International Lending Institutions (ILIs) and Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) continuously design and implement Educational System Typologies (ESTs) in order to evaluate a nation's educational performance in terms of quality of life improvements; Traditional ESTs are therefore constantly put at odds by the advent of new ESTs. This study aims to explore the ways in which traditional and newer EST designs relate to quality of life, using factor analysis on Colombian data for the period 1997-2000. Results for the Colombian case show that level-based non-mechanistic approaches are better at describing and promoting the relationship between educational indicators and quality of life assessments. (Contains 5 tables and 14 footnotes.)