to 10 percent, in 2019 - the rate of early abandonment is still among the highest in the EU.
However, more and more young people are choosing to pursue higher education: since the beginning of the 21st century, the percentage of people aged 30 to 34 with higher education has tripled from 11.6 percent in 2001 to 36.2 percent in 2019.
Even so, Portugal remains below the EU average (39 percent) in this indicator and in 2018 it was the third country to present the lowest value of graduates in this age group (33.5 percent), being above only Italy (27.8 percent) and Romania (24.6 percent).
At the top of the table, with more than half the population of this age group with university degrees are, in decreasing order, Lithuania, Cyprus, Ireland, Luxembourg and Sweden.
The data also indicate that one of the trends in the degree of higher education is the increase in the percentage of students enrolled in public universities: if in 1997 there were 36 percent of students in the private subsystem, today that figure is 18 percent.
Accompanying this trend is the decrease in the number of private higher education establishments: although private universities more than doubled between 1990 and 2001 (from 55 to 137), they have been decreasing and currently there are little more than a hundred (104).
The reverse trend is seen in the number of public schools at other levels of education, which has been decreasing in Portugal: in 2018 the country had 8,469 schools, half of which existed two decades ago.
However, while public schools went from almost 15,000 to less than 6,000, private schools maintained more or less constant values, varying between 2,500 and 3,000.
The study also concluded that the percentage of students who failed in 2018 decreased to at least half of the values of the late 1990s, at all levels of education.