The Iowa Department of Education collects information on joint enrollment from Iowa's 15 community colleges. Jointly-enrolled students are high school students enrolled in community college credit coursework. Most jointly-enrolled students enroll through Senior Year Plus programs, such as concurrent enrollment. Other students enroll independently…

Peers may both promote conformity and discourage ambitious choices when students make educational decisions. Low socioeconomic status (SES) students may be more sensitive to outside influence than high SES students when making educational decisions. Considering the case of choosing between an academic track and a vocational track in Danish…

Career and Technical Education (CTE) plays a vital role in preparing students for the workforce and postsecondary success. This Spotlight explores innovative approaches to CTE, highlighting strategies for expanding access to college-level coursework and real-world learning experiences. From developing effective career pathway models to integrating…

Accumulating evidence indicates that students' sense of school belonging has a substantial positive effect on educational attainment. At the same time, life course and life span developmental theories suggest that the benefits of a sense of school belonging could be weakened by the channeling effects of education systems that assign students to…

While global citizenship education (GCE) becomes increasingly popular, the concept is still contested in definition and assumes different meanings in various contexts. Many countries have started including GCE-related concepts in national educational policies and school curriculum. However, not much empirical research has been conducted on GCE in…

Sweden has a long tradition of comprehensive upper-secondary education. This began in the early 1970s. It culminated in 1994 with all the programmes having a core curriculum that gave general eligibility to higher education. Conservative and liberal governments have introduced several neoliberal school reforms, which the subsequent social…

One educational structure with its own grammar is the student-teacher relationship. The conventional relational grammar involves teachers and students connecting to pursue academic learning--a grammar rooted in both historic attempts to define the professional domain of teaching as the transmission of academic knowledge as well as current efforts…

By studying population-wide panels of 10th graders in Norway, I investigate the association between the social class composition of cohorts in schools and choosing an academic as opposed to a vocational track at upper-secondary level. Two steps are used to study this relationship. First, I use multilevel models estimating the group level model…

In Switzerland, the baccalaureate school is an important pathway to university education, and the aspirations of families and students to enter baccalaureate school have grown. However, vocational education and training (VET) remains the predominant educational pathway and has a strong lobby. We investigate how in this context, the transition from…

This report describes the development of the Secondary School Course Taxonomy (SSCT), to be used with high school transcript course-taking data that have been coded using the School Courses for the Exchange of Data (SCED). The SSCT aggregates the SCED-coded courses into 20 subject fields that align with how the National Center for Education…

Despite the shift from an elite to a mass higher education (HE) system in the UK, participation between students with Business Technology Education Council (BTEC) and Advanced-Level (A-level) qualifications remains unequal. The data presented here is taken from a longitudinal narrative inquiry funded by the Economic and Social Research Council…

Based on the educational hierarchical reproduction theory and the MMI and EMI hypotheses, this paper discusses the impact of the tracking of general and vocational education at the secondary level on higher education opportunity equity among social classes. The study finds that increasing gross enrollment rates of both general high schools and…

Education scholars have long debated the relative merits of vocational pathways in high school, weighing apparent employment benefits against the risk of foreclosing academic opportunities. Yet scholars are no closer to a consensus and the literature on vocational education has fragmented: economics, comparative political economy, sociology and…

Recognizing the underlying relationship between e-learning practice and the institutional environments hosted in, the Chinese educational practice on branching high school students into science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) and non-STEM academic major groups before being admitted into universities or colleges is examined. By…

The main purpose of this qualitative-phenomenological study is to examine vocational high schools in Turkey within the context of social inequality. Using criterion sampling technique, fourteen teachers working in vocational high schools participated in a semi-structured interview. The obtained data were analyzed through the descriptive analysis…