For most of the last sixty years, the United States has labored to provide a quality education to "all" children, regardless of their skin color or socioeconomic status. This struggle for equity in education has seldom been linked to America's position as the world's economic powerhouse and leading producer of college-educated individuals.…

Navigating the complicated path through college can be a difficult task. The report analyses the problems students have on graduating on time--such as earning unnecessary credits--which costs them collectively billions of dollars and millions of hours each year. It also proposes a possible solution--Guided Pathways to Success (GPS), which can…

Student workload is a contributing factor to students deciding to withdraw from their study before completion of the course, at significant cost to students, institutions and society. The aim of this paper is to create a basic workload model for a group of undergraduate students studying business law units at Curtin University in Western…

American businesses and industries have long identified shortages in key career and technical areas--some of these areas require two- or four-year college degrees, whereas others simply require industry certifications. Career and technical education (CTE) has the potential to play a central role in filling these gaps. The current Carl D. Perkins…

Lifelong learning has become one of the keys to making workers' career paths more secure at both the French and the European policy level. However, the implementation of these policy lines raises delicate questions as to how the responsibility for vocational training should be shared among employees, employers and public institutions. The…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to estimate the extent of "over-qualification" (i.e. holding a qualification which is above that required to gain entry to the job being done) and "skills under-utilisation" (i.e. being in a job which does not make use of the knowledge and skills possessed) in the United Kingdom and to…

This paper considers both the difficulties and the opportunities created by the mounting political pressures on UK universities to increase the "employability" of undergraduate students. Using the subject of criminology as an example, the paper considers tensions that can be created when practitioners are brought into the academy to…

Purpose: A central issue in the field of workplace learning is how work-related learning can be stimulated so that a powerful learning work environment is created. This paper seeks to further enlarge understanding on this issue. Based on the demand-control-support the aim is to investigate the influence of job-characteristics on the work-related…

First-year African American and European American college students were surveyed to examine ethnic differences in how their social cognitive beliefs (self-efficacy and outcome expectations) influenced their academic achievement. It was hypothesized that outcome expectations may better explain academic achievement for African Americans due to the…

This article presents a review of "Investing in Kids: Early Childhood Programs and Local Economic Development" by Timothy J. Bartik. Timothy Bartik's timely book contributes to an important conversation about the role of government in promoting investments in children in the years before traditional public schooling typically begins. Until…

This "crucible moment" in which democratic capitalism finds itself does not call for more government mandates to dictate progressive activism in higher education. Rather, this crucible moment calls higher education on its own initiative to focus on the moral foundation that both democracy and capitalism require. The foundation of democratic…

We examined the role of an in-company training program aimed at enhancing employees' intrinsic work-goal motivation by increasing their career preparedness in a randomized field experimental study. The program activities were implemented using an organization-level two-trainer model with trainers from the human resources management and…

This paper addresses the economic returns on tertiary degrees obtained in ages above 30 for individuals with upper-secondary schooling in light of current ideas on lifelong learning. Sweden is a case in point: Swedish tertiary education is open to older students, and labor market legislation supports employees who take a leave to study. The…

The first installment in the "To Learn and Earn" project, published in March 2009, concluded that Arizona has "unfinished business" in human capital--the knowledge and skills that are so important to stimulating innovation, creating wealth, and promoting economic growth. It identified the next step in finding solutions as…

A key to Washington's economic prosperity over the past 20 years has been a thriving employment sector for workers who have high levels of education in fields related to biological, physical, computer and health sciences, engineering, and mathematics. Washington has met the demands of its knowledge-driven economy by producing and attracting one of…