The competencies addressed by undergraduate agricultural education programs should be assessed so programs are effective in supplying a well-prepared agricultural- and natural resources-oriented workforce, and so human capital is optimized. In this study, agricultural and natural resources leaders were surveyed to determine the workforce…

Psychometrically sound evaluation measures are vital for examining the contribution of professional training to organizational success in a reliable manner. As training evaluations tend to be both time-consuming and labor-intensive, there is an increasing demand for economic evaluation inventories. Simultaneously, evaluation measures have to meet…

Progress in educational development in the world since 1900 has been slow and uneven between countries. Providing basic education for all children in developing countries has been and remains an unmet challenge of governments and international organizations alike. This is in sharp contrast to recent findings in the economics literature on the…

In recent years, the level of participation and attainment by Indigenous Australians in education and training has improved, yet substantial gaps still exist between Indigenous Australians and non-Indigenous Australians. Education has to be a key focus if the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous employment rates is to be closed. This report…

A crucial issue in the debate on state support for higher education is the extent that a state's production of college graduates affects the state's education attainment. The view that many new graduates take their state-supported degrees to labor markets in other states undermines states' incentives to promote wider access to college. This study…

The greatest challenge we face in the next ten years is the challenge of making sure we have a qualified workforce able to meet the demands of living in a global economy. To do this we will need to expand the capacity of our workforce development and educational system to meet the training needs of business and industry. In order to assess the…

The question of why some employers opt to lay off current workers and hire new workers with different skills while other employers retrain and retain their workers was examined. First, the literature on employer-provided training and the role of social capital in the workplace was reviewed. Next, data from a 1994 national employers survey of firms…

A dynamic model of decisions to work, invest in human capital, and commit crime was developed and examined. By making all three activities endogenous, the model explains why older, more intelligent, and more educated workers tend to commit fewer property crimes of some types than others. The model includes the following predictions: (1) policies…

This document contains 95 papers and summaries of 5 poster sessions from an Australian conference on putting vocational education and training (VET) research to work. The following are among the areas covered in the papers: factors affecting VET graduates' employability over time; technical and further education (TAFE) institutes as models of…

This document contains 127 papers and innovative sessions and three poster sessions presented at a conference on human resource development (HRD). A program overview, author index, keyword index, and a CD-ROM version of the document are also included. The papers are grouped by the conference's 44 symposiums, which were devoted to the following…