School-based skills assessments, such as those conducted with PISA, are well established and show significant differences between students depending on their parents’ occupation, geographical origin and gender, at the end of primary school or at the end of secondary school. This article, using surveys that include an assessment of skills among young adults aged 18 to 29 years (IVQ and PIAAC), looks at these inequalities at a less commonly studied time: the end of education. These young people have higher skills than older people, but with high variability, especially depending on the qualification. Their skills are linked to their social background, gender and geographical origin and partly, but only partly, to long-known educational inequalities. At the end of education, the inequalities in skills observed in France are on the same scale as those observed in other OECD countries; in France and elsewhere, they are close to what is observed at age 15.

Citation: Murat, F. (2021). Inequalities in Skills at the End of Education. Economie et Statistique / Economics and Statistics, 528‑529, 47–61. doi: 10.24187/ecostat.2021.528d.2060