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This publication provides a comparative statistical analysis of skills development through continuing vocational training (CVT) in EU enterprises. It is based on data from the latest rounds of the CVTS survey (CVTS 5, 2015 and CVTS 4, 2010) covering EU-Member States, Norway and North Macedonia and reporting on progress towards key policy objectives. The analysis considers indicators on enterprise CVT provision, staff participation, time devoted to training and enterprise expenditure. These are analysed and then summarised by means of a composite index. Results are further complemented with an analysis of data concerning the reasons given by enterprises for not providing (further) training and main skill needs in companies. The report pays particular attention to training efforts of SMEs.

Brazil spends more money, and a higher percentage of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP), on education than other Latin American countries. However, many of the outcomes of the country's education system are worse than its peer countries. We call this mismatch Brazil's Education Paradox. One of the primary reasons for Brazil's Education Paradox is the country's decentralized education system. Municipal, state, and federal governments handle different parts of the education system with little to no coordination among them. Although the Brazilian government is aware of this and working hard to rectify the situation, much of the government's efforts are hampered by political, social, and economic setbacks. For instance, since 2013, the government has been working on enacting a law that would create a National Education System to improve coordination among the different levels of education. But the government's plans are still mired in heated debates and disagreements. Thankfully, market-creating innovations can play a significant role in helping Brazil improve its education system. These innovations are unique for their ability to transform complicated and expensive products into simple and affordable ones--thereby making the products accessible to more people in society. Education-focused market-creating innovations are spreading across Brazil and improving learning outcomes despite the government's inability to rapidly solve its Education Paradox. This paper highlights the work that four market-creating innovators--Mind Lab, eduK, Descomplica, and Árvore Educação--are doing to improve learning outcomes in Brazil. In addition to working to create a national education system in Brazil, the government should invest in market-creating innovations that have the potential to create significant impact on the economy. By doing so, Brazil can, once and for all, solve its Education Paradox. [This paper was funded in part by Mind Lab Group.]

Understanding the return on investment (ROI) in VET provides governments with information on the performance of the system and justification for public expenditure. It can help enterprises and individuals to measure productivity improvement in firms or to determine increases in the employability of individuals following training investment. However, the measurement of ROI is not straightforward. This report introduces a conceptual framework for defining what is involved in the ROI calculation and provides a guide to what type of information and data are required to calculate the returns to training for government, employers and individuals.

For the first time in the nation's history, a majority of students in the United States are learning based on a common set of standards for mathematics and English language arts (ELA) that will prepare them for the demands of the 21st century. The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) provide a clear, consistent framework for what students should know at each grade throughout their K-12 education, aligned to the expectations of colleges, career training programs and the workforce.1 The standards level the playing field for students, rich or poor, black or white, and set the stage for collaboration on a range of tools to support teaching and learning. This white paper presents a discussion of the Common Core from idea, to development, to adoption, an overview of implementation, and an action plan for business leaders to show support for the Common Core. The paper begins by discussing why the common core is needed.

This study concerns how intra-organizational networks affect the implementation of policies and practices in organizations. In particular, we attend to the role of the informal subgroup or clique in cultivating and distributing locally adapted and integrated knowledge, or know-how. We develop two hypotheses based on the importance of intra-organizational coordination for an organization's capacity for change. The first emphasizes the importance of distributing know-how evenly to potential recipient subgroups. The second emphasizes the importance of restricting know-how to flow from high know-how subgroups. We test our hypotheses with longitudinal network data in 21 schools, finding stronger support for the second hypothesis than the first. Our findings can help managers cultivate know-how flows to contribute to organizational change. The following are appended: (1) Technical Appendix; and (2) Multilevel Estimation of Main Models.

Charter schools have generated support from politicians in both major American political parties, while stimulating intense debate among interest groups. We investigate whether and how public attitudes come to mirror interest group polarization or politician consensus in order to understand what drives public attitudes as policy debates mature and citizens learn information that drives advocates to opposite sides. Using survey experiments, we assess how views change in response to policy cues. Mirroring debates among advocates, we assess whether the role of private companies and non-union teachers polarize opinion. We find that the public responds to cues linked to unions and polarizes based on liberal and conservative ideology as well as attitudes toward unions. This helps to explain how ideological polarization can grow even in the absence of strong partisan sorting among top political leaders. The report includes a bibliography.

