School life expectancy, primary to tertiary (UNESCO UIS)
School life expectancy — the number of years a child of school-entrance age can expect to spend in education from primary to tertiary — in years, by country/region and year, from the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (https://api.uis.unesco.org/api/public/data/indicators). Each row is one (year, area): SLE.1T8, both sexes. Method: keyless UIS Data API v1; one request for the single indicator; null values dropped; rows with qualifier UIS_EST/NAT_EST are estimates. Units: years. Caveats: computed as the sum of age-specific enrolment rates across levels; repetition inflates the measure relative to grades completed, and children who never go to school pull it down; sparsely observed for many countries; latest 1-2 years provisional and revised; regional aggregates have no iso3 code. Coverage: worldwide, 1970 to 2025, yearly granularity. Provenance: UNESCO Institute for Statistics, CC BY-SA 4.0 — please cite the UIS with the extraction date. Primary key: (indicator_id, area, year). Join keys: iso3 (ISO 3166-1 alpha-3), year. Cadence: refreshed yearly. Sample use: filter iso3='DEU' to see Germany's school life expectancy reach 17.34 years in 2024.
- Rows
- 13,892
- Columns
- 7
- Source cadence
- Yearly
- Last refreshed
- Sep 24, 2026
- Theme
- education
| Column | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
| year | integer | Reference year of the observation. |
| iso3 | string | ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 country code; null for UIS regional aggregates. |
| area | string | Country name (resolved from the ISO code via hub.normalize) or the UIS regional aggregate label verbatim; with indicator_id and year forms the primary key. |
| indicator_id | string | UIS indicator code (e.g. LR.AG15T99, CR.1). |
| indicator_label | string | Human-readable UIS indicator label, from the SDG 4 monitoring framework. |
| value_years | float | Indicator value in years (mean years of schooling and school life expectancy indicators). (unit: years) |
| qualifier | string | Data quality flag from UIS: null (reported observation), UIS_EST (UIS estimate) or NAT_EST (national estimate). Absent from the completion-rates, education-expenditure, educational-attainment and mean-years-schooling datasets, where UIS publishes no estimate flags. |
First 10 sample rows — a preview, not the complete dataset.
| year | iso3 | area | indicator_id | indicator_label | value_years | qualifier |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1,970 | — | AIMS: Asia and the Pacific | SLE.1T8 | School life expectancy, primary to tertiary, both sexes (years) | 7.897 | UIS_EST |
| 1,971 | — | AIMS: Asia and the Pacific | SLE.1T8 | School life expectancy, primary to tertiary, both sexes (years) | 7.892 | UIS_EST |
| 1,972 | — | AIMS: Asia and the Pacific | SLE.1T8 | School life expectancy, primary to tertiary, both sexes (years) | 7.948 | UIS_EST |
| 1,973 | — | AIMS: Asia and the Pacific | SLE.1T8 | School life expectancy, primary to tertiary, both sexes (years) | 8.122 | UIS_EST |
| 1,974 | — | AIMS: Asia and the Pacific | SLE.1T8 | School life expectancy, primary to tertiary, both sexes (years) | 8.131 | UIS_EST |
| 1,975 | — | AIMS: Asia and the Pacific | SLE.1T8 | School life expectancy, primary to tertiary, both sexes (years) | 8.267 | UIS_EST |
| 1,976 | — | AIMS: Asia and the Pacific | SLE.1T8 | School life expectancy, primary to tertiary, both sexes (years) | 8.389 | UIS_EST |
| 1,977 | — | AIMS: Asia and the Pacific | SLE.1T8 | School life expectancy, primary to tertiary, both sexes (years) | 8.572 | UIS_EST |
| 1,978 | — | AIMS: Asia and the Pacific | SLE.1T8 | School life expectancy, primary to tertiary, both sexes (years) | 8.643 | UIS_EST |
| 1,979 | — | AIMS: Asia and the Pacific | SLE.1T8 | School life expectancy, primary to tertiary, both sexes (years) | 8.522 | UIS_EST |
Profiled Sep 24, 2026 from snapshot 20260924T090702Z-a31bc7126298
Measured- Completeness
- 83.3%
- Rows
- 13,892
- Columns
- 7
- Columns with gaps
- 2
| Column | Missing | Distinct | Range | Distribution |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| yearbigint | 0% | 53 | 1,970 → 2,025median 2,002 | 5 outside 1st–99th percentile |
| iso3varchar | 67.6% | 240 | — |
|
| areavarchar | 0% | 418 | — |
|
| indicator_idvarchar | 0% | 1 | — |
|
| indicator_labelvarchar | 0% | 1 | — |
|
| value_yearsdouble | 0% | 17,426 | 0.596 → 23.25median 9.79 | 278 outside 1st–99th percentile |
| qualifiervarchar | 49.6% | 2 | — |
|
- Current
20260924T090702Z-a31bc7126298 · sha256 a31bc7126298…
13,892 rows · first snapshot
Point any LLM at the metadata endpoint — the documentation above is machine-readable too (JSON-LD + Croissant).
curl "https://datazimuts.com/v1/datasets/unesco_uis/unesco_uis_school_life_expectancy" | jq '{title, rows, columns_count, license}'import requests
ds = requests.get("https://datazimuts.com/v1/datasets/unesco_uis/unesco_uis_school_life_expectancy").json()
print(ds["title"], ds["rows"], "rows")
# Sample rows for an LLM context window
for row in ds.get("sample_rows", [])[:5]:
print(row)API endpoint: https://datazimuts.com/v1/datasets/unesco_uis/unesco_uis_school_life_expectancy
Tip: fetch /llms.txt for the full machine-readable catalog.
Where this data comes from and what was made from it. Other people's work shows as counts; only shared projects are named.
Cite this snapshot
Pinned to snapshot 20260924T090702Z-a31bc7126298 and its content hash, so readers get exactly the data you used.
UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS). (2026). School life expectancy, primary to tertiary (UNESCO UIS) [Data set, snapshot 20260924T090702Z-a31bc7126298, sha256 a31bc7126298]. Datazimuts. Retrieved 2026-09-24, from https://datazimuts.com/en/datasets/unesco_uis/unesco_uis_school_life_expectancy?snapshot=20260924T090702Z-a31bc7126298
@misc{dz_unesco_uis_unesco_uis_school_life_expect_a31bc712,
title = {{School life expectancy, primary to tertiary (UNESCO UIS)}},
author = {{UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS)}},
year = {2026},
publisher = {Datazimuts},
howpublished = {\url{https://datazimuts.com/en/datasets/unesco_uis/unesco_uis_school_life_expectancy?snapshot=20260924T090702Z-a31bc7126298}},
note = {Snapshot 20260924T090702Z-a31bc7126298, sha256 a31bc71262988c2b3f6185282d39e75d020f17af4ed4eaa87578f8d78452e81f; accessed 2026-09-24}
}Embed a table or a chart
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