While the direct impacts of minimum wage changes on employment have received considerable attention, these policy changes have the potential to impact skill attainment by changing the opportunity cost of college enrollment. Using institutional data on college enrollment and program completion, we find that enrollment falls markedly among students…

This paper critiques the emergence of micro-credentials in higher education. It argues that micro-credentials build on the discourse of employability skills and 21st century skills within human capital theory, and that they increase the potential of human capital theory to 'discipline' the HE curriculum to align it more closely with putative…

Assessing the impact of widely distributed learning opportunities now accessible through distance education must take into account the re-imposition of values and motives long associated with traditional education. The expectations of new higher education consumers should be tempered by institutional acknowledgement of pre-existing value…

The relationship between supervisory identity development and supervisory experience, counseling experience, and training in supervision was examined for Association for Counselor Education and Supervision (ACES) members. Analyses indicated that supervisory experience and training were related to supervisory identity development, whilst counseling…

We use data on statewide end-of-course tests in North Carolina to examine the relationship between teacher credentials and student achievement at the high school level. We find compelling evidence that teacher credentials, particularly licensure and certification, affects student achievement in systematic ways and that the magnitudes are large…

Education researchers and policy makers agree that teachers differ in terms of quality and that quality matters for student achievement. Despite prodigious amounts of research, however, debate still persists about the causal relationship between specific teacher credentials and student achievement. In this paper, we use a rich administrative data…

Extensive education research on the contribution of teachers to student achievement produces two generally accepted results. First, teacher quality varies substantially as measured by the value added to student achievement or future academic attainment or earnings. Second, variables often used to determine entry into the profession and…

Mounting pressure in the policy arena to improve teacher productivity either by improving signals that predict teacher performance or through creating incentive contracts based on performance--has spurred two related questions: Are there important determinants of teacher productivity that are not captured by teacher credentials but that can be…

Dropping out of high school is related to a number of negative outcomes. For example, the average income of persons ages 18 through 65 who had not completed high school was roughly $20,100 in 2005.1 By comparison, the average income of persons ages 18 through 65 who completed their education with a high school credential, including a General…

Value-added models in education research allow researchers to explore how a wide variety of policies and measured school inputs affect the academic performance of students. Researchers typically quantify the impacts of such interventions in terms of "effect sizes", i.e., the estimated effect of a one standard deviation change in the…

Education names and classifies individuals. This result seems unavoidable. For example, some students will graduate, and some will not. Those who graduate will be "graduates"; those who do not graduate will be labeled otherwise. The only way to avoid such labeling is to fail to make distinctions of any kind. Yet education is rife with…