Historically, waves of new technologies have brought Americans higher standards of living. Electrical service and hot and cold running water, for example, were once luxuries; now their absence makes a home substandard. Today, technologies for accessing the Internet are diffusing at an even faster rate than those earlier innovations once did, bringing with them commensurate transformations of Americans' way of life. Technologies that increase the speed at which data can be transmitted have had powerful effects. Most importantly, they have transformed the Internet from a tool used by a narrow group of academics and technicians into a means of interaction used by a large majority of Americans. However, Americans have not universally benefitted from better Internet access. Geography, especially the divide between rural and urban America, determines how much some Americans can benefit from the Internet. Networks have not been as extensively developed in rural areas as in urban areas. Some people in rural America still have dial-up as their best available, affordable technology, a technology that offers five percent of the capacity for what the FCC has said is the broadband threshold. Others have service that reaches the broadband level, but still does not offer the "lightning-fast" speeds advertised by Internet service providers in urban areas. Accordingly, the nation faces a "broadband gap," not only with regard to the lack of access in rural areas to service that meets the broadband threshold, but also with regard to the lack of availability of faster service between urban and rural America. This report identifies opportunity costs that arise from this gap. These costs exist today, but the pace at which data transmission capability is growing means that the inequality between the technology being newly deployed and the technology that was deployed a decade or more ago is increasing. Networks that connect research institutions in the United States can move 100,000 times more data per unit of time than the dial-up connections that some Americans still must use. The technology gap is not a fixed deficit that once filled, stays filled. The technology gap will be larger--much larger--in the future, along with the information and technology gap, unless significant action is taken to overcome it. (Contains 2 figures, 1 table, and 19 footnotes.)

The rapid proliferation of technology can have profound effects on the evolution of teaching, learning, scholarship, and governance in higher education (Katz, 2008). However, instructors report that simply "keeping up" with new instructional technologies, let alone integrating them productively into one's teaching, can be a significant challenge (Sorcinelli, Austin, Eddy, & Beach, 2006; Zhu, Kaplan, & Dershimer, 2011). This Occasional Paper describes how instructors at the University of Michigan are currently using online collaboration tools (hereafter OCTs) in a variety of disciplines and teaching contexts to enhance student engagement and course management. Based on these cases and faculty interviews, the authors also outline recommendations for implementing OCTs effectively and efficiently in teaching.

The business models under which most public universities in the U.S. operate have become unsustainable. They were put in place when state economies were stronger and there were fewer programs making competing claims on state funds. The current Great Recession has made things worse, but the unsustainability of current business models derives from longer-term trends that will prevent state investment in higher education from rebounding to prior levels. States and universities are making both incremental and structural changes in response. Incremental changes work within existing financial and governance parameters to effect cost savings and/or to extend services; they stretch the use of existing or shrinking resources. Structural reforms change financial and/or governance parameters to create different incentives, which focus on performance, outcomes, and stabilizing capacity. A number of these new models are summarized including: "charter" and "public authority" models, the Virginia tiered system model, the Oregon public endowment model, and the UK income-contingent model. Current conditions create both a challenge and an opportunity for statewide higher education systems to re-define their missions and priorities to sustain their public universities for the future. Whether changes are made by drift or by design will determine how well public universities can contribute to the growth of the country in future decades. (Contains 16 endnotes.)

This paper examines different institutional characteristics of Thai private higher education in historical-organizational perspective. The analysis applies different conceptual categories of private emergence--Catholic, elite, demand-absorbing--drawn from international literature starting with Levy (1986) to the Thai case. The societal context of Thai private higher education is rooted fundamentally in the hands of both religious foundations and the business sector. Thai diversification partly conforms to international schema but also shows varying emphases. Catholic must be expanded to religious-oriented and elite reformulated as semi-elite. Although demand-absorbing institutions are the majority in the Thai private sector--as also seen elsewhere--the demand-absorbing subsector shows great internal variations. For all the three conceptual categories, missions may be assessed accordingly. Finally, the paper discusses a growing hybrid trend within the Thai private sector. (Contains 1 table and 17 endnotes.)

