Countries with the best and worst performance in the Pisa tests: how is Colombia compared to the rest of the world?

While Singapore, the Chinese region B-S-J-Z, and Macao (China) topped the Pisa 2025 tests, Colombia ended up far from those figures, in a field much closer to that of the countries with the worst performance in the world.

Beyond the exact position in each ranking, what these figures reveal is an underlying pattern: Colombia is not among the countries with the best educational performance in the world, but neither among the worst performers. Its place is that of a country stuck at a low-middle level, with no clear signs of takeoff.

For educational analyst Francisco Cajiao, this stagnation cannot be read in isolation. In an interview with EL TIEMPO, he explained that the results of the 2022 edition — the one before this — were already marked by the pandemic, but in a different way than might be thought: “The 2022 results were very immediate to the pandemic, so many of the kids who were the right age to take the PISA test had already acquired certain skills. In this case, we are talking about the kids who suffered the pandemic during a critical learning period, which are the first years of schooling. That is very interesting because it is very likely that the true effect of the pandemic will be seen in these tests and not so much in the previous ones.”

That is to say, according to his reading, the students who took the test in 2025 are those who experienced lockdown right at the stage when the foundations of reading and calculation are built. That factor, he says, could partly explain why the country fails to take off.

However, Cajiao was emphatic that the pandemic does not explain everything. He pointed out that other countries in the region, such as Chile and Uruguay, did show improvements in their results, which shows that Colombia’s lag also has a public policy component: “We are talking about four years in which the government really did very little for the quality of basic education. During the entire Gustavo Petro period, there was a strong emphasis on higher education, but there was really very little intervention in improving the quality of basic and secondary education, and this is felt and now evidenced.”

Thus, for Cajiao the diagnosis is twofold: on one hand, a generation that carries the educational impact of lockdown in its most critical years; on the other, a system that, according to his analysis, prioritized higher education while leaving the quality of basic and secondary education, precisely the segment measured by Pisa, in the background.

In total, these were the conditions that, according to the analyst, led Colombia to remain far from the top places in the three competencies, without falling to the last rung of the global ranking either.

For Cajiao, the consequences of this stagnation are neither minor nor short-term. He warned that a country without the necessary formative competencies faces structural limits to its development: “In a country where the population does not have the necessary formative competencies, it is very difficult to make progress in science and technology, it is very difficult to have processes of technological development appropriation, it is very difficult to find qualified people to perform in high public responsibility positions. Less prepared people are much less productive and that means a tremendous setback for the country. The most valuable resource a country has is its people, but its prepared people. If people do not have the necessary levels, they also cannot enter university and when they enter university it is more likely that they will drop out before finishing a degree.”

That chain described by Cajiao — from basic to higher education, and from there to the labor market and the country’s productivity — is, at its core, what is behind figures like those in this ranking. A country that fails to enter the group of the best in Pisa, he warns, risks dragging that lag into other fronts: university, qualified employment, and ultimately, long-term economic development.

MATEO CHACÓN ORDUZ | Deputy Editor Life Today – Education