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Purpose: This chapter examines alternative education programs available for Myanmarese migrant youth in Thailand, what these young migrants expect of education, and how these migrant learning centers (MLCs) can help provide more opportunities for migrants.

Methods: This study draws from the data collected through two stages of qualitative research undertaken in Mae Sot, a town that borders Myawaddy, Myanmar in Thailand. Stage one consisted of ethnographic research with the local Myanmarese diaspora when I worked as a volunteer at a community-based organization. In stage two, a series of interviews were conducted with eight faculty members and twenty students enrolled in the secondary school level or vocational training program of three local MLCs.

Findings: The main finding is that even with both inclusive education policies and alternative education options in place, there is still a missing link between the educational attainment of Myanmarese migrant youth and their future prospects. While Thai public education seems to be a pathway to more future opportunities in the host country, it can be a trap when migrant youth cannot make good use of their learned knowledge and Thai language skills in the future due to their irregular status. In contrast with Thai public schools, MLCs offer more than simply education. They also provide scholarship, employment and social welfare assistance to serve the varying needs of young migrants.

Originality: The case of Myanmarese migrants presents a unique study in which the gap between students’ educational attainment and future prospects cannot necessarily be bridged even with a valid work visa scheme in place. Some Myanmarese migrants are displaced individuals who fled from civil wars and without any identification documents. The legal systems enforced by nation-states, such as Thailand, that rely on identification documents to control the flow of population still lack the capacity to adequately address the educational needs and employment opportunities of individuals with irregular status.

Population worldwide has experienced several challenges related to sustainable development, such as scarcity of natural resource, unsustainable consumption, poverty, injustice, violence, social inequality and natural disaster (including floods, tsunami and landslide). These issues interfere in sustainable development and target to achieve societal balance, structuring without compromising economic and environmental resources of future generations. The higher educational institutions are included in this context because they play a role in professional training and in education to promote sustainable practices. The higher educational institutions can assume a prominent position in the 2030 Agenda implementation for sustainable development of the United Nations, especially in the Goals 4 and 10, quality education and reduced inequalities, respectively. The purpose of this research study aims to develop a literature review and analyze the higher educational and sustainable themes, involving the Brazilian scenario.

This research study develops a literature review based on researches that involve higher educational and sustainable themes in the Brazilian scenario. Inclusion criteria are papers in English, with the search equations in their titles, and peer-reviewed papers. Paper publication year was not an exclusion criterion. This research aimed to understand opportunity and challenge processes in the Brazilian higher educational institutions and their actions, so that the Sustainable Development Goals are completely achieved and the 2030 Agenda for sustainable development is fulfilled. For this, a research central question was established: What are the opportunities and the challenges to achieve the 2030 Agenda for sustainable development in the Brazilian higher education?

A total of 636 papers were recovered. The “Higher Education AND Opportunities,” “Higher Education AND Challenge,” “Higher Education AND Challenges,” “Higher Education AND Opportunity,” “Brazilian AND Higher Education” and “Brazil AND Higher Education” search equations found, respectively, 165, 146, 131, 74, 62 and 25 papers, involving 94.8% of the total number of the papers found. The papers recovered enabled the vision of five clusters: policy; inclusion; culture; relationship; and environment, society and economy. The paper analyses found that innovation process, sustainable practical implementation and holistic look, involving professors and students, can allow the 2030 Agenda achievement.

The authors of this research study presented a framework based on the literature analyzed through five clusters: policy; inclusion; culture; relationship; and environment, society and economy, considered from opportunity and challenge perspectives. The authors introduced and discussed the Brazilian higher educations and their opportunities and challenges. The Brazilian panorama was linked with the 2030 Agenda for sustainable development, in specific, with the Goals 4 and 10. Implications of this research study are related to the higher educational opportunities and challenges in policy, inclusive, cultural, sustainable and relationship contexts, involving governmental and nongovernmental sectors, professors and students for the Brazilian educational improvement.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the connections between state education finance distribution models and student achievement. To date, lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of state finance systems have been heard in 45 states; the judicial interpretation of the requirement to provide equality of educational opportunity has led to changes in finance distribution models as well as the implementation of accountability policy.

The study included district level finance and achievement data from five states. Researchers reviewed the relevant judicial interpretation of the finance system, the accountability policy, and the finance distribution system. Next, researchers calculated the equity of both the finance distribution model and measures of student achievement. Finally, an equity ratio was developed and calculated to discern the degree to which state distribution models resulted in equitable measures of student achievement.

Findings reveal that no state has both an equitable system of finance and equitable measures of student achievement. The way that states define proficiency significantly impacts the percentage of students that reach proficiency. This impacts the provision of equality of opportunity.

Traditionally, the measurement of equity has only been applied to finance distribution systems. The authors of this paper have applied these concepts to measures of student achievement and aligned the two concepts with the equity ratio. Since states are charged with providing sufficient resources to enable students to reach proficiency, an understanding of the interaction between resources and achievement is a critical tool in analyzing the provision of equal opportunity.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the inequality of opportunity among Indonesian school-age children from 2002 to 2012. It focuses on the possibilities of accessing basic needs, such as primary education, secondary education, electricity and clean water.

This paper used three interrelated indicators, namely, coverage access rate, dissimilarity index and human opportunity index. It also applied Shapley decomposition to measure the contributions of each determinant of inequality opportunities. These data were obtained from the National Household Survey conducted in 2002-2012.

This study revealed that the level of access to all basic needs, except clean water, was likely to increase with even distribution during the observation period. Moreover, the decomposition results showed that the education of household heads, household income and region (rural-urban) were the main contributors to the total inequality of opportunity.

