Purpose: The purpose of this research is to investigate sustainable strategies for skills development that is specific to the youth of South Africa. International and South African data are statistically analysed and quantified to provide inputs for the systems dynamics (SD)-based predictive skills model. The skills model simulates the impact of…

The positive side of employment during studies is the increase of net investments in human capital. The main objective of this paper is to discover factors influencing the work of students in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro and to compare students' employment in these three Western Balkan countries. Quantitative analysis based on…

This paper estimates the monetary return to quality in US graduate education, controlling for cognitive ability and self-selection across award level, program quality, and field-of-study. In most program types, I cannot reject the hypothesis of no returns to either degree completion or program quality. Important exceptions include master's…

There is growing concern about the detrimental effect of term-time employment on university students' academic success. We report results from an online survey of 1837 students of the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, whose responses were later matched to their academic records for a semester. The majority of employed students reported…

Despite the development of employability skills being firmly entrenched in higher education's strategic agenda worldwide; recent graduates' standards in certain skills are not meeting industry expectations. This paper presents and tests a model of undergraduate competence in employability skills. It highlights those factors which impact on…

A longitudinal sample from the Educational Longitudinal Study of 2002 was used to determine differences in work outcomes between (a) individuals with learning disabilities or emotional-behavior disorders and (b) individuals with or without disabilities. Twelve factors were arranged into individual, family, school-peer, and community categories.…

The National Center for Education Statistics reports that over 250,000 high school graduates moved across state lines to enroll in college in 2008. The choices made by these high ability individuals may have long-lasting implications for state economies; not only do they contribute to state and local economies through their tuition and daily…

This study examines if the college wage premium favoring college graduates still exists. The NLSY-79 data is employed. The sample includes individuals who received their high school degree and college degree in 1980 and 1981. These individuals were followed until the year 2004. A cross sectional regression model was estimated for the years 1982,…

A social cognitive model of well-being [Lent, R. W. (2004). Toward a unifying theoretical and practical perspective on well-being and psychosocial adjustment. "Journal of Counseling Psychology," 51, 482-509.] was adapted to the context of academic adjustment and tested using a longitudinal design. Participants were 252 students at a…

This paper uses a new data-set for cumulative national investment in formal schooling and a new instrument for schooling to estimate the national return on investment in 61 countries. These estimates are combined with data on the private rate of return on investment in schooling to estimate the external rate of return. In 1990 the external rate of…

Much analysis of youth transitions focuses on the first year after education, or outcomes at a specific age. Such work looks, for example, at the effect of education on the likelihood of being employed or unemployed. This study takes a different angle by considering the effect of education on the persistence of labour market outcomes. For example,…

The chapter begins by discussing why the continued underrepresentation of blacks and Hispanics in American higher education is a critical area for research, policy, and practice. The author then describes the expanded conceptual model and summarizes research support for the model. (Contains 1 table.)

Recent data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) were used to examine the validity of the traditional human capital model, which predicts that training lowers starting wages and increases wage growth. The primary data sample was restricted to those 4,309 members of the NLSY sample who were working for pay and not enrolled in…

Reports on a study of Black and White male workers aged 32 or less, who had established their own residences and had worked full time for 10 years or less. The study explored the relationships among such variables as parental income, educational background, job tenure, and workers' earnings. (PGD)

While there exist many examples of institutional use of the results of the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), there is a relative paucity of research explicitly linking student outcomes to responses on the survey. A major Doctoral-Extensive institution in the Southeast recently conducted a large-scale implementation of the National…