Some scholars and policymakers who are concerned about the inequitable distribution of quality teachers suggest offering financial incentives for working in hard-to-staff schools. Previous studies have estimated compensating differentials using hedonic modeling, an approach potentially undermined by district-wide salary schedules and the lack of…

Social exclusion can be defined in different ways, but a prominent definition--in relation to young people in particular--is exclusion from formal learning and paid employment. This ignores the role of informal learning and the informal economies. In England, career guidance services were remodelled to deal with the issue of social exclusion by…

I review theories and evidence on wage-setting institutions and labor market policies in an international comparative context. These include collective bargaining, minimum wages, employment protection laws, unemployment insurance (UI), mandated parental leave, and active labor market policies (ALMPs). Since it is unlikely that an unregulated…

In recent times, many key host nations have made it easier for foreign graduates to migrate after graduation. These students are often considered ideal migrants, possessing local qualifications along with a degree of acculturation, language skills and, in many cases, relevant local work experience. For the student, the opportunity to obtain…

Most poor children achieve less, exhibit more problem behaviors and are less healthy than children reared in more affluent families. We look beyond correlations such as these to a recent set of studies that attempt to assess the causal impact of childhood poverty on adult well-being. We pay particular attention to the potentially harmful effects…

Alternative routes into teaching, particularly in urban school districts, are becoming increasingly prevalent. Four features capture the range of variation in these programs: the nature of the provider, specific labor market needs, the timing and focus of coursework and fieldwork, and the focus of recruitment and selection. The issue of student…

It is often said that public school teachers are poorly paid. At an average salary of about $60,000 a year, public school teachers in New Jersey take home substantially less pay than do many other college educated professionals. Teachers tend to work fewer hours in a year than do other professionals. Does the widespread assertion that New Jersey's…

Studies examining the wage effect of overeducation have generated very consistent results. Their findings suggest that, for workers with similar educational attainment, workers who are overeducated for the job suffer from significant wage penalties. However, most studies use cross-sectional data, implicitly assuming that workers are randomly…

This paper estimates the distribution of educational returns by gender for India. While previous studies focus on mean returns, the variance of educational returns has important implications for policy-making and micro-level decision making with respect to education. If the variance of educational returns is large, it can leave large sections of…

In the US academy, there is significant disciplinary variation in the extent to which graduate students are encouraged to or discouraged from studying abroad and doing fieldwork overseas. This article examines this issue, focusing on US graduate training in the social sciences and the extent to which students are discouraged from developing…

This paper examines experiences with "skills development" in South Africa to contribute to broader debates about "skills" and the relationships between vocational education and development. Numerous policy interventions and the creation of new institutions and systems for skills development in South Africa are widely seen as…

This issue of "Fast Focus" is based on an article published by Sara Goldrick-Rab and Kia Sorensen in the fall 2010 issue of "The Future of Children" (Vol. 20, No. 2; used here with permission), which focuses on "fragile families," defined as families in which the parents were unmarried when the child was born. The authors examine unmarried parents…

The Employment Retention and Advancement (ERA) project evaluated strategies to promote employment stability among low-income workers. This practitioner brief examines the work, education, and training patterns of single parents in the ERA project. Three years after entering the study, only one in four single parents had advanced. Most of the…

"Everyone has a career to be managed" is the simple message in new policy strategies for career guidance in Europe. In this article, the promotion of career management for "all" will be unsettled by analysis of career self-management put in relation to rationalities of government and self-government. We are governed to…

The United States is in a bind. On the one hand, it needs millions of additional citizens with at least one year of successful post-secondary experience to adapt to the knowledge economy. The Gates and Lumina Foundations, as well as President Obama have championed this goal in different ways. On the other hand, it has a post-secondary system that…