Similarity of the European Union countries in terms of graduates’ fields of education

The purpose of the paper is to divide the European Union countries into groups of most similar distributions of graduates’ fields of education. The study covers three education levels – bachelor’s, master’s, doctoral – and ten different fields. As a measure of the degree of similarity of distributions D statistic was used, which is the maximum absolute value of the difference between two cumulative distribution functions. Data from 2015 were used for computations. On the basis of the values of the D statistic calculated for each of the pairs of distributions the countries were divided into relatively uniform classes. The implemented procedure enabled to distinguish one compact cluster of countries in the case of the bachelor’s level of education, two unlike sets in the case of the master’s level and one relatively homogenous group in the case of the doctoral level.