At the request of the State of Pennsylvania, the School District of Philadelphia, in the summer of 2002, asked three for-profit firms to assume responsibility for 30 of its lowest-performing schools and it asked four nonprofit managers to assume the management of 16 other low-performing schools. A difference-in-differences analysis is used to estimate the impact of nonprofit and for-profit management on individual student achievement. Gains in test scores at the treated schools are estimated by comparing them with gains in other low-performing schools in the district. Students at schools under for-profit management outperformed those at schools under nonprofit management in all six years in both reading and math. Most estimations are statistically significant. Impacts of for-profit management relative to district management were positive in math, but no reading impacts could be detected. At nonprofits, students appear to have learned substantially less, especially in math, at nonprofit schools, than had their school remained under regular district management. However, impacts fell short of statistical significance. (Propensity Score Analysis is appended. Contains 21 endnotes and 9 tables.)

This paper uses panel regressions to investigate the effects of innovation policies and framework factors on business R&D intensity and patenting for a sample of 20 OECD countries over the period 1982- 2001. Both sets of factors are found to matter; the main determinants of innovativeness appear to be the availability of scientists and engineers, research conducted in the public sector (including universities), business-academic links, the degree of product market competition, a high level of financial development and access to foreign inventions. The effect of direct public financial support for business R&D is generally positive but modest, though it may larger for cash-constrained firms. Intellectual property rights appear to increase patenting significantly, but have little impact on R&D spending. Finally, the paper takes a closer look at the labour market for researchers, estimating jointly equations for employment and wages. Although the supply of scientists and engineers is eventually responsive to wage differentials, both with other professions and across countries, the evidence suggests that it may difficult to raise significantly the real amount of domestic R&D in the short run because the supply of researchers is relatively inelastic. (Wage Schedule and Reduced Form Coefficient Derivations are appended. Contains 93 footnotes, 4 figures, 1 box and 8 tables.)

This paper discusses routes by which HIV/AIDS money is dispersed and received. It notes that capturing accurate data on actual spending patterns of large donors can be difficult, as there is no uniform tracking or reporting system and much HIV/AIDS money is spent under the broader category of sexual and reproductive health. Most of the information contained in the first two sections is based on main reports that assess the general manner in which HIV/AIDS money as a whole is being distributed. Moving on from who is providing funds for HIV/AIDS initiatives at global level, it tracks sources and flows from governments, through bilateral and multilateral channels. It does not include estimates of household spending on care and treatment, which cannot be realistically quantified. Information follows on top US and European donors, the international business community and pharmaceutical companies. Later sections look into ways HIV/AIDS funding is being spent, with the proviso, as before, that detailed breakdowns of actual spending are rare. The broadest categories are prevention, care and treatment, orphan support and research. Within the field of ECD vis-a-vis HIV/AIDS, funds are being directed through two main areas of concern--prevention of mother-to-child transmission and the care of orphans and vulnerable children. This paper describes major players in these arenas, showing that efforts are being made by a few agencies through the amount of funding directed along these channels is minimal in contrast to other target areas. Fundamental questions are raised about current donor priorities and there follows some discussion touching areas where new or reallocated HIV/AIDS funding could be directed. Obvious gaps in the provision of money for ECD and HIV/AIDS support are then identified along with opportunities to carry out work fill such gaps. The final section examines what it would take to direct more money to support young children living in the shadow of HIV/AIDS. Including very young children in HIV/AIDS response strategies will ultimately depend on individual communities devising their own solutions. A further section highlights the critical importance of sharing knowledge through networks that communicate and disseminate evidence-based research findings and project evaluations. In conclusion, this paper calls for advocacy to urge that more funding should go to ECD-HIV/AIDS needs and that current funding approaches to dealing with the crisis need, in addition, to be tracked and evaluated, with a view to promoting more and better ways of meeting the unfulfilled needs of very young children affected by HIV/AIDS. (Contains 2 figures.)

