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With many countries having reached universal primary and secondary education, parents are increasingly investing in private tutoring as a means of ensuring that their children attend the best schools and universities. However, unlike the returns to years of schooling and effects of school quality on student achievement, the effects of spending on private tutoring have received limited attention. This chapter studies the impact of tutoring on higher educational outcomes using exogenous variation in tutoring expenditure caused by the imposition of a curfew on the operating hours of tutoring institutes in Korea. The estimated effects of the curfew highlight the severity of the college entrance rat race, with a 10 p.m. curfew constraining tutoring expenditure and increasing sleeping hours. I find diminishing marginal effects of tutoring on college entrance and positive effects on degree completion while the impact on college major followed varies across disciplines.

This paper uses data from the 1979 and 1997 National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth to estimate the changing returns to cognitive and non-cognitive skills with respect to college completion, and quantifies the extent to which gender differences in these skills are driving the college gender gap. The use of two distinct college graduation cohorts allows a dynamic analysis of the widening female advantage in college graduation. I decompose the increase in the college gender gap into three pertinent categories of measurable attributes: family background, cognitive skills, and non-cognitive skills (captured by school suspensions, behavioral problems, and legal infractions). A second decomposition is applied to the change in the gap between the two periods. The results show that roughly half of the observed college graduation gender gap in the NLSY97 is due to female advantages in observable characteristics, and roughly half is “unexplained”: due to gender differences in the coefficients. With respect to the change in the gap, approximately 29% of the difference in differences is the “explained” component, attributed to changes in the relative characteristics of men and women. In particular, declining non-cognitive skills in men are associated with about 14% of the increase in the gender gap.

Introduction Since 1949, when the Chinese Communists took over the mainland China and the Nationalists fled to Taiwan, many changes have taken place in almost every respect on the island. Among the changes, the development of higher education has been one of the most noticeable. In 1945, when the island was first restored to the Nationalist Chinese from the Japanese, there were only four institutions of higher learning. All were publicly supported. Private colleges and universities had not been established prior to 1945 due to the suppressive colonial policy of the Japanese in Taiwan. In addition, students of native origin, with very few exceptions, were barred from entering law school or pursuing the social sciences. As a consequence, most of the students went into areas such as agriculture, engineering and medicine.

The impact of academic and school-related factors on college readiness, aspirations, and access has been examined frequently within the literature (Barber & Torney-Purta, 2008; Polite, 1994; Taliaferro & DeCuir-Gunby, 2008; Uwah, McMahon, & Furlow, 2008; Wimberly, 2002; Yun & Kurlaender, 2004). Several factors related to school racial composition and perceived school support (Yun & Kurlaender, 2004), school relationships (Wimberly, 2002), gaps in exposure to college preparatory and advanced placement curriculums (Taliaferro & DeCuir-Gunby, 2008), teacher perceptions (Barber & Torney-Purta, 2008), and structural inequalities (Polite, 1994) have been identified as variables that significantly impact the opportunities for African-American children to be exposed to the types of interpersonal relationships and educational experiences necessary for preparing them to succeed in postsecondary education.

Building on my earlier work (Dang, 2007, 2008), this chapter provides an updated review of the private tutoring phenomenon in Vietnam including the reasons, scale, intensity, form, cost, and legality of these classes. In particular, this chapter offers a comparative analysis of the trends in private tutoring between 1998 and 2006 using all available data.

This chapter analyzes data from different sources, including (i) the 2006 Vietnam Household Living Standards Measurement Survey (VHLSS), (ii) the 1997–1998 Vietnam Living Standards Measurement Survey (VLSS), (iii) the 2008 Vietnam Household Testing Survey (VHTS), and (iv) local press in Vietnam. Quantitative methods are used.

Several (micro-)correlates are examined that are found to be strongly correlated with student attendance at tutoring, including household income, household heads’ education and residence areas, student current grade level, ethnicity, and household sizes. In particular, I focus on the last three variables that received little attention in the previous literature on the determinants of tutoring.

This chapter provides an updated and systematic review of the private tutoring phenomenon in Vietnam. Findings are highly relevant to the ongoing debates on private tutoring among all stakeholders in Vietnam, as well as policymakers/researchers in other countries. Suggestions are proposed on current gaps in the literature for future research.

This chapter focuses on policy efforts to improve college access in India and Brazil, which utilize affirmative action in higher education for historically marginalized groups. We compare structural factors impacting access to higher education for marginalized groups in India and Brazil, placing these factors in their respective historical contexts. We apply the concepts of intersectionality and interest convergence from critical race theory (CRT) not only to draw attention to how race, caste, and socioeconomic status converge to affect access for historically marginalized groups but also to further an understanding of how elites can maintain their hegemony even in the face of policies intended to achieve social justice.

The No Child Left Behind Act (2002) and Race to the Top (2009) led to the highest rate of standardized-state testing in the history of the United States of America. As a result, the Every Student Succeeds Act (2015) aims to reevaluate standardized-state testing. Previous research has assessed its impact on schools, educators, and students; yet, youth’s voices are almost absent. Therefore, this qualitative analysis examines how youth of color perceive and experience standardized-state testing.

Seventy-three youth participated in a semistructured interview during the summer of 2015. The sample consists of 34 girls and 39 boys, 13–18 years of age, of African American, Latino/a, Jamaican American, multiracial/ethnic, and other descent. It includes 6–12th graders who attended 61 inter-district and intra-district schools during the 2014–2015 academic year in a Northeastern metropolitan area in the United States that is undergoing a racial/ethnic integration reform.

Youth experienced testing overload under conflicting adult authorities and within an academically stratified peer culture on an ever-shifting policy terrain. While the parent-adult authority remained in the periphery, the state-adult authority intrusively interrupted the teacher-student power dynamics and the disempowered teacher-adult authority held youth accountable through the “attentiveness” rhetoric. However, youth’s perspectives and lived experiences varied across grade levels, school modalities, and school-geographical locations.

In this adult-dominated society, the market approach to education reform ultimately placed the burden of teacher and school evaluation on youth. Most importantly, youth received variegated messages from their conflicting adult authorities that threatened their academic journeys.

Higher education has been faced with some of the same problems that have triggered widescale lay‐offs in industry. This article is an account of how one university engaged in organisational development interventions to retrain and reassign 58 dislocated faculty members and set up a humane outplacement programme for another 110 faculty. Tracking of faculty who participated in outplacement efforts indicated a 94 per cent success rate, defined as securing employment in another position which was enjoyed as much as or more than employment at the university.

Racial and ethnic diversity and the attendant challenges and benefits of multiculturalism in society are a worldwide phenomenon. As higher education is often the training ground for future social and political leaders, as well as the primary institution charged with the study of social problems, the educational benefits, and challenges of diversity in society are particularly relevant to institutions of higher learning. This chapter synthesizes the ongoing empirical research on the educational impact of racially and ethnically diverse university environments in a U.S. context and offers a framework of institutional practices based on that work to help administrators both respond to challenges and better harness-related benefits for all students.