This handbook is designed to help community-based organizations that provide adult education improve their program quality in order to better achieve results that matter. The target audience for this handbook includes administrators and other members of program improvement teams in community-based organizations that want to use Equipped for the…

Today's rural leaders are becoming increasingly attuned to the fact that high achieving schools and related human capital investment strategies are key ingredients in the promotion of sustainable development at the local level. Serious challenges often await rural areas that seek to pursue such efforts. As a case in point, if rural schools are…

Innovation, from high profile scientific discoveries to lower profile changes in processes or practices, is crucial to Australia's economic development. However, its impact on the wider community is usually relatively small. Promotion of innovation across all sectors is required to produce the biggest changes. This report focuses on the roles of…

This innovative session provides a vehicle for facilitating dialogue and practical application of effective tools for linking human resource development (HRD) strategies with business/organizational strategies. The primary goal is to provide an increased understanding of and skill using practical, research-based approaches and techniques to build…

The economic benefits of postsecondary education are well established. However, there still seem to be differences in employment outcomes by gender or equity status. This exploratory research examined employment differences at the intersection of gender and equity status. Data were derived from a graduate survey and institutional records of a…

The South can move out of the shadows of the harsh economic realities of the last 15 years and into the sunshine of developing new strategies to take advantage of the region's strengths. These strengths include a vast wealth of natural resources; a Sunbelt location; and most important, a huge reservoir of undeveloped human capital. The road to…

The notion of local district capacity needs to be rethought in light of the extraordinary demands for learning imposed on teachers and others by the current wave of reform in science, mathematics, and other subjects. In this article, a district's capacity to support ambitious instructional reform is viewed primarily as a capacity to learn the…

Productivity is a central issue these days in any discussion about the economy. However, there is much more talk about productivity than there is real knowledge. We need a clear understanding of what direction productivity improvement efforts will take and what efforts are required to retrain the existing work force. (SSH)

Evidence from four Eastern and three Western European countries suggests that there has been some convergence in the application of manpower and social demand criteria to higher education planning. The theoretical case for and against manpower planning is discussed, and the approaches of specific countries are described. (Author/MLW)

Publicly supported education will change dramatically in the postmarket age. Rapid disappearance of mass employment and economic marginalization undermines both rationales for public mass education: economic utility and cultural/intellectual development. The technological elite and unemployed will find the common-school ideal irrelevant. Instead…

Describes an approach to academic advising based on the concept that the advisor's role is to increase the student's human capital. Outlines five categories of personal characteristics that add to a worker's human capital (formal education, adult education, on-the-job training, health, geographic mobility), noting issues in each category that…

Current Population Survey data indicate that in 1991, only 40% of rural workers had received training on current jobs. Less educated, minority, and Southern rural workers were particularly unlikely to receive training. The nonmetropolitan training rate rose modestly, 1983-91, but less rapidly than the metropolitan rate, suggesting that fewer rural…

Participation, empowerment, and sustainability are basic tenets of community development work of the Inter-American Foundation, but these are difficult to measure. The Grassroots Development Framework breaks these concepts into concrete, measurable components to evaluate sustainability over time and short-term cost/efficiency results of community…

A study examining Canadian involvement in postsecondary technical or vocational international education since the 1960s surveyed international education practitioners at 61 postsecondary institutions. Respondents felt that international education promoted economic growth in Canada and abroad and had positive effects on recipient nations. The shift…

Three factors have contributed to government's increasing involvement in the content of university study programs: the "massification" of higher education, the theory of human capital and its application to economic policy, and the crisis of public financing and the welfare state. Instruments used to influence academic planning are…