Each year, policymakers, educators, and the general public engage in debates around the statewide average teacher pay figure that the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction (DPI) publishes on its website and reports to the National Education Association. These debates take up the important consideration of whether or not teachers are…

The recent Supreme Court decision NCAA vs Alston (June 2021) has heightened interest in the benefits and costs of participation in sports for student athletes. Anecdotes about the exploitation of student athletes were cited in the opinion. This paper uses panel data for two different cohorts that follow students from high school through college…

The paper empirically examines labor-management communication concerning in-house training programs and its relation to the actual on- and off-the-job training policy and wage structure. Using governmental datasets from Japan, we study how different labor-management communication institutions may affect the training interests of employers and…

In this paper, we estimate a rich model of college major choice using a panel of experimentally-derived data. Our estimation strategy combines two types of data: data on self-reported beliefs about future earnings from potential human capital decisions and survey-based measures of risk and time preferences. We show how to use these data to…

The abrupt closing of college campuses this spring due to the spread of COVID-19 upended the lives of students and their families and disrupted the higher education sector. The impact of these closures and the questions of whether and how to reopen campuses this fall have been widely discussed. Less attention has been paid to the potential…

When the Obama administration implemented the first gainful employment (GE) rule in 2014 to protect students from education credentials that lead to unaffordable debts, virtually all programs at public institutions passed the test. The Biden administration is developing its own GE rule after the Trump administration repealed the Obama-era rule. A…

Career education programs in California's community colleges are a critical component of public higher education in the state. Also known as career technical or vocational programs, career education trains individuals for middle-skill jobs that require more than a high school diploma but less than a four-year degree. These jobs make up a third of…

As part of its effort to make universal prekindergarten (UPK) available to four-year-olds, California has recently expanded transitional kindergarten (TK) in its public schools. TK will be a full pre-K grade level in all districts by the 2025-26 school year. Other states that seek to broaden access to early care and education (ECE) can learn…

This Perspective summarizes recent trends in young peoples' entrance into and completion of postsecondary educational programs. Education is an important pathway into well-paying jobs and the American middle class. Education levels have been rising for the past 50 years, including large gains for many demographic groups. But declining public…

This report describes a study of healthcare training programs that CCRC conducted to understand the current role that community colleges play in training healthcare workers, including public health workers. In an analysis of 2019-20 data from the U.S. Department of Education's Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), the authors…

Youth apprenticeship has emerged as a potential strategy to recruit and train a new generation of early childhood educators. Many in the field hope it will help address teacher shortages, promote the recruitment and retention of diverse candidates, and provide the training and experience needed both to enter the profession and grow into…

Better-educated workers form many more long-distance job matches, and they move more quickly following local employment shocks. I argue this is a consequence of larger dispersion in wage offers, independent of geography. In a frictional market, this generates larger surpluses for workers in new matches, which can better justify the cost of moving…

Throughout this report, we will investigate trends for administrators overall and provide further analyses on three key administrator positions: presidents, provosts, and chief human resources officers (CHROs). This report starts with an investigation of trends in representation and pay equity by gender (women, men) among administrators over the…

The Worker Retraining (WRT) program is a key strategy in meeting the economic and workforce needs of Washington's workers and employers. Funded through the state legislature, the aim of WRT is to ensure dislocated and other unemployed workers have access to education and training that will help them reattach to the labor market in jobs and careers…

Academic support services such as coaching and mentoring programs have shown the most promise, but only when they are implemented in a very proactive manner--when they provide students with personalized follow-up and attention. Unfortunately, these programs are often expensive, making them hard to implement or scale at a regional or national…