Search results

This chapter will provide an overview of Bachelor’s degrees into teaching in Scotland. It will consider how policy contexts shaped the original Bachelor degrees in Education (BEd) and more recently how policy discourse and texts have helped to shape the development of the new Bachelor's degrees in Education now on offer in Scotland.

Whilst the traditional Bachelor's degree in Education for many years remained the main undergraduate route for teacher education in Scotland, the publication of ‘Teaching Scotland's Future’ (Donaldson, 2011) recommended a gradual phasing out of the traditional undergraduate degree and the development of a new Bachelor's in Education ‘concurrent’ or ‘combined’ four-year undergraduate route. Donaldson's ‘vision’ of concurrency has been interpreted in many different ways across Scotland's universities resulting in a rich variety of new Bachelor's degrees in Education reflecting a range of structural, contextual, attitudinal and environmental constraints and opportunities which have influenced the nature of ‘concurrency’ at each institution.

The chapter traces how a number of influential policy texts from the 1960s onwards have influenced the repositioning of the new Bachelor degrees, which in turn aimed to broaden student teachers' understanding of teaching in the twenty-first century.

Transitions to and within university studies can be associated with heightened distress in students. This study focusses on the less studied transition from a bachelor’s to a master’s degree. During a master’s degree, study requirements and autonomy increase compared to bachelor’s studies. The present study examines how students’ experiences of study-related burnout, their approaches to learning and their experiences of the teaching and learning environment (TLE) change during this transition. Moreover, the study examines how approaches to learning and the TLE can affect study-related burnout.

Questionnaire data were collected from 335 university students across two timepoints (bachelor’s degree graduation and the second term of their master’s degree).

The results show that students’ overall experience of study-related burnout increases, as does their unreflective learning, characterised by struggling with a fragmented knowledge base. Interestingly, students’ experiences of the TLE seem to have an effect on study-related burnout in both master’s and bachelor’s degree programmes, irrespective of learning approaches. These effects are also dependent on the degree of context.

The study implies that students’ experiences of study-related burnout could be mitigated by developing TLE factors during both bachelor’s and master’s degree programmes. Practical implications are considered for degree programme development, higher education learning environments and student support.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate linkages in US labor market between importance of specific skills, education, or training requirements, and private average salary for occupations not characterized as requiring a bachelor’s degree or higher.

Data set constructed that matches 474 less than bachelor’s occupations to private average salary, education, or training requirements category, and 35 specific skills. Statistical and regression analysis has been done to assess linkages between these variables.

Highest returns associated with cognitive skills, quantitative skills, and other core academic basic skills set followed by traditional blue-collar technical skills. Interpersonal skills and related social skills set exhibited weak, and sometimes negative, association with private average salary by occupation.

Study of only US labor market at single point of time, findings may not generalize to either non US markets or occupations requiring bachelor’s degree or higher.

Workers in the less than bachelor’s labor market have greater upside salary potential if they obtain postsecondary certificates or associates’ degrees and target occupations placing a greater importance on cognitive skills, quantitative skills, and core academic basic skills than if they target traditional blue-collar technical skill occupations.

Social policies to enhance earnings for workers lacking bachelor’s degrees must target improving core generic transferable academic skills as well as vocationally specific training.

This if the first study that links these many specific skills to salary variation across less than bachelor’s occupations.

There seems to be some cognitive dissonance between the rapid growth of entrepreneurship education programs in higher education and the insignificant, if not negative, correlation to new venture creation, especially among the college-aged and recent graduate demographic (Fairlie, Reedy, Morelix, & Russell, 2016; National Chamber Foundation, 2012). Is a bachelor’s degree in entrepreneurship worth it? No, it is argued here that a bachelor’s degree in entrepreneurship is not worth it for a student whose goal is to be an entrepreneur by founding his or her own venture for two main reasons. First, the most important part of an entrepreneur is the set of the dispositional traits that enable them to acquire and operationalize any skill or knowledge quickly, and these cannot be learned through instruction in any degree program. Second, a major in entrepreneurship necessarily means concentrating the majority of study on the diverse, practically infinite, set of possible skills and knowledge needed, at the expense of a deep focus on an area of specialized knowledge from which high quality opportunities can be discovered. Almost any other bachelor’s degree program offers more in terms of opportunity discovery. Given these points, almost any other bachelor’s degree is worth more to a student whose goal is to found a new venture, as they ultimately allow for the discovery of higher quality opportunities for venture creation.

There has been much discussion, but little research about why African American males do not attend and or complete a college education. We examine the alternatives that might reduce or compete with the decision to complete a college education. We analyze the number of men incarcerated, trends in labor force participation, and occupation and wages by educational attainment. We find that even when the number of 18–24-year-old African American males incarcerated increased, the number of 18–24-year-old African American males enrolled in college had a larger increase suggesting that incarceration is not a plausible explanation for the growth rate in degree attainment for African American males. We find that the decrease in the overall percentage and in the percentage of 18–24-year-old African American males reporting employed as their labor force status and the increase in the percentage for these groups reporting not in the labor force and unemployed may have an impact on the college degree completion. Additionally, an increasing percentage of African American males have an associate's or bachelor's degree, but there was a larger percentage change in the percent of African American males with some college. African American males with some college earn significantly less than those with an associate's or bachelor's degree, but earn significantly more than African American women with some college or an associate's degree. This supports Dunn's (1988) finding that African American males do not invest in college because they desire “quick money.” The earnings differential between African American males and females may also explain the degree attainment gap, as it is the African American females with a bachelor's degree that earn significantly more than African American males with some college.