This study on the inequality of opportunity is interesting, for it is tightly related to inequality of outcome, i.e. income, expenditure and wealth. It is arguable that the inequality of outcome, nowadays, is a reflection of the past inequality in basic opportunities. Thus, the exploration of potential inequality drivers begins to be increasingly important, as it can assist the policymakers in drawing effective policies to repress the increasing trend of future inequality.

Within individual countries, the paths towards increasing educational attainment are not always linear and individuals are not equally affected. Differences between boys’ and girls’ educational attainments are a common expression of this inequality as boys are more often favored for continued schooling. We examine the importance of birth cohort, sibship size, migration, and school accessibility for explaining both the gender gap and its narrowing in secondary schooling in one district in Northeast Thailand between 1984 and 1994. Birth cohort is a significant explanation for the narrowing of the gender gap. Migration, sibship size, and remote village location are important explanations for limited secondary education opportunities, especially for girls.

Educational policies are widely recognized as the means par excellence to equalize opportunities among children with different social and family backgrounds and to promote intergenerational mobility. In this chapter, we focus on the French case and we apply the opportunity equalization criterion proposed by Andreoli, Havnes, and Lefranc (2019) for evaluating the effect of rising compulsory schooling requirements in secondary education. Our results show that such education expansion has a limited redistributive effect on students’ earnings distribution. Nonetheless, we provide evidence of opportunity equalization among groups of students defined by family background circumstances.

The purpose of this paper was to determine the factors that enable entrepreneurial opportunity recognition and the significant role of education and training in enhancing opportunity recognition.

This paper follows a systematic literature review method to answer the research questions. A systematic literature review allows us to determine the work carried out to date, how it was done, assess literature and report all relevant research. The authors have used the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic and Meta-Analysis procedure.

The findings of this study showed that prior knowledge, social networks, external environment, entrepreneurial alertness, creativity, self-efficacy and entrepreneurial passion are the main factors that play a role in the opportunity recognition process. The authors were also able to establish the importance of education and training in enhancing opportunity recognition. Experiential learning is at the forefront of education methods used to improve prior knowledge and experience that directly impact the ability to recognize entrepreneurial opportunities.

The paper provides human resource development practitioners and entrepreneurship educators with factors that determine entrepreneurial opportunity recognition. It pinpoints the factors that can be exploited in enhancing employees and novice entrepreneurs’ ability to recognize viable entrepreneurial opportunities.

Opportunity recognition is recognized as the first step in the entrepreneurship process. Therefore, it is crucial for entrepreneurs to have the ability to recognize opportunities that are viable. Understanding the factors that contribute to a successful opportunity recognition is important. In addition, the role of education and training in opportunity recognition and enhancing entrepreneurial opportunity recognition cannot be overlooked.

In the United States, policy discussions of teacher education in relationship to teacher quality have tended to focus more closely around debates about the nature of teacher preparation and the need for quality teachers to possess advanced degrees or certification. The field is in need of an array of indicators – a set of powerful, well-researched indicators that can be applied to large public universities as well as small regional private colleges, from university-based programs to “alternative” programs and to more “hybrid” programs. These indicators need to be relevant for teacher certification across a variety of age-ranges and developmental stages. In this chapter, we build on a growing conversation about practice in teacher education and efforts on the part of researchers to identify key features of powerful teacher education. We propose that quality teacher education is designed around a clear and shared vision of good teaching; it is coherent in that it links theory with practice and offers opportunities to learn that are aligned with the vision of good teaching; and it offers opportunities to enact teaching. While these features are supported for the most part by growing consensus in the literature (National Research Council, 2010; NCATE, 2010), there is also an emerging empirical base that provides support for the value of these features as well.

In Africa, there is a great desire to achieve social and economic development through a full and proper education and utilization of the abundant human resources available. However, great inequalities in access to education exist for different social classes and for different parts of each African Country. Attempts to equalize opportunities include the introduction of free universal primary education, and the building of boarding primary schools for nomadic tribes; the reduction of secondary school fees; and the establishment or expansion of Federal and regional scholarships, bursaries and loan schemes. There are also admission quota schemes in favour of women and disadvantaged regions. Racial, private and church‐owned schools have been abolished or taken over by the government. Plans have been made for the establishment of large numbers and varieites of educational institutions especially in the rural areas and underdeveloped regions of each country.

The worldwide expansion of higher education participation has destabilised the value of higher education as a currency of opportunity. An increasing number of graduates are experiencing the precarity of unemployment, under-employment and low salaries. This study aimed to investigate how university students in China understand and respond to the changing relationship between higher education and career opportunities.

The research team conducted 100 in-depth interviews with final-year undergraduates at one elite and one lower-tier university in a metropolitan city in Guangdong Province.

The students were acutely aware of fierce competition in the graduate labour market. When asked “what matters most” for post-graduation career prospects, they identified elite universities and high-status fields of study as “traditional” currencies of opportunity. Nonetheless, to stand out in a competitive environment, they perceived a growing need to supplement higher education credentials through university experiences (internships, student governance, study abroad programmes), party membership, personal connections and (overseas) postgraduate education. Moreover, in a “race to the top”, they discussed how qualitatively distinctive university experiences and elite postgraduate education are “new” currencies of opportunity for high-status professional employment.

The study demonstrates how intensified competition for graduate employment can result in an “opportunity trap”. The students were participating in an “arms race” to accumulate positional advantages for their post-graduation careers. The net impact of such efforts on a systemic level is to create an upward spiral in what students are expected to do in preparation for their post-graduation careers and further destabilise the value of higher education as a currency of opportunity.