This report on the nexus between postsecondary education and workforce development discusses the question of how California's colleges and universities address the state's need for a highly educated and skilled workforce. It includes a detailed review of the systems and their roles, and considers issues regarding how those roles are being carried…

The processes linking job characteristics to school performance and satisfaction in a sample of 253 full-time college students were examined from 2 role theory perspectives, 1 of which emphasized resource scarcity and the other resource expansion. Model tests using structural equation modeling showed that 2 resource-enriching job characteristics,…

At the heart of teacher certification is the issue of teacher quality within an education system. Every education system depends upon the quality of the teachers to realize its goals. A major challenge within the wider context of an education system is meeting the needs of students who must be able to function within the world of work. In order…

This paper uses an experimental design to estimate preferences of employers for key competencies during the transition from initial education to the labor market. The study is restricted to employers of entry-level academic graduates entering public health organizations in the Netherlands. Given the changing and complex demands in public health,…

This article draws on the first two years of a longitudinal study of young people's pathway and career-related experiences and perspectives. It argues for a richer conceptualisation of young people's transition to study, training and employment than what simple school-to-labour market models allow. We present four clusters of young people's…

Professional practice is important in the lives of many people and it is often assumed that professionals are motivated with a desire to serve the public interest. However, studies have increasingly addressed the professional dilemma of combining demands for efficiency with the obligation to help others. This study examines what professionals want…

The article traces the policy history of Kenya over more than 40 years (1963-2006) in order to tease out the tensions between the key themes of its own national agenda and the priorities of its principal development partners. The national concerns with the education-and-employment connection and with the orientation of schooling towards skills for…

Using previously unanalysed data from Norbert Elias's lost study of young workers in Leicester--the "Adjustment of Young Workers to Work Situations and Adult Roles" (1962-1964), and data from a subsequent restudy of the same respondents in 2003-2005, this paper focuses on three main themes. First, we critically examine the concept of…

Employers provide jobs to people with disabilities at a much lower rate than the general population. Federal legislation requires schools to (a) work with students and parents to develop transition plans and (b) plan for students' employment after graduation. It is unfortunate that transition plans do not necessarily translate into successful…

Based on one of the most widely used datasets by foreign-based sociologists, this paper examines the rate of returns to education in rural China. Compared with the previous studies that showed rather low rates in rural areas throughout the 1980s, this study finds a considerably higher rate in 1996. A chief contributor is the rapid non-agricultural…

With funding from the UK's Royal Academy of Engineering, the University of Edinburgh has developed a series of truly interdisciplinary design courses aimed at improving penultimate-year students' ability to operate across disciplines and improve their preparation for industry. Led by a Visiting Industrial Professor, the course on hydropower design…

School personnel are mandated to provide transition planning services to students with disabilities as they prepare for postsecondary activities. A variety of student skill and knowledge areas have been recommended as important during this process. Students with disabilities encounter a variety of additional transitions throughout their schooling,…

This article arises from case studies in 2006 of 20 businesses in Samarkand (Uzbekistan), surveys of their up to 30-year-old employees (r = 419), follow-up interviews with eight of these employees, and matched samples in Almaty (Kazakhstan) and Bishkek (Kyrgyzstan). The main difference between education in Samarkand (and Uzbekistan in general) and…

The Spellings Commission report calls for greater access to higher education for low- and moderate-income students, greater transparency in the way higher education works and greater accountability for producing results. These recommendations are all significant in their own right, but the three concepts also converge to provide powerful support…

Unlike nursing or social work, counselling is not yet a statutory profession and there is no obvious career progression route. To explore the ways in which graduates of a counselling programme use their training a questionnaire was sent to 143 counselling students who had completed a minimum of Diploma level training. The questionnaires were…