This chapter examines the types of institutions successful at replicating the diversity of the full-time undergraduate population in the diversity of the STEM-discipline degrees awarded. The sample is limited to full-time undergraduate students enrolled at or who are graduates from nonprofit private and public institutions. Relative to their share of the full-time undergraduate population and U.S. population, Asians and whites are overrepresented and blacks and Hispanics were underrepresented in the STEM – discipline bachelor's degree population. Private doctorate and public bachelor's and public master's comprehensive degrees–granting institutions were more successful than their counterparts at replicating the diversity of the full-time undergraduate population in the diversity of the STEM-discipline degrees awarded. Historically Black College and Universities (HBCUs) were the most successful at replicating this diversity. These findings were consistent over the time period analyzed.

Education system stimulates the development of human capital and provides informative signaling allowing to differentiate productivity of individuals. If education system is efficient then higher levels of education usually associated with greater returns on labor market. To evaluate the efficiency of Russian education system we aim to estimate the effect of vocational education and different levels of higher education on wages.

We use data on 8,764 individuals in the years 2019–2021. Our statistical approach addresses two critical issues: nonrandom selection into employment and the endogeneity of education choice. To tackle these problems, we employed Heckman’s method and its extension that is a structural model which addresses the issue of self-selection into different levels of education.

The results of the analysis suggest that there is a significant heterogeneity in the returns to different levels of education. First, higher education, in general, offers substantial wage premiums when compared to vocational education. Specifically, individuals with specialist’s and bachelor’s degrees enjoy higher wage premiums of approximately 23.59–24.04% and 16.43–16.49%, respectively, compared to those with vocational education. Furthermore, we observe a significant dis-parity in returns among the various levels of higher education. Master’s degree provides a substantial wage premium in comparison to both bachelor’s (19.79–20.96%) and specialist’s (12.64–13.41%) degrees. Moreover, specialist degree offers a 7.16–7.55% higher wage premium than bachelor’s degree.

We identify a hierarchical pattern in the returns associated with different levels of higher education in Russia, specifically “bachelor-specialist-master.” These findings indicate that each level of education in Russia serves as a distinct signal in the labor market, facilitating employers' ability to differentiate between workers. From a policy perspective, our results suggest the potential benefits of offering opportunities to transition from specialist’s to master’s degrees on a tuition-free basis. Such a policy may enhance access to advanced education and potentially lead to higher returns for individuals in the labor market.

There are many studies on returns to higher education in Russia. However, just few of them estimate the returns to different levels of higher education. Also, these studies usually do not address the issue of the endogeneity arising because of self-selection into different levels of education. Our structural econometric model allows addressing for this issue and provides consistent estimates of returns to different levels of education under the assumption that individuals with higher propensity to education obtain higher levels of education.

Since the first enslaved Africans arrived in America, there has been a dialogue about if, how and what “the Negro” should be taught. This discussion became more important with the emancipation of approximately 3 million slaves, more than 90 percent of whom are believed to have been illiterate. The general sentiment of Southerners about the education of blacks is evident in The Southern Planter and Farmer, where a Virginian named Bebbet Puryear, writing under the pseudonym “Civis,” wrote:I oppose [education for blacks] because it is a policy that is cruelty in the extreme to the Negro himself. It instills in his mind that he is competent to share in the higher walks of life, prompts him to despise those menial pursuits to which his race has been doomed, and invites him to enter into competition with the white man for those tempting prizes that can be won only by a higher order of administrative talent than the negro has ever developed. (Lucas p. 159)

We focus our study on children of immigrants in science, technology, math, and engineering (STEM) fields because children of immigrants represent a diverse pool of future talent in those fields. We posit that children of immigrants may have a higher propensity to prepare for entering STEM fields, and our analysis finds some evidence to support this conjecture. Using the National Education Longitudinal Study (NELS: 88-00) and its restricted postsecondary transcript data, we examine three key milestones in the STEM pipeline: (1) highest math course taken during high school, (2) initial college major in STEM, and (3) bachelor’s degree attainment in STEM. Using individual level NELS data and country-level information from UNESCO and NSF, we find that children of immigrants of various countries of origin, with the exception of Mexicans, are more likely than children of natives to take higher-level math courses during high school. Asian and white children of immigrants are more likely to complete STEM degrees than third-generation whites. Drawing on theories of immigrant incorporation and cultural capital, we discuss the rationales for these patterns and the policy implications of these findings.

Service-learning (SL) is an innovative methodology aiming to improve learning while providing students experiences in the community. Consequently, students also develop social and emotional skills many higher education institutions promise to foster. However, few academic enrichment opportunities are implemented to develop these social skills and university teaching staff are limited in their knowledge of SL to promote active citizenship and civic engagement (Belando-Montoro, Jover, Ruiz de Miguel, Blanco, & Carrasco, 2015). This chapter presents an analysis of the presence of direct and indirect indicators related to social responsibility and SL in the degree programs of the Social and Legal Sciences area of the Complutense University of Madrid. These indicators include questions related to the social environment needs diagnosis and the design of projects that meet these needs, the environmental care, among others. The results indicate the lack of presence of courses on the direct indicators in the degrees offered. However, the focus on indirect indicators is relatively common. In particular, those common indirect indicators are related to critical thinking about social reality, the environment needs diagnosis, and the development of social intervention. The findings suggest universities increase their focus on social responsibility and community service in the university curriculum, providing training oriented toward socio-community intervention.