precisely the ages at which children are expected to be enrolled in primary in the country. It is therefore possible to identify the proportion actually in school to compute the net coverage of education services at this level. Six years later, in the year 2001, the same cohort can be identified again at ages 13-17, which is the age group expected to be attending secondary. Within the cohort, it is also possible to verify whether those ages 13-15 are actually enrolled in LS as expected, and if the older half of the cohort who are ages 16-17 are enrolled in US. With this information, net enrollment in both segments can be determined, as well as the share that is enrolled at a lower level (and therefore overage) and the share that is out of school.

The following sub-sections implement this approach in order to identify patterns of secondary, LS, and US dropout over time in Central America, with comparisons to the rest of the region.

# **1.3 The general context: Progress in education in Central America over six decades**

Taking a long-term regional view of the extent and speed of education progress helps to place the current dropout challenge in perspective. This is illustrated in Figure 2, which plots the average years of schooling of individuals belonging to different cohorts across all of Latin America, reported in the latest household survey available for each country (circa 2013). According to these estimations, individuals belonging to the cohort born in 1935-40, and who were ages 78-82 in the year of observation (that is, 2013), attained on average 4.7 years of schooling.<sup>6</sup> When comparing them to the average of 11.5 years of schooling attained by the cohort born 60 years later in 19901995, and who were ages 18-23 in 2013, we conclude that that there has been an increase of 6.8 years of average educational attainment across generations over the period.<sup>7</sup> This way of plotting the data is useful for viewing long-term trends, and also for verifying the moment when different benchmarks were reached. For example, as the figure shows, the cohort born around 1950—who turned 18 in 1968 and 63 in 2013—attained 6.5 years of schooling, which is equivalent to having completed the primary level. Our interpretation (subject to the caveats mentioned in footnote 7) is that already in 1968, the new entrants into the labor force in Latin 6 The year of birth of each cohort appears at the bottom of the Figure. For illustration, take again the case of El Salvador, where the latest household survey was held in 2013. In these data it is possible to identify, for instance, all individuals in the 78-82 age group, who by definition were born between 1935 and 1940, and thus turned 18 during the period 1953-58 -which is the age at which individuals are expected to have exited US and either continued to tertiary or entered the workforce. Since household surveys report the number of official years of schooling and the maximum level reached for all individuals, it is possible to determine the average schooling level of the cohort. Additionally, since schooling occurs at early ages and typically stops by ages 20-24, it is possible to interpret the result as the education acquired by the cohort during schooling age. The same exercise can be performed for all individuals who were age 18-22 in 2013, and were therefore born in the 1990-1995 period, as well as for all cohorts in between the two extremes. The Figure plots the average years of schooling for subsequent cohorts born between 1935 and 1995 for the 18 Latin American countries for which we have data –the data points correspond to unweighted regional averages.

> 7 Evidently, cohorts can change in composition over time and this can affect the averages obtained. Specifically, if there is differential mortality, emigration, or immigration, the averages will not reflect the profile of the same population over time, and can bias the picture. For instance, if those migrating outside of the country at prime age have relatively lower or higher education levels that those remaining in the country, the average years of schooling of those observed in the remaining cohort might be biased upward or downward, respectively. Unfortunately there is not sufficient data to correct for this for the countries included in our analysis, but we believe that the picture is still illustrative. In the case of mortality, if rates are higher the lower the education level, pictures such as that in Figure 2 would be upward biased.

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