Yes, sorry, I meant per capita gdp, otherwise big countries would win out easily by sheer numbers. I'm not definitively saying any of these are measures of tha

Yes, sorry, I meant per capita gdp, otherwise big countries would win out easily by sheer numbers. I'm not definitively saying any of these are measures of that - the study of the effectiveness of education is a whole field of academic study on its own. What I meant was, many people use subjective measures that are grounded in cultural traditions as a metric for it, but I think that more objective measures of 'success' (such as prosperity, both individual and of the country as a whole, and for which I use per capita gdp as a proxy, with the caveat that said per capita GDP should probably be distributed roughly normally and have a not too large standard deviation - although I'm not prepared to quantify that, that's a whole other discussion...) are better criteria. The reason I propose GDP, and this also answers your second question, is the assumption that people get educations to better their lives, at least in part in the material sense. So, the measure of the success of the educational system is in to what extent people actually better their lives in that aspect - to put it bluntly, how much (more) money they make. Of course making money isn't the only driving factor for many people when choosing what to study, but then again, for a majority of students it's a matter of weighing three factors: what do I like, what am I capable of, and what kind of a lifestyle will it provide me with. Since the first two are more or less fixed, the financial prospects of an education become a substantive decisive factor when it comes to study of choice. So, in that line of reasoning, GDP is not a measure of the medical health of a country; since medical health is a goal in itself, while education is (partially, and in the aggregate, I'm not interested in nitpicking on the absoluteness of my phrasing...) a means to an end, to bettering ones life (at least partially) in the material sense, which is expressed by proxy in per capita GDP.