This paper is a review of the literature in economics on the effect on earnings of human capital investment from Adam Smith to the early 1980s. It discusses the use of the net present value (NPV) technique by Walsh and Friedman and Kuznets, and Becker's use of the NPV to estimate the internal rate of return to schooling. The first regression-based…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine career engagement and perceived employability during the school-to-work transition. We studied within-person changes in career engagement and perceived employability in the transition from higher education to the labor market. We investigated their dynamic reciprocal relationship to unravel whether…

This study compares the transition from education to work for Norwegian graduates with a professional STEM master's degree to that of their peers with a non-professional STEM master's degree. We find that professional STEM graduates tend to have better labour market outcomes than other STEM graduates. However, the unemployment rate of professional…

Working-class students often face more challenges in securing graduate-level jobs than their middle-class peers. This paper applies the concept of boundary crossing in studying the experience of Finnish business graduates from a working-class background (n = 27) and asks what types of boundaries they have faced and how they have managed them on…

The notion of "Bildung" has been booming in several European countries for almost twenty years now, but it has attracted little attention in vocational education. One reason for this is that "Bildung," the process of becoming human as a goal in itself, is understood in opposition to vocational education, which task would be to…

We study how human capital diversification, in the form of double majoring, affects the response of earnings to labor market shocks. Double majors experience substantial protection against earnings shocks, of 56%. This finding holds across different model specifications and data sets. Furthermore, the protection double majors experience is more…

There is an ever-increasing demand for Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) to engage with the challenges of the changing labour market contexts and trends, such as the Fifth Industrial Revolution and the new normal. However, a major criticism is that higher education institutions do not often prepare graduates for real-life contexts. For that…

Purpose: Young graduates in Morocco are encountering an increasingly challenging labor market environment. Confronted with intense competition, job insecurity, and unclear career trajectories, many find themselves in low-skilled positions despite possessing relevant qualifications. This issue is particularly pronounced among vocational training…

Using longitudinal data of college graduates in Colombia, we estimate labor market returns to postsecondary degrees and to various skills--including literacy, numeracy, foreign language, and field-specific skills. Graduates of academic programs and schools of higher reputation obtain higher earnings relative to vocational public programs. A one…

The future of the humanities has been the subject of debate in several countries where it is often stated that too many students are accepted into courses that offer relatively poor employment opportunities. In this article, we examine the development in mismatch among master's graduates in Norway for the period 1995-2015, to see whether this…

It is widely believed digital technologies are transforming all aspects of economy and society, driven by scientific advances across interdisciplinary fields and innovations relating to artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, robotics, etc. But what, if anything, is revolutionary about these developments and what are the implications for…

Purpose: This study aims to explore the findings related to data literacy skills for students to succeed in the digital age labor market and the role of university-industry collaborations (UICs) in the co-design and co-delivery of curriculum for the development of students' data literacy. Design/methodology/approach: The study uses an…

Much research has investigated international graduate employability in home "or" host countries. However, limited studies have accounted for such employability "across" the home and the host. Drawing on Bourdieu's relational and reflexive sociology, this paper critically examined the first author's narrative of his employment…

In this study, we explore whether education-occupation mismatch in the form of over-education and under-education affects the risk of long-term sickness absence. We use register data covering the Norwegian population in the period 2003-2013, containing 13,628,079 person-year observations (2,059,989 persons). To account for selection, we controlled…

Evidence on gender inequality in the labor market is extensive. However, little is known about the potential role of overeducation and horizontal mismatch in explaining women's labor-market disadvantages. We draw on recent data from the Eurograduate pilot survey to investigate the role of overeducation, field-of-study mismatch and field-specific…