This paper is a response to the collective interests expressed by a network of the leadership of ten U.S. community college systems to better understand how community colleges can support emerging state cluster-based economic development strategies. The intent is to proved concrete applications of a cluster-based model that inform both workforce and economic development policy and decision makers, bringing together two agendas that states usually pursue separately. The paper presents an initial model of a cluster-based workforce delivery system based on: (1) college practices observed and studied in the U.S. and around the world; (2) direct experience with cluster building strategies; (3) emerging theories and innovations; and (4) the experience and wisdom of members of the network. According to the authors, industry clusters have become the new mantra for economic development policy. Regional technical institutions are best able to focus on and respond to regional economies. Therefore, the paper argues, these institutions would do well to practice institutional and system-wide cooperation in order to develop specific expertise that will help them to become a particular business cluster's center of excellence. The paper presents an assortment of special features that some colleges have added to address the needs of clusters. The choices colleges make should reflect industry and student needs; local availability of and access to programs, services, and budgets; and long-term development plans of the state and region. (Contains 13 references.) (NB)

The purpose of this report is to better determine the level of general public trust in public higher education and the content of published articles in the press that may influence and reflect public confidence. By conducting a six-month media scan of four California newspapers, an overview is provided of the key concerns and issues facing higher education today. Appended are: (1) The impact of California's fiscal crisis on higher education; (2) Admissions policy; (3) Student diversity; (4) New appointments; (5) Business news; (6) Union action and strikes; (7) California's national nuclear weapons laboratories; (8) The death of Clark Kerr; (9) The soaring cost of textbooks and journals; (10) Dealings with the law; (11) International perspective; (12) Undergraduates' lack of basic academic skills; and (13) Miscellaneous. (Contains 1 table.)

This paper describes a study that examined the demand for tutoring within a context of heightened credential competition and a growing private-education sector consisting of private schools, charter schools, homeschoolers, and a burgeoning entrepreneurial education industry. The number of private-tutoring businesses is rapidly growing in Canada, even though the Canadian educational system lacks the characteristics that normally fuel the demand for such businesses. Which kinds of parents hire and desire private tutors, and how is the demand linked to other educational preferences? Using data from a national survey, the study found that parents who desire affordable tutoring do not differ greatly from other parents in their demographic or political ideology. However, tutoring parents are less satisfied with public education, are more involved in their children's schools, and are greatly more desiring of private schooling and other educational alternatives. The paper concludes that for many parents, private tutoring represents a school choice by default, and is an affordable educational option in lieu of the ability to pay for private schools. (Contains 16 references.) (Author)

This essay examines the ways in which nonprofit universities increasingly emulate businesses, focusing on two of the most direct forms of emulation: the creation of internal university markets at the University of Southern California through adoption of variants of resource center management (RCM) and the privatization of public higher education at the University of Virginia. (Contains 55 endnotes.)

This white paper examines the relationship of child care to business interests. Areas explored include: (1) the relationship between a robust economy and increasing family stress; (2) family-friendly benefit options and the bottom-line rewards for employers who offer them; (3) how businesses are getting involved in partnerships to address issues of early care and education both inside and outside of Virginia (includes numerous short program descriptions); and (4) projected changes for the new workforce and economy. The paper concludes with recommendations for action by business and government leaders and other advocates across Virginia for improving child care quality. (EV)

This working paper is intended to enrich an initial description of alternative businesses and A-Way Express Couriers, in particular. (A-Way, a 12-year-old community organization, is a psychiatric survivor-run alternative business.) The paper begins with a brief commentary on the psychiatric survivor movement and research on it. The paper traces the emergence and entrenchment of learning as a key feature of psychiatric survivor-run or alternative businesses. The methodology used is to re-read previous research projects and results through the lens of informal learning. Early research on psychiatric survivor-run businesses is reviewed in view of a definition of social learning with these three dimensions: solidarity learning, reshaping the definition of self, and organizational learning. A more detailed examination of informal learning processes at A-Way builds on a previously generated profile and is organized according to the three dimensions of social learning. Comments are based on face-to-face interviews with five employees from each of these three groupings within A-Way: couriers on commission, part-time office staff on salaries, and full-time management on salaries. The final section constructs a narrative account of one woman's learning at A-Way--how over nine years she moved from courier to executive director of the business on a journey that evokes the richness and complexity of informal learning in this context. (YLB)

We present enetCollect, a large European network project funded as a COST Action that sets ground for combining crowdsourcing with IT technologies used in areas such as language learning and Natural Language Processing (NLP). This project tackles a major challenge of bringing together interdisciplinary researchers to foster language learning of all European citizens from diverse sociodemographic, cultural, educational, and linguistic backgrounds. It aims at unlocking a crowdsourcing potential available for all languages, including less widely spoken languages, in order to create language resources and achieve a coverage of material for teaching the languages. It will meet its research and capacity-building goals by creating an international community of researchers that will work on producing a comprehensive theoretical framework and running prototypical experiments to benefit a wide range of users and languages, while considering ethical, legal, and business issues. This article informs about its objectives, expected impact and strategic organisation that contribute to reaching its flexible and sustainable success goals. [For the complete volume of short papers, see ED590612.]

