Higher education could be one of California's most effective tools for combating economic and social inequities. College graduates experience large wage gains and their jobs offer more benefits than those of workers without bachelor's degrees. College graduates are also relatively insulated from recessions--including the current downturn--and…

This article suggests that a process of de-academisation is discernible in the way the Erasmus year abroad is promoted, organised, supervised and evaluated. The article argues that rather than being a product of students' consumerist rationalities, this process is produced within the conditions of the managerialised and under-resourced university.…

This report focuses on a critical concern for the European Training Foundation's (ETF's) partner countries and other countries of the around the world. Skills mismatch is recognised as a major challenge by policy makers, practitioners and social partners, as it is often associated with dynamic social and economic contexts such as restructuring…

Many studies assessing national policy reforms in education focus on the likelihood of acquiring an advanced education and the associated returns in the labor market. In this paper, the authors investigate the impact of the Israeli Academic Colleges Law that was designed to promote the acquisition of higher education among all segments of the…

This paper is the first in a series of policy reports dealing with the impact of human capital investments on the U.S. labor market. It is part of a larger series of papers from the ETS Center for Research on Human Capital and Education that uses data from the "Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies" (PIAAC) to…

Raising educational levels may help to reduce inequalities between men and women in certain social and economic aspects. Using statistics for Spain, we analyse labour market behaviours such as the rates of activity and unemployment by sex according to the educational level. The results reveal that the differences between men and women decrease as…

The aim of this study was to investigate the existence of sectorial undereducation and overeducation problems in the Turkish labor market. In order to cope with this issue, the 2009 Household Labor Force Survey (TurkStat), which covers 145,934 individuals within 27 sectors, was utilized. An objective measure of education-occupation mismatch based…

This report provides a contribution to the growing public policy debate around how to combat structural inequality by quantifying the power of community college as a pathway to economic mobility. Until recently, it has been difficult to accurately estimate the return to a community college education in Massachusetts because numerous factors affect…

The transition from school to work can be a difficult period associated with spells of unemployment. Data show that those who leave school early have comparatively low skills and low educational attainment and face the greatest challenges in the labour market compared to their peers who stayed in education longer. Efforts should be made to ensure…

Across OECD countries, more and more individuals have attained tertiary education and the share of those with less education has declined. Although there are more tertiary-educated individuals than ever before, they still achieve good labour market outcomes. This confirms that labour market demand is generally keeping pace with rising educational…

The number of young people who are not in employment, education and training -- NEET, as this group has become widely known as -- is a key indicator on the state of youth labour markets and opportunities for young people more generally. The persistence and, in the years following the global financial crisis, growth of this group of young people is…

The European Training Foundation (ETF) has been providing regular input to the European Commission in implementing the work programme of the Eastern Partnership, a joint policy initiative aimed at deepening and strengthening relations between the EU, its Member States and its six Eastern Neighbours -- Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova…

The rapidly changing economy is raising the stakes on states to address the skilled workforce needs of employers and to expand economic opportunity to more people and places. To guide the policy actions of states, Jobs for the Future (JFF) designed a comprehensive policy agenda for increasing attainment of postsecondary credentials valued in the…

Policymakers have become increasingly concerned with measuring--and holding colleges accountable for--students' labor market outcomes. In this article we introduce a piecewise growth curve approach to analyzing community college students' labor market outcomes, and we discuss how this approach differs from two popular econometric approaches:…

This paper reports on findings from a three-year ethnographic study of 24 young people in northern England who were classified as not in education, employment or training (NEET), or at risk of becoming so. Drawing on conceptions of opportunity structure and educational marginality, the paper discusses the processes leading to young people becoming…