Project Lead the Way (PLTW) is a hands-on, project-based engineering curriculum for high school and middle school students, which has quadrupled annual enrollment in Texas in five years to over 23,000 students. The diversity of students participating has also increased dramatically. Using six years of longitudinally-linked student data, the…

There is an assumption that e-learning is considered as a valued resource with great potential. This research explores how hairdressing apprentices experience vocational e-learning and makes recommendations on how good practice can be shared. An estimated 35,000 hairdressing and barber salons account for a quarter of a million UK workers and…

Stagnant earnings and growing inequality in the US labor market reflect both a slowdown in the growth of worker skills and the growing matching of good-paying jobs to skilled workers. Improving the ties between colleges, workforce institutions, and employers would help more workers gain the needed skills. Evaluation evidence shows that training…

This paper estimates the effects of human capital skills largely created through education on life's chances over the life cycle. Qualifications as a measure of these skills affect earnings, and schooling affects private and social non-market benefits beyond earnings. Private non-market benefits include better own-health, child health, spousal…

For a long time, links have been made between higher education and economic activity. The relatively recent emphases on employability (in the UK) and graduate attributes (largely in Australia) can be construed as contemporary variations. This article describes some of the developmental work that has taken place in the UK but which has obvious…

Apprenticeships and traineeships offer pathways from school to adult working life for a significant proportion of young people by formally combining study and work to link learning in the workplace with learning in an educational institution. They contribute in important ways to the formation of skills for individuals and for the community as a…

This study compared the work benefit and skill trajectories of a cohort of trade (vocational education) and bachelor (higher education) graduates of RMIT University in the first ten years of their working lives. It found that there are a number of key similarities and differences between the two groups in terms of further learning and occupational…

Although researchers have argued students experience feelings of stress, fear, and uncertainty as they transition from college to work life, there is limited empirical research supporting this argument. Our study filled this gap by exploring 183 fourth-year students' perceptions regarding their impending transition out of the college environment.…

Though the importance of college is well recognized (Heckert & Wallace, 1998; Arney, Hardeback, Estrada & Permenter, 2006), there continues to be debate about whether a specific major or choice of college affects a person's future success as measured by position and/or compensation. As college costs have risen faster than income (Anonymous,…

In the world of campus IT hiring, think of certifications as the equivalent of the SATs. They're just one component of the overall application, along with the interview, past performance, and references. If the candidate is accomplished and well rounded, the SATs--or certifications--can be more of a checklist item. Otherwise, they may make the…

The current study investigates how college students expect to react to inequity in blended friendships. Blended friendship is defined as a friendship that involves interaction at work and outside of work. Data from undergraduate students (N = 185) showed that liking and relational importance were found to be lower in underreward and overreward…

This paper looks at the economic returns to different fields of study in Ireland in 2004 and also the value placed on various job-related competencies, accumulated on completion of higher education, in the Irish labour market. In examining these issues, the paper also analyses, through quantile regression, how the returns vary across the earnings…

In this article the authors concentrate on the change in the concept of employability during the Bologna process. They show that employability has gradually moved from a peripheral to a core presence in the most recent Bologna process documents. Using a Finnish university merger (University of Eastern Finland) as an example, the authors…

We examine effects of entering the labor market during a recession on subsequent employment and earnings for Japanese and American men, using comparable household labor force surveys. We find persistent negative effects of the unemployment rate at graduation for less-educated Japanese men, in contrast to temporary effects for less-educated…

This paper employs conditional second moments to identify the impact of education in wage regressions where education is treated as endogenous. This approach avoids the use of instrumental variables in a setting where instruments are frequently not available. We employ this methodology to estimate the returns to schooling for a sample of…