skills that are needed to improve one’s chances of obtaining a good job that is less likely prone to automation. Those in vocational secondary have substantially lower cognitive skills according to an analysis using PISA data (Bentaouet Kattan, Macdonald and Patrinos 2018).

Also of importance are so-called non-cognitive skills, or socioemotional skills, which include the “Big 5” personality traits of extraversion, conscientiousness, openness to experience, emotional stability and agreeableness (Heckman 2011). There is evidence that non-cognitive skills – particularly openness to experience – are positively associated with being in a non-automationprone occupation (Bentaouet Kattan, Macdonald and Patrinos 2018). Also, vocational education programs tend to emphasize technical skills over cognitive _and_ non-cognitive skills, placing such graduates at a further disadvantage. Frey and Osborne (2017) and Brynjolfsson and McAfee (2014) find that non-cognitive skills such as creativity, social-intelligence and advanced perception will be humans’ comparative advantage over machines given current technological trends.

# **Implications for Education Systems**

Education systems are faced with the double challenge of improving the quality of education to make it relevant to the labor market given the automation challenge and giving students the ability to navigate the post-truth society. As daunting as that challenge might be, it turns out that the solution to both problems is more and better education. The challenge, however, is that this is expensive and difficult. At the same time, governments have to increase educational attainment, improve cognitive skills, and teach non-cognitive skills. These are expensive and difficult tasks, and the evidence base on how to improve non-cognitive skills is limited.

The labor market returns to schooling are high and this alone justifies expanding access to education. For compulsory schooling, the guidance is clear. It is government’s responsibility to finance schooling. At the higher education and post-compulsory levels, the onus is not on government to fully provide and finance it, but certainly to put in place the conditions for increasing access to quality opportunities. This is an area where financial innovations make sense. There are options for governments, such as using the evidence from labor market returns to education to implement financial innovations – and use future earnings to finance higher education (Bentaouet Kattan, Macdonald, Patrinos 2018). High returns suggest that it makes sense to expand higher education – but in an equitable and sustainable manner.

In terms of increasing cognitive skills, the task is difficult, and developing countries lag far behind. Yet, we know how to do it. Education systems that do well prepare children early on, reform continuously, and use information for improvement. There is a need to focus on basic skills, early development, and to measure and improve early reading. High-performing East Asian countries offer some useful lessons (World Bank 2018). These include: (1) aligning institutions to ensure basic conditions for learning by ensuring that the basic conditions for learning are in place in all schools; (2) concentrating effective, equity-minded public spending on basic education, including the channeling of public resources to schools and districts that are falling behind; (3) ensure children are ready to learn in school; (4) selecting and supporting teachers throughout their careers to allow them to focus on the classroom, starting with raising the selectiveness of who becomes a teacher; and (5) assessing students to diagnose issues and inform instruction.

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