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This study aims to analyze the wage differentials of the majors in college education in Turkey, which is a country implementing an ongoing expansion in college education in recent years.

The study implements Mincreian wage regression using ordinary least squares, Heckman two-step estimation and quantile regression with sample selection correction by using household labor force surveys of TurkStat from the years 2014–2017.

The findings indicate one of the highest heterogeneity, close to 0.50 log points, between majors in the literature. The within-heterogeneity created by majors is highest among the graduates of social-behavioral sciences, law, biology, physics, mathematics, statistics, computer, engineering and manufacturing, as shown by a 90–10 difference, which is almost 700% for some of these majors. This study shows that the natural science and technical majors that are expected to be more productive and to be paid more fall behind in the wage distribution.

Estimation results show that natural science majors, except for subjects allied to medicine and engineering, are paid lower than law and service-sector-related majors. This indicates that the predictions of the skill-biased technical change hypothesis are not valid in the wage profiles in Turkey and that some majors supply more than the sectoral needs. This casts doubts on the effectiveness of the ongoing higher education expansion process of the country.

This study contributes to the literature on wage differentials of college majors, an area with limited studies. This is the first study analyzing wage differentials of the field of studies by correcting sample selection bias for the Turkish case.

The objective of this chapter is to explain how an innovation-driven economic development model can help to mitigate corruption and facilitate competitiveness in Nigeria.

With the use of descriptive narratives, Nigeria was examined in comparison with other countries such as South Korea. The chapter argues that Nigeria has not experienced development as much as South Korea because of her primary dependence on crude oil for economic sustenance.

Evidence from the statistics showed that innovation-driven economies are more competitive and less corrupt compared to natural resource-driven economies such as Nigeria. Nigeria has performed poorly in terms of competitiveness, transparency, and governance owing to her dependence on natural resources as a major means for economic sustenance.

Helps to explain why an innovation-driven economic development model is the solution to mitigating corruption and facilitating competitiveness in Nigeria.

This chapter draws on findings from a comparative, qualitative research project investigating the decision-making of different groups of English higher education students in central England as they graduated from a Russell group university (46 interviewees) and a Post-92 university (28 interviewees). Half of the students graduated in 2014 (lower tuition fees regime) and the other half graduated in 2015 (higher tuition fees regime). The students interviewed were sampled by socio-economic background, gender, degree subject/discipline and secondary school type. Semi-structured interviews were used to explore students’ future plans and perceptions of their future job prospects. Despite higher debt levels, the 2015 sample of Russell Group graduates from lower socio-economic backgrounds had a positive view of their labour market prospects and a high proportion had achieved either a graduate job or a place on a postgraduate course prior to graduation. This group had saved money whilst studying. The 2015 sample of Post-1992 University graduates (from both lower and average socio-economic backgrounds) were worried about their level of debt, future finances and labour market prospects. This chapter raises questions about whether a fairer university finance system, involving lower levels of debt for graduates from less advantaged backgrounds, might avoid some graduates’ transitions to adulthood being so strongly influenced by financial anxieties.

The basic structure of Korea's formal education system is 6-3-3-4. This school system, which was established soon after its independence from Japan after World War II, has not been changed very much until recently. Primary education covers grades 1–6. Kindergarten has not been a part of the official school system until now, although making it a part of the pubic school system has been under discussion for some years. In the secondary education sector, there are two levels of schools: middle schools covering grades 7–9, and high schools covering grades 10–12. After 12 years of formal education, students advance to higher education. Typically, undergraduate degree (B.A. or B.S.) takes four years.

The purpose of this paper is to construct soft-skill indicators and measure their effects on graduates’ earnings using survey data from a sample of master’s degree graduates in France.

The authors use a quantile analysis to measure the effects of soft skills on income.

Certain soft skills explain a proportion of the earnings of recent master’s graduates. In particular, they influence the highest salaries and are important for the most highly skilled jobs.

Most of these soft skills are measured using declarative responses and may result from the feeling of having skills rather than actually possessing the skill. Moreover, this paper only looks at graduates who are employed, and a deficit in soft skills may be more penalising for job seekers.

While some young people take advantage of soft skills early and benefit from them in the labour market, it is likely that it is even more important for those less endowed with these skills to further develop them before entering the labour market.

This research illustrates the heterogeneous nature of the skills that young post-secondary graduates acquire. French diplomas do not seem to homogenise all of the skills that young people develop through their academic and professional experiences.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on the implications of the gender wage gap in Australia, before considering policy responses and their effectiveness at both the government and workplace levels.

The method concerns an extensive literature review and an examination of secondary data and reports relating to workplace gender equality and data.

While the gender wage gap in most OECD countries has decreased over time, in Australia the gap has increased, with the largest contributory factor identified as gender discrimination. Consequently it is proposed that current policy responses supporting women in the workplace appear to be ineffective in closing gender wage gaps.

Further research is recommended to identify the impact of gender equality policies on hiring decisions and whether such decisions include an unwillingness to hire or promote women. As findings were based on secondary data, it is recommended that future research include workplace surveys and case studies.

It is suggested that articles such as this one can assist in guiding public policy and workplace decisions on gender wage equality issues, in addition to providing human resource leaders with the information to make better decisions relating to gender equality.

This paper suggests that current policy responses may not only be ineffective in closing the gender wage gap, but may even exacerbate it as employers may avoid hiring women or continue to pay them less than men, due to costs incurred when attempting to meet policy directives.

This chapter is an examination of the recent history of access for marginalized racial and socioeconomic groups to the United States’ most selective institutions of higher education, including Washington University in St. Louis (WUSTL). Utilizing WUSTL as a case study, we review the university’s place in this narrative from the Black Manifesto and the 1968 sit-in in Brookings Hall to the school’s current effort to shed its status as the nation’s least socioeconomically diverse institution as determined by the fraction of undergraduates receiving Pell grants. Through this exploration of the trend toward the diversification of admissions pools in elite higher education, the chapter concludes with the acknowledgment that selective universities in the United States have the opportunity to significantly impact the country’s racial and socioeconomic disparities.

Higher education researchers are often challenged by the difficulty of empirically validating causal links posited by theories or inferred from correlational observations. The instrumental variable (IV) estimation strategy is one approach that researchers can use to estimate the causal impact of various higher education–related interventions. In this chapter, we discuss how the body of quantitative research specifically devoted to higher education has made use of the IV estimation strategy: we describe how this estimation strategy was used to address causality concerns and provide examples of the types of IVs that were used in various subfields of higher education research. Our discussion is based on a systematic review of a corpus of econometric studies on higher education–related issues that spans the last 30 years. The chapter concludes with a critical discussion of the use of IVs in quantitative higher education research and a discussion of good practices when using an IV estimation strategy.