Data showing what students earn after attending higher education institutions have become increasingly available, bolstering calls from policymakers and advocates that government financial aid programs should be tied to those outcomes. Often overlooked, however, is that these data and policies usually reflect the earnings of only students who…

Recent higher education accountability policies and proposals have often linked programs' or institutions' federal aid access to students' postcompletion earnings. But proposals differ regarding when to measure earnings. Policymakers may want to know how fast earnings typically grow and when in an individual's career earnings growth rates change.…

The OECD Survey of Adult Skills is the jewel in the crown of its Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC). This paper argues that the findings and policy lessons from the project to date justify the high hopes which were placed in PIAAC when detailed planning for the project began in 2003. First, it presents a brief…

What do state policies say about how to fund postsecondary education? This 50-State Comparison answers this question by searching state statutes, state rules and regulations, enacted state budget bills, and state postsecondary education agency policies that address postsecondary education budgeting and funding. According to the content of the…

Tailoring education policy to deliver the skills needed by modern labour markets is complicated by the rapid pace of technological change. These complications are amplified when the associated risks of technological redundancy and the lengthening working lifetimes are taken into account. At the heart of the challenge for policy-makers is…

Human capital production is central to economic wellbeing from a national perspective: it improves productivity, spurs technological innovation, and promotes sustainable economic growth over time. Equally important, investments in human capital are central to economic wellbeing at the individual level. College graduates tend to earn more money,…

This article explains why the massification of higher education in Hong Kong has, contrary to the predictions of received wisdom, failed to enhance the upward social mobility of the youth in the city. Building upon recent literature in political science, it argues that massification can take different forms, which in turn determine the effects of…

Governors plays a central role in ensuring that public educational institutions provide students with the knowledge and abilities required for a successful life and career. The systemic use of data from education and labor markets informs governors and other policymakers of the effectiveness and efficiency of their existing postsecondary systems…

This paper proposes a theoretical framework where "within graduates" wage inequality is related to overeducation/educational mismatch in the labor market. We show that wage inequality may arise because of inefficient self-selection into education in the presence of ability-complementary technological progress and asymmetric information…

For decades, the popular conception of a college student in this country has been the full-time residential financially dependent student who enrolls in a four-year college immediately after graduating from high school. That student has not been the norm at U.S. postsecondary institutions for more than 30 years. Such students exist but they are…

Though a relative small part of the school sector, private schools have an important role in British society, and there are policy concerns about their negative effect on social mobility. Other studies show that individuals who have attended a private school go on to have higher levels of educational achievement, are more likely to secure a…

Students of color in low-income schools are 3 to 10 times more likely to have unqualified teachers than students in predominantly White schools. These disparities in teacher distribution matter greatly: Research consistently shows that teacher quality is one of the most important variables for student success and that teachers with stronger…

We study the effects of the large expansion in British educational attainment that took place for cohorts born between 1970 and 1975. Using the Quarterly Labour Force Survey, we find that the expansion caused men to increase education by about a year on average and gain about 8% higher wages; women obtained a slightly greater increase in education…

How pronounced is income inequality around the world--and how can education help reduce it? This paper reports the following: (1) Across OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) countries, the average income of the richest 10% of the population was about nine times that of the poorest 10% before the onset of the global economic…

This paper looks at what the value of a doctorate is, both to employers in particular and to society and the economy at large. Given the emphasis many universities and funding agencies/governments are putting upon the development of PhD programmes, this is an issue deserving attention. The paper tries to show how two separate but interrelated…