Search

International student mobility has been rising as a global phenomenon in the last few decades, while its impact could be various in different contexts. For the European Union (EU), studying in another EU member country could be regarded as an important factor for the solidarity and integrity of the Union. The current study elaborates on the role of studying abroad regarding the attitudes of people toward immigration in the EU. It shows that people who are studying in an EU member country, belonging to higher social classes and from EU15 countries, are more likely to have positive attitudes toward immigration. But after controlling several socio-demographic variables studying abroad still contributes positively to the attitudes of EU citizens toward immigration. Accordingly, current study provides promising pieces of evidence on the social contribution of studying abroad for both future research and policymakers.

Several studies have been published on disengaged test respondents, and others have analyzed disengaged survey respondents separately. For many large-scale assessments, students answer questionnaire and test items in succession. This study examines the percentage of students who continuously engage in disengaged responding behaviors across sections in a low-stakes assessment. The effects on calculated scores of filtering students, based on their responding behaviors, are also analyzed. Data of this study came from the 2015 administration of PISA. For data analysis, frequencies and percentages of engaged students in the sessions were initially calculated using students' response times. To investigate the impact of filtering disengaged respondents on parameter estimation, three groups were created, namely engaged in both measures, engaged only in the test, and engaged only in the questionnaire. Next, several validity checks were performed on each group to verify the accuracy of the classifications and the impact of filtering student groups based on their responding behavior. The results indicate that students who are disengaged in tests tend to continue this behavior when responding to the questionnaire items in PISA. Moreover, the rate of continuity of disengaged responding is non-negligible as can be seen from the effect sizes. On the other hand, removing disengaged students in both measures led to higher or nearly the same performance ratings compared to the other groups. Researchers analyzing the dataset including achievement tests and survey items are recommended to review disengaged responses and filter out students who are continuously showing disengaged responding before performing further statistical analysis.

Context: Existing studies have explored the association between workplace training and wages suggesting that training participation may have a positive association with wages. However, we still know very little about whether this association varies between men and women. Through its potential positive association with wages, training may balance wage differences between men and women. In addition, the gender wage gap varies across the wage distribution. Differences in the association between training participation and wages for men and women across the earnings spectrum may offer an explanation as to why the discrepancy in female/male earnings is larger at some point of the wage distribution compared to others. Approach: Using data from the Programme for International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) and unconditional quantile regression, this paper examines whether the association between workplace training and wages differs between men and women at different points of the wage distribution across 14 European countries. To partly control for endogeneity in training participation, detailed measures of cognitive skills have been included in the models. Findings: Findings show gender differences in the association between training and wages across the wage distribution. In most countries, results indicate larger training coefficients for women than men at the lower end of the wage spectrum whereas they are larger for men at the top. This pattern holds across most countries with the only exception of Liberal ones, where women benefit less than men across the entire wage spectrum. Conclusions: The findings of this work reveal that distributional variations in returns to workplace training follow a similar pattern across industrialized countries, despite their different institutional settings. Moreover, differences in training coefficients of men and women at different parts of the wage distribution suggest that training could reduce gender wage differences among low earners and potentially widen the gap in wages among individuals at the top of the wage distribution.

This study explores the role of the welfare state in reducing young people not being in education, employment, or training (NEET)s across 15 European countries. Using data from the Survey of Adult Skills in the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) in combination with the Social Expenditure Database, we conducted cross-national analysis to reveal whether the increase in public social spending moderates the risk of being NEET at a young adult age, especially for socially disadvantaged young people. Our results highlighted that the rise of one percentage point of public social spending per gross domestic product, including social expenditure on education, active labor market, and unemployment, is significantly associated with decreasing the odds of being NEET. Furthermore, these social expenditures appeared to lower the NEET risk given socially disadvantaged backgrounds suggesting that young people with low educational levels, whose parents have low educational attainment levels, non-immigrant families, and females are likely to benefit given the robust social protection system. These findings suggest that public social spending may be an effective investment in promoting the social involvement of young people from socially disadvantaged background.

In this study, we investigated factors predictive of disconnection, or not being in education, employment, or training (NEET), among young adults with at least a 2-year college degree. We also explored the extent to which disconnection influences civic participation and well-being among NEETs with and without college degrees. The authors used 2012 and 2015 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) data from the Survey of Adult Skills in the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) for 29 countries, including the United States, along with US 2012 data from the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 (ELS:2002), collected by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). Results highlight that college-educated individuals whose parents have low levels of educational attainment actually have a higher likelihood of becoming NEET relative to college-educated individuals whose parents are more highly educated. Study findings also emphasize the influence of economic and geographic differences (country-level for OECD and county-level for United States) on NEET rates, in addition to the extent to which mothers have a higher likelihood and fathers have a lower likelihood of being NEET relative to their childless peers and the influence of country-level family leave policies on the odds of being NEET across the OECD. College field of study also emerges as an important influence on disconnection across the 29 OECD countries in the study, but not in the United States separately. Finally, comparing results for college-educated NEETs and NEETs without degrees, we found that higher education appears to reduce the likelihood of community disengagement and reports of poor health among NEETs across the OECD countries. However, this is not the case within the United States where NEETs are less likely to be engaged in their communities and more likely to describe themselves as in poor health regardless of their educational attainment.