The authors examine racial and ethnic differences in computer ownership and Internet usage using data from a survey conducted by the Nomura Research Institute in 2000. They focus on on-line shopping because few studies have examined racial and ethnic differences in e-commerce. The results indicate that blacks and Hispanics are less likely to own or use a computer than are non-Hispanic whites but are not less likely to shop on-line. Indeed, blacks appear to shop on-line more frequently and to spend more than non-Hispanic whites do. (Determinants of Computer Ownership and Usage in August 2000 CPS; and Descriptive Statistics for Socioeconomic Characteristics in Nomura Data Set are appended. Contains 2 footnotes and 6 tables.)

Immigrants play a vital role in innovation activities and entrepreneurship. Given the substantial contribution of immigrants in these areas, a set of natural questions arise: What are the pathways that high-skilled immigrants take to arrive in the United States, and how has the importance of these pathways changed over time? What are important institutions that serve as gatekeepers for high-skilled immigrants, and do they affect the types of immigrant founders that come to the United States? Do certain parts of the United States benefit disproportionately from high-skilled immigration, and if so, what are some factors that contribute to these benefits? The answers to these questions have important implications for designing immigration policy and regulation, which have become increasingly acrimonious topics in public discourse. They also have important implications for firms and universities that recruit talent from abroad and for the communities that hope to promote vibrant entrepreneurial ecosystems. To answer these questions, the authors studied immigrant entrepreneurs backed by venture capital (VC). From a policy perspective, the results emphasize the importance of immigrant entrepreneurs as founders of startups with high growth potential. [This research brief is based on Natee Amornsiripanitch, Paul A. Gompers, George Hu, and Kaushik Vasudevan, "Getting Schooled: The Role of Universities in Attracting Immigrant Entrepreneurs," NBER Working Paper no. 28773, May 2021.]

This study presents an expanded methodology for economic impact analysis to measure the impact of a community college, South Plains College (SPC), Texas, on a specified nonlocal economy. The research had four parts. First an economic impact study was conducted for SPC and its impact on the local economy of Hockley County, where the college is located. Second, existing economic impact analysis methodology was expanded based on a modified Ryan model (a variation of the Caffrey-Isaacs model) to facilitate the estimation of the economic impact on a nonlocal economy. Third the method was applied to the nonlocal economy, Lubbock County, which is adjacent to Hockley County. Fourth, the findings of both impact studies were evaluated to identify differences in method and relative impacts in both economies. The study found that differences in the method rested chiefly in writing the impact formulas and in collecting the impact data. Analysis showed that, in Hockley County, there was a return to the economy of about four dollars for every one dollar of taxes invested in the college, and that Lubbock County experienced a total business volume impact of $21 million. Comparison of impact volume between the two showed that total impact differed by only approximately $86,000. (Contains 30 references and 12 figures.) (JB)

This report introduces archivists to the potential of expert systems for improving archives administration and alerts them to ways in which they can expect intelligent technologies to impact federal record-keeping systems and scholarly research methods. The report introduces the topic by describing expert systems used in three Fortune 500 companies. It then defines expert systems, distinguishes them from conventional programs, and presents the capabilities of the technology together with examples of suitable applications. Discussion of the building of an expert system application begins with a short history of the evolution of the technology, followed by a detailed account of knowledge engineering, i.e., the process used to develop an expert system. Descriptions of several expert systems applications in the federal government highlight applications in the Internal Revenue Services, the Social Security Administration, and the Office of Management and Budget (Executive Office of the President). A report on the library profession's emerging use of this technology focuses largely on the three national libraries of the federal government: the National Library of Medicine, the National Agricultural Library, and the Library of Congress. The discussion of recent advances in expert systems technology that concludes the paper examines limitations of the technology, identifies likely frontiers for further research and development, and considers the implications of the technology for archives administration. A list of sources and related bibliographies is appended. (MAB)