As a follow up on my last post, I thought I’d better take a look at the current Danish government, and how they spent their youth studying.

There are current 22 members of government. I went through their official CVs, and used Wikipedia to supplement dates where necessary/possible.

Of the 22 members of government, 14 have an University degree, while the rest either have a non-academic degree (journalism, nursery, school teacher) or haven’t any degree at all. Of the 14 people with a university degree, one is a ph.d., 9 have a Masters, and the rest have a Bachelors.

At least two members of government hold multiple degrees at the same educational level (something which new laws will keep others from getting).

It was frequently difficult to get information about when they had started studying at university, so it is hard to say for sure whether many of them had finished their study on time (5 years for a Masters, 3 years for a Bachelors), but of the people where we know when they started, only 2 out of 7 managed (here I have left out one of the people with multiple degrees, as she would count in both groups). Both of those, which finished on time, have a Bachelors degree.

One of the things that the current government is pushing, is that young people should start at their education straight after high school. From the data I’ve got, it seems like at least 12 members of the government didn’t do this (here I count both people going on the university or to a non-academic degree), 4 might have (one of these is very unlikely), and 3 have for sure. I don’t have sufficient data for the last five.

What the data also shows, is that of those people that went straight on to their education, none of them managed to finish it on time. Of the 4 people who might have gone straight on, none of them finished their education on time if that was the case. So, it seems like that there is no member of the current government for which it holds true that they went straight from high school to their education, and managed to finish the education on time.

I wonder why they believe that young people today can do this, when they couldn’t do so themselves?