Education is the core of the factors that improved people for a better lifestyle and increases the level of society' development. Quality education is one of the most vital goals of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) due to actualizing these factors. Using relational network data envelopment analysis (DEA), which have three interrelated substages, this current paper computes the educational economy efficiency of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries bearing in mind the characteristics related to SDGs. The contribution of our study is the use of a novel approach to computing the educational economy efficiency using relational network DEA with GAMS. Even though some interesting differences reveal in the efficiency of the countries, the findings show that countries with high-efficiency scores are clustered around countries like Latvia, Slovenia, and Korea.

This study explores the relation between risk of job automation and participation in adult education and training (AET) and examines variation in that relation across welfare regimes distinguishing between situational and institutional barriers. Using microdata of PIAAC, we analyze participation in formal or nonformal AET for job-related reasons in relation to the risk of automation of the respondents' occupation after controlling for main sociodemographic characteristics. Logistic regression models are run on respondents from 14 European countries representing different welfare regimes: Denmark, Norway, and Sweden (Scandinavian countries); Italy, Greece, and Spain (Southern European); Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Poland (Central and Eastern Europe), Belgium, France, and Germany (Continental); and United Kingdom and Ireland (Anglo-Saxon countries). Our findings confirm that workers in occupations at high risk of automation were found to be consistently less likely to participate in job-related AET, quite irrespective of welfare regime. [The paper was presented at XIII Conferenza Espanet Italia--Il welfare state di fronte alle sfide globali (Venezia, 17 September 2020).]

This study aims to identify the literacy skills of individuals whose highest level of education was in the field 'teacher training and educational sciences'. The study sample comprised 10,618 individuals in the field of teacher training and educational sciences, selected from 31 countries (participating in the International Adult Skills Assessment Programme during the 2014-2015 survey) using a multi-stage sampling method. The study employed multi-level latent class analysis and three-step analysis in order to determine both the number of multi-level latent classes of educators' literacy scores as well as the selected independent variables' success in predicting those latent classes. The analysis revealed that educators in Germany constituted the group with the highest literacy skills while educators from Singapore comprised the group with the lowest literacy skills. [This study was presented at the 9th International Congress of Educational Research. Ordu University, Ordu, Turkey.]

This article models the migration flow of EEA students who graduated from masters and doctoral programmes in UK universities. The increased intra-European mobility of students and graduates is claimed to have crucial positive influence on building Europe's high-skill labour force, which in turn would strengthen its competency in the global knowledge economy. However, the absence of accurate quantitative data on degree-mobile students makes it difficult to track and investigate their post-study mobility patterns. Six one-year extracts from the DLHE dataset were analysed (2011/2012-2016/2017) using cross-classified multilevel modelling in order to investigate which group of EEA graduates were more likely to remain and work in UK, and how the patterns were changing in the long-term. The stay rates of students from four countries (Romania, Bulgaria, Italy, and Greece) were found to have stable growth between 2011/2012 and 2016/2017. Graduates who received degrees in Medicine & Dentistry and Computer Sciences were found to have the highest and the most stable stay rates among all graduates. Multilevel modelling results show that, at domicile-level, the difference between home and host country in GDP per capita could be an effective predictor in analysing student post-graduation movement. At HEI-level, the prestige level of HEI could not effectively predict students' stay rate. At individual-level, students' education background and gender identity were significant in predicting stay rate. Results imply that group effects at neither HEI-level nor domicile-level should be ignored. This study provides an empirical foundation for evidence-based decision-making in a field that is heavily contested in policymaking.

A central objective of schooling processes at the international level is reading skills development. Unfortunately, many students in the European Union underperform at this, and these low performances can be more pronounced in countries with lower Human Development Index (HDI) values. This study analysed the contextual effect of school socioeconomic status (SES) on reading performance using PISA data from 27 countries. We found that school SES had a positive contextual effect on student reading performance, especially countries with lower HDI values, via reading self-competence. However, in middle and higher HDI countries, the contextual effect was smaller, and we did not observe an indirect effect via reading self-competence. We conclude that school SES, rather than student SES, matters the most. Therefore, the modification of school composition and resources might act as a buffer for low student SES, particularly in lower HDI countries.

In large-scale assessments, performance differences across different groups are regularly found. These group differences (e.g., gender differences) are often relevant for educational policy decisions and measures. However, the formation of these group differences usually remains unclear. We propose an approach for investigating this formation by considering behavioral process measures as mediating variables between group membership and performance on the 2012 Programme for International Student Assessment complex-problem solving (CPS) items. We found that across all investigated countries interactive behavior can fully explain gender differences in CPS, but cannot explain differences between students with and without a migration background. However, in some countries these results differ from the cross-country results. Our results indicate that process measures derived from log data are useful for further investigating and explaining performance differences between girls and boys and students with and without migration background.

