This article uses a multi-level ecological model to explore the dynamics of localities in England and their effects on the 14+ participation, progression and transition (14+ PPT) of young people at a time when nationally and internationally there is a recognition that transitions from education to employment are both more complex and take longer.…

Most Canadian provinces offer high-school apprenticeships to facilitate students' transitions to skilled work and address employers' concerns about labour shortages. Using interview data with graduates from high-school apprenticeships in Alberta and Ontario, we analyse the impact participation in these programmes has had on their…

This article investigates the relation between the second chance of increase in formal education amongst low-educated adults in Sweden and long-term wage development. Despite the awareness of the role of education for employability and individuals' overall life chances, surprisingly few studies have investigated the wage effects of…

This paper reports on recent research into enterprise skill profiles and workplace training practices in the Bangladesh manufacturing industry. The article presents survey and interview data for 37 enterprises across eight manufacturing sectors collected during a study for the International Labour Organisation. The research analysed enterprise and…

Lifting the rate of workforce participation in Australia has been called "the challenge of the decade". In light of the ageing workforce, changing nature of work demands and workforce attitudes, the need for insight into current patterns of workforce participation has never been more urgent. The following paper offers an overview of an…

The study examines whether the reduction in the timeframe for the completion of university studies in Greece will affect students of different socio-economic background disproportionally. To this intent, it assesses the influence of the status of students, defined as working and non-working, on the duration of studies but the relevance of other…

This article argues that work ethic research has suffered from a tendency to conflate preference and morality, and that this has been particularly detrimental to our understanding of the relationship between commitment to the work ethic and educational attainment. The work ethic is almost always measured quantitatively, yet in-depth research…

This paper explores the drive to expand the quantity and quality of PhD's in South Africa and the impact this has had on under-represented groups, in particular black graduates. Based on both qualitative and quantitative data, the paper argues that while there has been a significant increase in the number of black students in doctoral education,…

The Czech Republic is one of the post-communist countries where the transformation from late industrial to knowledge economies and knowledge societies was complicated by the simultaneous transformations from communist centrally planned economies to democratic regimes and market economies. Furthermore, the transformation of higher education itself…

Gender equality policies regulate the Swedish labour market, including higher education. This study analyses and discusses the career development of postgraduate students in the light of labour market influences. The principle of gender separation is used to understand these effects. Swedish register data encompassing information on 585…

A theoretical approach is formulated that connects various theories of why education has an effect on labour market outcomes with institutional settings in which such theories provide the most likely mechanism. Three groups of mechanisms are distinguished: education as an indicator of productive skills, as a positional good and as a means for…

Despite their generally higher educational attainment, young women are characterised by lower labour market positions than men in Belgium. Using regression and decomposition analyses on data from the longitudinal SONAR survey on the transition from school to work, we examine to what extent subject choice and processes of family formation can…

This paper analyses the effectiveness of non-formal schools for working children in Jalandhar, Punjab, India, in mainstreaming child labourers into the formal education system through incentivised, informal schooling. Using a family fixed effects model and sibling data as an equivalent population comparison group, I find that the non-formal…

The paper analyses the labour market situation among youth with low or medium levels of formal education. The analyses focus on studying the effects of level of competence, grades and immigrant background. Which factors contribute to labour market success among this group of youth? And which factors may increase the risk of not getting into the…

This paper analyses polytechnic graduate placement in Finnish manufacturing. The paper uses a register-based data source covering white-collar manufacturing workers over the period 1995-2004. Taken together, the results show that wages and job classification are higher for polytechnic graduates, once other covariates are controlled for. Despite…