The historical literature about postsecondary education in British Columbia, as in many jurisdictions, is fragmented. Scholarly works have tended to recount the development of a single institution or a single sector: colleges and universities, vocational colleges, apprenticeship, or continuing education. And not all sectors, whether comprised of…

The OECD Career Readiness project makes use of quantitative evidence to identify how teenage career-related activities and attitudes are linked with better adult employment outcomes. Review of multiple national longitudinal datasets confirms that teenage experiences of the workplace through part-time working and volunteering are routinely…

Over the postwar period in most developed countries, the university participation rate has risen steadily to well over 30 percent, although there remain differences between countries. Students from lower income families have lower participation rates than those from higher income families. The article provides an economic analysis of these…

This article makes tentative links between abstract global forces and the affective and material reworking of race in intimate spaces of culture and community. Using postcolonial and psychoanalytic resources the article follows enduring manifestations of race as racism surfaces and is mobilized through global shifts of people, ideas and capital.…

One of the central problems in managing technological change and maintaining a competitive advantage in business is improving the skills of the workforce through investment in human capital and a variety of training practices. This paper explores the evidence on the impact of training investment on productivity in 14 Canadian industries from 1999…

Trends within Western capitalist societies toward the individualizing of social problems, the responsibilizing of individuals for such problems, the treating of social problems as problems of control, ongoing attempts to shift the burden for safety and security from the state to the market, and changing conceptions of citizenship, have produced a…

Following the end of World War I, the Ontario Department of Education initiated a series of reforms aimed at both elementary and secondary schooling. This article examines the reforms that were made to elementary school curriculum and pedagogy. These were initiated within the context of a call for a general reconstruction of education and society…

Over the past three decades, educators have faced an increasing variety of reform proposals that can best be contextualized as efforts to commodify and privatize public education. While supporters of market-based reforms attempt to place these proposals within education theory, they are in reality firmly entrenched in neoliberal economic theory.…

Another round of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) reporting has come and gone and the world is still spinning. So is the media. For the classroom teacher, generally, today is another day where they will teach and children and youth will learn. So do the PISA results impact on a day in the life of a classroom teacher? Author…

This paper investigates achievement gaps between low and high socioeconomic students in 19 high-income countries. On average, math scores of students with indicators of high socioeconomic status (SES) are over one standard deviation above those with low SES indicators. The paper estimates the extent to which these achievement gaps can be…

Education is recognized to be a key factor of economic development, not only giving access to technological progress as emphasized by the Schumpeterian growth theory, but also entailing numerous social externalities such as the demographic transition (Murtin, 2009) or democratization (Murtin and Wacziarg, 2010). If the evolution of world…

Human capital theorists perceive of educational expansion as beneficial to individuals, corporations and national economies, while social closure theorists have claimed that inflation of credential requirements maintains traditional status inequalities. In this paper I argue that status inequalities are not only maintained by credential inflation,…

This study examines earnings losses associated with motherhood using longitudinal administrative Canadian data. Contrary to the endogenous motherhood hypothesis, the author found no dips in earnings for women during their prechildbirth years. Although the results show that earnings losses incurred by mothers in the year of childbirth and the year…

This article examines the relationship between community colleges and universities in Canada and the United States based on increased involvement of community colleges in offering baccalaureate programs. The article employs a theoretical framework borrowed from the study of jurisdictional conflict between professions. After considering the types…

This analysis of the economic impacts generated by Canada's Colleges and Institutes is based on a sample of 61 colleges in 9 provinces, representing roughly two-fifths of the some 150 Colleges and Institutes in the country. The findings from the sample were used to generate results by inference for all colleges in Canada. Two major analyses are…