The United States is falling behind other developed nations in terms of the share of its population with a college degree, and the gap will widen substantially unless the nation makes postsecondary education much more accessible, according to a report released last week by Jobs for the Future, a Boston-based research organization. If current…

Through successive rounds of negotiations, the World Trade Organization (WTO) encourages countries to commit their higher education system to the mandates of the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). The WTO is an organization committed to the aggressive trade liberalization of services like higher education. This ideology, known as…

Since the start of the current millennium, experience and expertise in the development and delivery of mobile learning have blossomed and a community of practice has evolved that is distinct from the established communities of "tethered" e-Learning. This community is currently visible mainly through dedicated international conference…

South Africa needs to reexamine responses to some basic questions if it is to develop a robust push that would enable the higher education sector to maximise the benefits of internationalisation in the context of the "knowledge society" and to serve local needs while being an integral part of the global community. In responding to these…

While evidence from developed countries suggests that communities may contribute to school effectiveness and efficiency, there is a need for more systematic reviews of such practice in developing countries to inform international policy. Research suggests that community participation through school councils could produce opposite outcomes: it can…

The issue of what determines subjective well-being has been at the centre of a recent flurry of research in the economics field. A necessary part of this understanding is the role relative positions (economic, social, geographic) of economic agents, particularly individuals, play in life (commonly referred to in the literature as rivalry). In this…

The purpose of this paper is to suggest an improved measure of financial poverty, based on household consumption and wealth as well as income. Data come from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics Australia (HILDA) Survey, which appears to be the first national socio-economic panel survey to provide longitudinal data on all three measures of…

In the United States, developing "human capital" for both economic and social benefit is an idea as old as the nation itself and led to the emergence of world's first mass higher education system. Now most other nations are racing to expand access to universities and colleges and to expand their role in society. Higher education is…

Many countries are considering lifelong learning, which is becoming an important education goal, and promoting lifelong learning in the information age. With the development of Information and Communications Technology (ICT), digital divides have become a major concern in the world. In this study, we focus on three dimensions of digital divides in…

The inscription on the internal pedestal of the Statue of Liberty proclaiming "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses" today is an ideal of another age. Compared with those of other developing countries, U.S. poverty rates are extraordinarily high, as are the odds of remaining in poverty intergenerationally. No longer do…

The Millennium Development Goal 2 has a target of ensuring that, by 2015, all children will complete a full course of primary schooling. This is consistent with the second goal of the Dakar Framework of Action for Education for All [EFA] that pre-dated it, except that the Dakar goal qualifies the Millennium Goal with "compulsory education of…

Compared to most countries assessed in 1994, the United States had a greater concentration of adults who scored at the lowest literacy levels across prose, document, and quantitative literacy domains. However, it had one of the higher concentrations of adults who scored at or above level 4 on the prose scale. The proportion of adults who scored at…

This publication reprints the text of the Accountability Framework for the Adult Literacy Education System and Core Quality Standards for Programs in Ontario. The framework describes how the Ontario Training and Adjustment Board (OTAB) is accountable to Ontario's adult literacy education system and explains how OTAB-funded programs are accountable…

This guide is designed to help Ontario's literacy program coordinators implement the Core Quality Standards in their literacy programs. It provides ideas about simple approaches to evaluation which they can use. The first part of the guide discusses what program evaluation is and what it can do for the program coordinator. The second part…

The Tertiary Lead Group in New Zealand created a national qualifications framework to incorporate all types of degrees given by colleges and universities. This report describes the process undertaken, the principles to be considered and the issues to be addressed, the benefits of such a national system, the features and specifications proposed,…