Education plays a fundamental role in American society. This paper takes a look at school enrollment, costs and educational outcomes. How does school enrollment today compare with 1970, when the baby boom generation was in its prime years of school attendance (age 6 to 24) and made up 90 percent of all students enrolled in school? What do people…

We analyze the returns to education in a life-cycle framework that incorporates risk preferences, earnings volatility (including unemployment), and a progressive income tax and social insurance system. We show that such a framework significantly reduces the measured gains from education relative to simple present-value calculations, although the…

Educators, researchers, and policy makers have long been interested in what happens to students after they graduate. For this reason as well as others, some high schools and most colleges and universities try to stay in contact with their alumni. While the quality of K-12 and postsecondary education in general has long been debated, in recent…

There are many changes occurring in higher education, and often it is difficult to see trends nationally. In this presentation, experts working with national data present trends in higher education from a forward-looking perspective. Senior researchers from the College Board provide trends using College Board SAT and AP data, as well as new…

The purpose of this ex-post facto quantitative study was to evaluate the benefits of professional technical postsecondary education in Idaho. Human capital theory formed the basis of understanding the importance of acquiring education beyond high school, both for the individual and society. Interactions between entry earnings and cost of attending…

"Straight A's: Public Education Policy and Progress" is a biweekly newsletter that focuses on education news and events both in Washington, DC and around the country. The following articles are included in this issue: (1) House Appropriations Subcommittee Sharpens Budget Knife: Subcommittee's Bill Would Cut Education Programs by $1.1…

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…