Each year, policymakers, educators, and the general public engage in debates around the statewide average teacher pay figure that the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction (DPI) publishes on its website and reports to the National Education Association. These debates take up the important consideration of whether or not teachers are…

Discussion and comparison of faculty salaries in academia is an ongoing research interest for all stakeholders in higher education. The intention of this research is to understand the differences in faculty salaries within five business classifications and across other academic subject areas. Various authors have examined different aspects of…

This paper is among the first to investigate the impact of over-education and over-skilling on workers' wages using a unique pan-European database covering twenty-eight countries for the year 2014, namely the CEDEFOP's European Skills and Jobs (ESJ) survey. Overall, the results suggest the existence of a wage penalty associated with…

Providing Missouri students a highly qualified, appropriately credentialed workforce has grown steadily more challenging over the past decade. Unsurprisingly, the pandemic made it even harder. Multiple surveys indicate Missouri educators' growing dissatisfaction over the last two years. These data, coupled with figures on declining enrollment in…

This dissertation studies the labor market outcomes of college graduates. The choice of college major is one of the most direct ways for college graduates to acquire skills and earnings differences between college majors rival those between high school and college graduates. In each chapter, I combine rigorous descriptive analysis methods with…

How can a bonus program affect the performance of teachers in classrooms? This paper collected data from teachers employed in Brazilian state-run schools to examine the key mechanisms through which a teacher bonus scheme can have a causal effect on the academic achievements of students. Using mixed-methods research and data triangulation from…

This paper presents a study that analyzed the relationship between Student Evaluation of Teaching (SET) and mid-career median pay and was conducted at a state university. The analysis was based on 49 courses prefixes from 5 different colleges/schools within the university. The SET data was collected from a wide range of courses, and the analysis…

This dissertation studies the effect of higher education costs on students' outcomes in the labor market, particularly when credit constraints are absent. It utilizes the UK's institutional setting to identify such an effect. The key findings are as follows. (i) Increasing tuition fees does not have adverse effects on students as long as credit…

Recruitment and retention of agriculture teachers is a major concern in the field of school-based agricultural education (SBAE). A major reason cited for this concern is perceived shortcomings in teacher compensation. To remedy this factor, Illinois implemented an extended contract grant program to provide agriculture teachers with additional…

With the introduction of the sectorial agreement signed between the Maltese Government and the Malta Union of Teachers in 2017, Maltese teachers have been incentivised to accelerate their salary scale progression following engagement in self-sought professional learning. The theory of affordances was applied in this mixed-methods research to…

This study investigates the impact of the extension of the duration of general education on educational opportunities and labour market performance. Taking the example of the Polish education reform of 1999, which we treated as a natural experiment, we used a regression discontinuity design and estimated the effects of an additional year of…

Administrative assistants within the higher education system are a vital part of universities, including supporting students, faculty, and administrators. Although administrative assistants are essential to a college or university, they often lack recognition and salary support for their contributions. This applied qualitative study seeks to…

Using administrative data from Delaware and aggregate occupational wage data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, this paper examines expected wage inequality in Career and Technical Education (CTE) by analyzing how student demographics relate to selection into programs of study (POS) with different expected wages. Through multilevel mixed-effects…

This study is the first statewide analysis of the effectiveness of the Texas Teacher Incentive Allotment (TIA) program. Introduced in 2019, TIA is the most significant and unprecedented teacher merit-pay system in the U.S. Leveraging the Synthetic Control Method (SCM), we construct a counterfactual scenario to assess the causal impact of TIA on…

Rising housing cost burdens can impose a strain on a district's employees, so it is worthwhile for school districts to examine the extent to which their employees face those burdens and how these burdens intersect with potential employee exit. This research brief presents three key takeaways from the Wake County Public School System (WCPSS)…