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…

A community economic development organization in rural Ireland partnered with a technical college to build a college to teach furniture design and manufacturing, with an emphasis on entrepreneurship and new production technologies. The college has been successful in attracting good students and helping them find employment. A research and…

Most school-to-career initiatives are limited to career education and applied learning, combining academic basics and workplace readiness skills. A high-school credentialing system would offer a structured pathway to academic and technical credentials, requiring that students earn a college-placement readiness credential and industry-recognized…

This article deals with informal networks and their role in young people's strategies of coping with the uncertainties of transitions to work. The underlying hypothesis is that informal networks have a high potential in this regard that, however, is strongly differentiated according to class and education. Drawing on West German data from the…

Federal and state education policy relies on the belief that student achievement will improve if schools have incentives and disincentives--rewards if they succeed, sanctions if they fail--to raise test scores in math, reading and science. But even if this were a practical way to elevate such scores, a test-based accountability system is still…

This article describes the Leadership Education and Development (LEAD) program at University of Pennsylvania. It specifically discusses the experience of Charles Crockett, one of its earliest alumni. Crockett says the Leadership Education and Development program helped him to broaden the scope of his educational and career goals by convincing him…

In this paper we address a perceived gap in the workplace learning literature, for there is very little writing which successfully integrates the issues of individual learners into predominantly social theories of learning. The paper draws upon data from four linked research projects to address this problem. Following an analysis of the…

This chapter examines recent attempts to promote students' transitions into postsecondary education. In particular, it focuses on the evolution of career and technical education (CTE) to promote student transition by coupling more rigorous academic preparation with CTE programs.

We examined participation in the Career and Technical Education concentration (CTE), and School-to-Work activities at the end of the century following more than a decade of education reform in the United States. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, we also explored whether school-to-work activities have extended beyond…

In this article, the author discusses that in January 2006, the "New York Times" headlined a new $3.75 billion federal initiative that would give $750 grants to low-income college students who successfully completed a "rigorous secondary school program of study" (Dillon 2006). The author argues that this quiet addition to the…

This longitudinal study focuses on the transition from higher education to working life. Research has hitherto described the transition in rather general terms, and there is still only limited knowledge about how graduates construe themselves as professionals, or how they experience the transition to the sociocultural contexts of working life. In…

The purpose of the study is to explore the patterns of personal and academic stressors reported by Korean college students. The survey items included types of stress factors in academic and personal stressors and demographic variables (i.e., gender and school year). The participants were asked to provide the academic and personal stressors as the…

To address the difficult problem of transition from school to adult community services for students with learning disabilities (LD), this article provides information on available community agencies, the resources they offer, and ways school personnel might work with these agencies in an effort to enhance successful transitions for individuals…

A conference event is mediated through keynote speeches, power point presentations, professional role-playing and the turgid language of policy agendas, initiatives, benchmarks and outputs. Serious human concerns rarely surface in the orchestrated and anodyne arena of professional conference-going. The ready recourse to ritual and procedure means…

Providing structured work experience for undergraduate psychology students is seen by many authors, employers and students as academically desirable and the Dearing Report (1997) indicates that work experience is something which all undergraduates should undertake. It is a problem for psychology degree course administrators to provide relevant…