Given the double risk of exclusion caused for women with a low educational level, adult education can be a fundamental element that allows them to actively participate in their social, political, and cultural environments. Moreover, because educational level has been reported by the scientific literature to be a factor that directly favors personal benefits, such as having better health or greater employability, adult education may be an opportunity to obtain the aforementioned benefits for women with a low educational level. In this study, using the data from the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies survey, a model was developed to perform a structural equation analysis on a sample of 5,838 European women with an educational level of ISCED 0-2 and to investigate the benefits of participating in nonformal education activities. The results show that this participation provides these women with greater social and political confidence, more intense cultural participation and even better health and employability.

Higher education systems globally have seen major increases in women's participation and the overall trend in OECD countries has been a transition from the traditional male majority in enrolments to a substantial female majority. Prompted by a recent reversal of this trend, this paper explores gender differences in participation in higher education in 27 OECD countries between 1971 and 2015. While increased participation by women was thought to be part of the solution to persistent gender inequalities we argue that this is not an inevitable outcome. Our argument is based on an analysis of changes in the gender composition of the student population, using available secondary data. We explore how changing gender differentials are linked to the concurrent massification of HE, changing distribution of enrolments by field of study, changes in sex segregation by field, features of national education systems and wider social structural differences related to gender. Our analysis examines the complex interaction between discipline-specific levels of sex segregation and overall levels of gender parity. We argue that that sex segregation needs to be considered alongside women's long-standing higher participation rates to understand why the latter has not triggered a transformation in the gendered division of labour.

This paper explores linguistic landscapes and the enactment of public visibility and presence of non-majority linguistic groups in EU member states. Non-majority linguistic groups gain power, visibility and presence through the introduction of bilingual or multilingual signposts on roads, streets, squares, and public buildings in towns and cities where a given linguistic group represents a significant population share. The article offers a comparative analysis of language policies of EU member states regarding enactment of official bilingual or multilingual signs in public space. Twenty EU member states have signed the "European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages," while 17 members have ratified it. In addition, the Charter of Fundamental Rights, an integral party of the Lisbon Treaty, stipulates that language diversity is one of the fundamental values respected by the EU. Hence, this comparative research assesses various practices employed by member states in relation to the proclaimed values of multilingualism. Consequently, the paper depicts and compares different language policies that produce linguistic landscapes in EU member states. Finally, it tries to determine whether there is a convergence towards a common EU policy on bilingual and multilingual signs in public space.

This article examines the extent to which parental socioeconomic status (SES) affects the likelihood of a child becoming a top-performing student, offering an international perspective by reporting this relationship in 31 developed countries. The impact of 3 important educational system characteristics (differentiation in terms of early tracking, standardisation, and private schooling) on the relationship between parental SES and top performance was determined. We employed multilevel logistic regression models on data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2015 (N = 216,980) to reveal that children with low parental SES have a lower probability of becoming a top-performing student than those with high parental SES, although this association differs between countries. The negative relationship between a disadvantaged parental background and top performance was not affected by the educational system characteristics under investigation.

This study compares the literacy and numeracy proficiencies of higher education (HE) degree holders in 21 OECD countries based on primary analysis of the national data sets collected via the OECD's Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) 2012 study. The differences in the graduates' average literacy and numeracy proficiencies amongst the OECD countries are substantial. Depending on the country, a smaller or greater proportion of a young highly educated age group does not have sufficient skills in literacy or numeracy to cope with many of the everyday tasks requiring the use of that skill. The PIAAC study challenges existing evaluation practices of the effectiveness of HE in fostering individual skills and puts into perspective the attempts to lift national average skill levels by increasing the HE sector's intake.

This paper explores patterns in participation in adult education and training (AET) by comparing five countries with high participation rates (the Nordic countries and the Netherlands) with three countries with significantly lower participation rates (France, Poland and the Slovak Republic). Using PIAAC data the paper examines differences in the levels of demand for AET as well as variations in barriers to AET participation between the two groups of countries. The demand for AET is higher than the actual participation rate since it includes those who do not participate although they wish to. The demand for AET is substantially higher in countries with high participation rates. Further, the structure and level of barriers is quite similar in the two groups of countries. Countries with low AET participation rate do not have a higher proportion of individuals reporting barriers to AET participation; that they do not participate in AET although they wish to. In both groups of countries demand for AET is strongly associated with the individuals' educational level. The findings are discussed by drawing on previous studies on drivers of and barriers to participation in AET.

"Delayed participation" in higher education (HE) is an increasingly important feature of modern HE systems in many countries. Despite this, surprisingly little empirical research has been undertaken seeking to better understand levels of delayed adult participation in HE across Europe. The present article responds to this gap by analysing country-level data on delayed adult participation in HE across 15 European countries and by modelling associations between participation levels and a range of theoretically derived economic, social, demographic and systemic factors. The findings suggest that there is considerably more cross-national variation in levels of adult delayed participation and that prevalent typologies of HE, such as Trow's, fail to give recognition to the importance of delayed participation. The modelling work finds that social and demographic factors exhibit relatively strong associations with delayed participation in HE. This questions the pre-eminence of economic factors within much of the academic literature, policy discourse and policy activity.