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Can having more education than a job requires reduce one’s chances of being offered the job? We study this question in a sample of applications to jobs that are posted on an urban Chinese website. We find that being overqualified in this way does not reduce the success rates of university-educated jobseekers applying to college-level jobs, but that it does hurt college-educated workers’ chances when applying to jobs requiring technical school, which involves three fewer years of education than college. Our results highlight a difficult situation faced by the recent large cohort of college-educated Chinese workers: They seem to fare poorly in the competition for jobs, both when pitted against more-educated university graduates and less-educated technical school graduates.

Utilizing work task data drawn from the OECD’s Survey of Adult Skills of 2011–2012 and 2014–2015, we derive a new skills-based indicator of graduate jobs, termed ISCO(HE)2008, for 31 countries. The indicator generates a plausible distribution of graduate occupations and explains graduates’ wages and job satisfaction better than hitherto existing indicators. Unlike with the traditional classifier, several jobs in major group 3 “Technicians and Associate Professionals” require higher education in many countries. Altogether, almost a third of labor is deployed in graduate jobs in the 31 countries, but with large cross-national differences. Industry and establishment-size composition can account for some of the variation. In addition, two indicators of the relative quality of the higher education system also contribute to the variation in the prevalence of graduate jobs across countries.

In Saudi Arabia, quality management receives a significant amount of attention in higher education. In medical education, specifically, Saudi colleges have been fully engaged with quality assurance and accreditation since 1992, under the supervision of the Saudi Council for Health Specialties. Along with the quality standards determined by accreditation agencies, the perspective of employers on the quality of learning and teaching needs to be acknowledged. The needs of medical employers can be translated into quality standards for medical education to help overcome the perceived deficiencies which lead to poorly equipped graduates. This chapter explores how employers conceptualize quality in medical education with an emphasis on learning and teaching and employers’ perspectives on the quality attributes of medical graduates. This chapter is based on interviews with 14 medical employers in Saudi Arabia. From the employers’ perspective, a high-quality medical education is marked by high quality educational systems, curricula, faculty members, and medical training. Additionally, medical graduates must attain a balance of soft skills, practical and clinical skills, and theoretical medical knowledge. Understanding employers’ perspectives on quality in medical education will complement our existing understanding of quality in medical education.

This chapter uses a college-by-graduate degree fixed effects estimator to evaluate the returns to 19 different graduate degrees for men and women. We find substantial variation across degrees, and evidence that OLS overestimates the returns to degrees with the highest average earnings and underestimates the returns to degrees with the lowest average earnings. Second, we decompose the impacts on earnings into effects on wage rates and effects on hours. For most degrees, the earnings gains come from increased wage rates, though hours play an important role in some degrees, such as medicine, especially for women. Third, we estimate the net present value and internal rate of return for each degree, which account for the time and monetary costs of degrees. Finally, we provide descriptive evidence that satisfaction gains are large for some degrees with smaller economic returns, such as education and humanities degrees, especially for men.

Higher education and student affairs professionals have a very important, active role in the lives of their students. The issues college students face are complex and higher education professionals must be properly trained to be able to address them (Franklin-Craft, 2010). Projections that by 2030 most college students in the United States will be non-White increase the responsibility of those working in higher education to truly understand the developmental issues of a diverse student body (Karkouti, 2015; Rankin & Reason, 2005; Torres, Howard-Hamilton, & Cooper, 2003).

This chapter highlights findings of a study that examined the multicultural competence of graduate students in a higher education program. Employing a snowball sampling method, completed surveys were received from 28 master and doctoral students out of 45 surveys distributed (response rate = 62%). Responses on the Multicultural Competence in Student Affairs – Preliminary 2 Scale (MCSA-P2) were also examined by race, gender, and other pertinent variables. The findings from this research indicate the need for infusing diversity into the curriculum and requiring diversity courses to increase the cultural competence of graduate students in higher education programs. The findings also support the need and call for additional research and analyses to be conducted on multicultural competence of higher education/student affairs professionals. Implications for graduate programs in higher education and reflexivity of the researcher conclude the chapter.

