This is the executive summary for the report, "Graduate Degrees: Risky and Unequal Paths to the Top" which proposes new measures to improve accountability and transparency in graduate education through a regulatory framework for Grad PLUS loan eligibility that includes both an in-field earnings premium test and a debt-to-earnings test.…

Community and technical colleges are known as "Democracy's colleges." They are grounded in the core American value that all people deserve the opportunity to move up in the world, regardless of where they are from, what obstacles they face and where they need to start. At a time when college education is the ticket to a middle-class…

Washington's Integrated Basic Education and Skills Training Program (I-BEST) quickly teaches students literacy, work, and college-readiness skills so they can move through school and into living wage jobs faster. Pioneered by Washington's community and technical colleges, I-BEST uses a team-teaching approach to combine college-readiness classes…

In the Year of the Schoolteacher, the issue of how to enhance the pedagogical worker's status takes on special urgency. Unfortunately, the problem has been addressed only on the regional level, with each region doing things its own way. The teaching profession in Russia is hampered by poor prestige, low incomes, and inadequate resources and living…

In early 2000, Florida's workforce wasn't keeping pace with demand. The state decided that a then-novel credential, a bachelor's degree from a community college, was the solution. The plan is working. The new bachelor's degrees initially focused on education, health care, and information technology. Even as the job market has shrunk, demand has…

At first glance, closing the achievement gap seems fairly straightforward. It is a difficult task to accomplish, but it does not seem an especially complex one to conceptualize. How educators look at achievement gaps will determine their success in reducing them. When designing interventions, the author suggests that educators need to remember the…

In recent years, the transition from higher education to work in comparative perspective has attracted increasing attention from scholars and practitioners alike. Previous studies reveal similarities and differences in labour market outcomes across countries, but explanatory frameworks mainly refer to fields of study, whereas differences by types…

This paper provides an overview of vocational education and training (VET) system in India, and discusses various challenges and difficulties in the Indian VET system. The paper also examines labour market outcomes of vocational graduates and compares these with those of general secondary graduates using a large-scale nationally representative…

This article proposes an explanation of sex-differences in job-allocation and pay in different institutional contexts. Job-allocation calculations are considered to be related to (1) the distribution of housework and (2) the skill-specialization requirements of jobs. In a context of uncertainty and imperfect information, housework and…

The present paper raises questions about the use of the concept of reputation in sociological studies of the relationship between higher education and the labour market. Sociologists of education have yet to subject the concept of reputation to sustained critique and evaluation. This situation is unsatisfactory because a number of critical…

Today, more and more students and parents are asking whether college is about getting education or getting a job. The stakes these days are especially high. Tuition and student-loan debt have risen to record levels, while the economy has slowed. In a competitive market, a college degree is no longer the golden ticket to a professional career. Due…

Since the opening up of private universities and colleges in the Kuwait education system in the late 1990s, there has been an explosion of tertiary institutions (both domestic and international) established in the country, with many of them offering vocational education and training. The move towards vocational and educational training forms part…

For most of the twentieth century, high school was enough for a shot at middle-class status and wages. Today, no one goes anywhere in the American job market without some postsecondary education or training. This article argues that postsecondary competencies and awards have become the threshold requirement for middle-class earnings and status.

In this article, in a context of wage equations with sample selection, we propose a novel interpretation of the partial effects linked to education as additional measures of returns to education that complement the traditional one, which is directly obtained from the estimation of the wage offer equation. Using European Household Panel data for…

The community college has many roles and constituents: academic, professional, and vocational. Its curriculum may be distinguished from that of other institutions of higher education by its many courses designed to enhance students' immediate career opportunities, especially with nearby employers. This article focuses on the job markets for…