Methodology - Tertiary education
Most of the data on education were obtained from sources of a workplace of the State Statistical Service at the Ministry of Education, Youth, and Sports, international comparisons were taken over from the Eurostat database. This applies to all data for higher vocational schools. The system of schools providing higher education comprises public and private schools (university-type and non-university type of schools) and two state universities (currently the Police Academy of the Czech Republic in Prague and the University of Defence established by the Ministry of the Interior and by the Ministry of Defence, respectively). Data on public and private universities are taken from the SIMS database (i.e. Union Information from Students’ Registers), to which the universities, both public and private, transmit data on students, students enrolled for the first time, and graduates. The SIMS source database is continuously supplemented and updated, including retroactive corrections. The Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports receives also data on state universities from the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of Defence. Due to different data collection and methodology, statistics for public and private universities are usually presented separately from state universities.
Data on higher professional education are given for school years and they are reported with the status as at 31 October, data on university students are published as at 31 December of a given (academic) year. Data for students enrolled for the first time and for graduates are for the calendar year.
Students in higher professional schools (together with children/pupils in nursery up to secondary schools) and students in state universities are reported as numbers of studies (for example, when a pupil/student is enrolled in multiple study programmes or in multiple schools, he or she is counted multiple times in the relevant piece of data). The only exception is breakdown by citizenship, in which the units kept are natural persons (headcount). On the contrary, students in public and private universities are reported as headcount (i.e. one student is only counted once in each piece of data regardless how many schools or how many programmes he or she is studying in). The total numbers of students, graduates, and the enrolled for the first time in studies at public and private universities thus may differ from the sums for individual universities or individual types of education and types of study programmes.
Students enrolled for the first time are students enrolled for the first time in studies at a university that falls under the education system of the Czech Republic or in a partial study programme of such a school. It means that, for example, a student enrolled for the first time in a follow-up master study programme is concurrently enrolled for the first time at a university of the Czech education system only provided that he or she graduated from a bachelor study programme, which it follows, at a university abroad.
Further methodological information and statistical data relating to higher education can be found in the CZSO publication Students and graduates of universities in the Czech Republic, or in the Statistical Yearbook of the Czech Republic and the Public Database. For the inclusion of educational programs in the international ISCED classification, see information on ISCED 2011 (levels of education) and ISCED-F-2013 (fields of education and training). Further methodological information and statistical data regarding higher vocational education are provided in the publications of the CZSO (Statistical Yearbook of the Czech Republic, Schools and School Facilities), or in the Public Database or the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports' database.