Much rhetoric around the construct of a work-ready graduate has focused on the technical abilities of students to fulfill the expectations of the future workplace. Efforts have been made to extend from the technical skills (e.g., skills in calculation for engineers) to include soft or behavioral skills (e.g., communication). However, within previous models of understanding of the work-ready graduate there has been little done to explore them as critical moral agents within the workplace. That is, whilst the focus has been on being work-ready, it is argued here that in current and future workplaces it is more important for university graduates to be profession-ready. Our understanding of the profession-ready graduate is characterized by the ability to demonstrate capacities in critical thinking and reflection, and to have an ability to navigate the ethical challenges and shape the organizational culture of the future workplace.

This chapter aims to explore a movement of thinking away from simply aspiring to develop work-ready graduates, expanding this understanding to argue for the development of profession-ready graduates. The chapter begins with an exploration of the debates around the characteristics of being work-ready, and through a consideration of two professional elements: professional identity and critical moral agency, argues for a reframing of work-readiness towards professional-readiness. The chapter then considers the role of work-integrated learning (WIL) in being able to support the development of the profession-ready graduate.

In an ever-interconnected world dominated by discourses on the internationalization and marketization of higher education, concerns related to language and employability have been the focus of recent debates. There is, however, a dearth of research investigating how these dimensions relate to one another in recent comparative and international higher education research. By focusing on how issues related to language and employability have been presented in recent higher education research worldwide, this chapter aims to contribute to our understanding of this concern. To achieve this goal, we conducted a scoping literature review using the Web of Science, Scopus, and the Education Resources Information Center (ERIC) databases, considering the years 2011–2020. The findings, perhaps not surprisingly, suggested that language skills are perceived to be valued by both graduates and employers though the discussions predominantly focused on one language, English. The research focus on English for employability in Anglophone contexts is understandable. However, the fact that the trend is observed in contexts where the language is not the primary or official language seems to indicate the influence of internationalization of higher education and global labor markets primarily dominated by English. The literature also suggested that (English) language training in higher education programs needs to move from solely linguistic and qualification-related content areas to a broader sphere of English for communication purposes that cover both specialized disciplinary content and broader generic employability skills. Considering this finding, we suggest that higher education systems and institutions incorporate recent developments in English for occupational purposes in their curriculum. We also recommend that there needs to be a shift from the overwhelmingly English language-dominated discussions to more inclusive research that assesses the impact of other dominant languages on employability-related concerns.

For generations, higher education in much of Sub-Saharan Africa has been disengaged from the problems of local communities largely due to the design of colonial education and the later thinking of industrial models of education where knowledge was received from experts at the top of the knowledge ladder. But new knowledge economics, the possibility of building collective learning frameworks and the need to solve globally linked problems that involve local communities is changing this thinking. Globally linked problems such as disease, environment, social and political stability and globalisation manifest locally and create challenges locally in various ways. This chapter explores the leadership of Zambia’s flagship university in serving the needs of local communities’ sustainable development with research and service resources of its graduate education system and its network. Understanding that knowledge is now formed both by collectives of people at the community level that is linked through major networks, it is particularly important that universities take a leadership role in building linkages to local communities. Specifically, leadership in the following community linkage areas are examined: community service schemes, consultancy services, research and project partnerships, community field tours and capacity development.

The focus of this chapter is to compare and contrast two Master of Education programs, one in Louisiana, United States, the other in Ontario, Canada. Our discussion addresses program design including focus of the graduate degree; admission requirements; number of instructor contact hours; nature and dimensions of course content; culminating activities such as e-portfolios, Master's Research Projects, field experiences, internships, and theses; professional and program standards; as well as assessment procedures and accountability requirements. The ongoing pressure to improve our schools in an increasingly competitive global environment has heightened educational standards and expectations as never before (Cowie & Crawford, 2007). In these times of increased accountability and financial strain for publicly funded universities, this analysis of contemporary trends and processes may provide some relevant insight into current practices for those presenting graduate programs.