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Most existing studies on excellence programmes focus primarily on the characteristics of students and/or programmes. However, little is known about the effects of participation in excellence programmes on cognitive and non-cognitive outcome measures. This study uses longitudinal data on over 1,000 students from five higher education institutions in the Netherlands to examine the added value of the excellence programmes relative to the regular education programmes. This study contributes to the current literature on the effects of participation in excellence programmes in three ways: the use of a representative control group; investigating multiple cognitive and non-cognitive outcome measures; and longitudinal assessments over a period of two years with pre- and post-test measurements (i.e. at the start and the end of the excellence programme). Our findings suggest that students who participated in excellence programmes have developed positively on both cognitive and non-cognitive skills, but that their development was not substantially different compared to students who did not participate in excellence programmes. The results underline that the students who participated in excellence programmes already performed better on most cognitive and non-cognitive skill measures at the start of the programme compared to students who did not participate in excellence programmes.

This article provides empirical evidence on the relation between institutional characteristics of labour markets that frame allocation processes, and optimal skill matching at the individual level. We investigate the extent to which skill-based job-worker matches are associated with employment protection legislation (EPL), unemployment benefits, and enforcing and enabling activating labour market policies. Drawing on data of the OECD's Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), and performing cross-country analyses of 28 industrial countries, we find that EPL can explain variance in the share of optimal skill matching across countries, displaying a positive relation. We also find a negative relation between strict enforcing activating labour market policies and optimal skill matching.

Academic dismissal policies are increasingly implemented to promote academic success, with existing empirical evidence mostly restricted to short-run outcomes. This study examines long-term academic outcomes of academic dismissal for two cohorts (N=1707) of first-year bachelor students in Economics and Business at a Dutch university. Using administrative records, regression discontinuity design estimates suggest that academic dismissal does not relate to a difference in the propensity of graduation, nor to a change in study delay, when comparing students around the academic dismissal threshold. Not meeting this credit-threshold forces students to leave, and most decide to re-enroll in the same (43.4%) program elsewhere or at least within the academic domain (41.9%). Thus, while academic dismissal forces students to switch, its intended purpose of redirecting students to a different field of study is not observed. Implications for why academic dismissal might not deliver on the intended efficiency or effectiveness gains are discussed.

In this paper an analysis is carried out whether objective tests and subjective self-assessments in international large-scale studies yield similar results when looking at cross-national differences in the effects of skills on earnings, and skills patterns across countries, fields of study and gender. The findings indicate that subjective skills measures do not correlate well with objective measures of similar constructs when looking at cross-national differences. Countrywise associations between subjective skills measures and earnings do not correlate well with those found using objective skills measures. Moreover, cross-national differences in the level of subjective skills measures do not correlate well with cross-national differences in skill levels based on objective tests. Nor do gender differences found using subjective skills measures correlate with those found using objective skills measures. This does not mean that self-assessments cannot be used, but they need to be restricted to analysing within-country differences. Within countries, self-assessments do a good job in predicting skills differences across fields of study and also in predicting the effect of skills on earnings. When comparing gender differences in skills levels within countries, however, one needs to be aware that females tend to overestimate their skills levels in typical "female" domains like literacy.

The main research question of this article is concerned with the combined estimation of the effects of educational systems, school composition, track level, and country of origin on the educational achievement of 15-year-old migrant students. The authors focus specifically on the effects of socioeconomic and ethnic background on achievement scores and the extent to which these effects are affected by characteristics of the school, track, or educational system in which these students are enrolled. In doing so, they examine the "sorting" mechanisms of schools and tracks in highly stratified, moderately stratified, and comprehensive education systems. They use data from the 2006 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) wave. Compared with previous research in this area, the article's main contribution is in explicitly including the tracks-within-school level as a separate unit of analysis, which leads to less biased results concerning the effects of educational system characteristics. The results highlight the importance of including factors of track level and school composition in the debate surrounding educational inequality of opportunity for students in different education contexts. The findings clearly indicate that analyses of the effects of educational system characteristics are flawed if the analysis only uses a country level and a student level and ignores the tracks-within-school-level characteristics. From a policy perspective, the most important finding is that educational systems are neither uniformly "good" nor uniformly "bad", but they can result in different consequences for different migrant groups. Some migrant groups are better off in comprehensive systems, while others are better off in moderately stratified systems. (Contains 10 tables and 17 notes.)

This study explains early school-leaving in lower secondary education in the Netherlands, taking into account background characteristics, family resources and school composition factors at the same time. We distinguish four groups of school-leavers: "dropouts" (those without any qualification), those who leave school with a diploma in lower secondary education ("low qualified"), those who complete apprentice-based tracks ("apprentices") and those who continue education and receive a full upper secondary qualification ("full qualification"). The breakdown into these four groups reveals clear differences in the effects of different factors on the risk of early school-leaving. (Contains 1 figure, 2 tables and 10 notes.)

Labor market rewards based on competencies are analyzed using a sample of young European higher education (HE) graduates. Estimates of monetary rewards are obtained from conventional earnings regressions, while estimates total rewards are based on job satisfaction and derived through ordered probit regressions. Results for income show that jobs with higher participative and methodological competency requirements are better paid. The results also show that higher requirements in terms of competencies increase graduates' job satisfaction.

In this study, the effects of several educational and non-educational indicators of competence on short-term labour market outcomes for university graduates are estimated. The research question is: to what extent do indications of specific and generic competence during the educational program predict labour market outcomes? Labour market outcomes in this study pertain to employment chances and quality of the job. We use data on specific and generic aspects of competence, all of which were assessed during the university programme, i.e. test scores on the attainment of domain specific knowledge, scores on group functioning, and the Masters' thesis result. In addition, some other indicators of human capital acquired outside education are used, i.e. relevant work experience and managerial experience. The results indicate a rather differentiated pattern for the value of specific and generic competence acquired during education for the labour market. Group functioning scores have large effects on attaining jobs on the academic level. (Contains 7 tables and 7 notes.)

In this study, we explore the role of education in explaining the labour market outcomes for a sample of graduates in medicine. More specifically, the following research question is answered: To what extent are labour market outcomes of physicians explained by the skills acquired in education, as indicated in the theory of human capital, or by competences already present at the start of education, as suggested by the screening theory? The study uses separate measurements of competence at the start and at the end of education. Moreover, we use a direct measurement of competence development during medical education. This enables us to disentangle the effects of the suggested mechanisms. The results suggest that after graduation human capital factors do not explain subsequent differences in labour market outcomes. The medical degree seems a sufficient signal of screening device as such. However, selection processes during education take place on human capital acquired before and during medical education. The following are appended: (1) The value of Progress Test scores in measuring actual learning accumulation in relevant competences in medical education; (2) Argumentation for indicators of labour market success for physicians; and (3) Selection bias in competence levels for a research sample of physicians. (Contains 8 tables and 2 figures.)

This chapter describes a new conceptual model for measuring competencies of higher education graduates. The proposed instrument can become a valuable tool for higher education quality management, policy evaluation, and scientific research. (Contains 1 figure.)