The Digital Equity Act (DEA), a provision within the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (Public Law 117-58), includes a historic federal investment to promote digital equity, literacy, and inclusion. In particular, the State Digital Equity Capacity Grant Program will award nearly $1.5 billion in federal funds to states to support the…

Researchers have posited various theories to explain supposed declines in teaching quality: the expansion of labor market opportunities for women, low relative wages, compressed compensation structures, and substituting quantity for quality. We synthesize these previous theories and expand on the current literature by incorporating a useful…

This descriptive/transcendental phenomenological design aimed to understand how working college graduates perceived their college experience, their transition from school to work for workforce integration, and their career alignment to gainful employment. The intended sample was ten working college graduates with bachelor's degrees. However, due…

The Council on Postsecondary Education (Council) is charged with guiding the reform efforts envisioned by state policy leaders in the Kentucky Postsecondary Education Improvement Act of 1997 and is Kentucky's statewide postsecondary and adult education coordinating agency. To gain better insight into economic conditions and workforce trends,…

As with the previous reports in the series, this new report relies on the rich source of data from the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), including direct assessment of literacy and numeracy skills and a host of information on education, income, and other demographic characteristics. But what is unique in…

Over the last couple of years, we have seen increased concerns about the teacher workforce and intensified news reporting describing teacher shortages. In response, many states have enacted policies largely in the absence of data on the precise nature of their staffing challenges, such as lowering standards across the board for entry into…

This report is a response to congressional requests for the Congressional Research Service (CRS) to identify, synthesize, and explain the core components of the workforce skills gap discourse and, to the extent possible, explore and clarify evidence on the existence of skills gaps. The report acknowledges that the skills gap label is often applied…

This study utilizes a Critical Anti-Race Qualitative Phenomenological Methodology to challenge the dominant deficit perspective which reinforces the notion that the cultural deprivation of Blacks causes their marginalization. From this viewpoint, Blacks should take individual responsibility for changing their life conditions. However, this article…

Enacted in 2014, the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) was designed to increase collaboration among workforce systems at the federal, state, and local levels to integrate the array of programs and services available to job seekers and businesses through American Job Centers (AJCs). WIOA requires the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) to…

Across the U.S. economy, large-scale changes in work are occurring because of skills disruption: the constant re-invention of work driven by the vigorous, accelerating demand for new skills in virtually all jobs, and the spread of those skills across industries and around the world. In the past half decade, the average U.S. worker has had to…

Utilizing the 2013 "National Survey of College Graduates" (Scientists and Engineers Statistical Data System, National Science Foundation, 2015), this study examined three measures of labor market outcomes: annual earning potentials; primary work activity; and education-job match for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics…

While college students are increasingly mobile across countries, there is limited evidence of these mobile students' impact on local communities in host countries. The purpose of this study is to fill this gap by investigating the impact of international students on local economies in the United States. I examined two overarching research…

This dissertation studies the effects of China's higher education expansion reform on workers' labor market outcomes. In Chapter 1, I investigate how China's higher education expansion reform affects young workers' labor market outcomes. Using data from the 2005 China Population Survey, I estimate the effects of the reform using a diff-in-diff…

Higher education is based on a disciplinary system and science-specific educational programmes, but multi/interdisciplinarity (MD/ID) knowledge, working methods and collaboration are becoming common in the workplace with complex tasks and digital work environments. This article will provide an insight into these issues by presenting a study of the…

The population of the United States is getting older. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), older workers -- which the BLS defines as those who are 55 and older -- made up 22% of the U.S. workforce in 2016, nearly double the 12% recorded in 1995. This increase is largely "fueled by the aging baby-boom generation, a large…