This landscape report explores the impact of earning micro-credentials on the social mobility of rural learners. Through four in-depth case studies, we show how earning micro-credentials may lead to credential attainment, workforce entry, promotions, and/or economic improvements (e.g., salary increase, prioritizing learners impacted by poverty),…

Students are juggling multiple, competing priorities such as work pressures, parenting, debt, and degree affordability, as they seek the best educational decisions for their economic mobility and life goals. Driving questions of quality has been the recent effort of states to set and increase postsecondary attainment rates. These rates typically…

The UK's National Learning Targets for Education and Training, embracing 11- to 21-year-olds, adults, and employers, promote a credentialist approach to economic and social development. This article shows how the steel industry measures up. Using qualifications-based targets as a proxy for adult workforce capability is misguided. (Contains 40…

This working paper is a product of a regional study in industrial South Wales of the determinants of participation and non-participation in post-compulsory education and training, with special reference to processes of change in the patterns of these determinants over time and to variations between geographical areas. Based on this data, three…

This book, which traces the emergence of an official state-sanctioned learning policy for education and training in the United Kingdom, examines how the country's government has taken a concerted approach to accomplishing the following two goals: (1) integrating the reproduction of knowledge at all levels in the educational institutions under…