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Tertiary education in the Anglophone Caribbean, particularly in Jamaica, has become highly competitive and complex and increasingly influenced by global neoliberal discourses. This free-market driven development is partly evidenced by the proliferation of national, regional, and international providers. Yet, within this seemingly unrelenting international influence, one can also detect more recent approaches by regional governments in concert and individually, through policy and systems of governance to reassert their sovereignty and retain some level of regulation and ownership of tertiary education. This chapter establishes an analytical framework for understanding these tertiary education governance changes by drawing on the principles of critical educational policy analysis. The chapter scrutinizes the multiple sources of power, international, regional, and national, that shape the rapid ongoing tertiary educational changes. Ultimately, the chapter argues that Jamaica’s tertiary education governance can be categorized as a shift from the governance mechanisms of “growth driven” to “regulatory control.” The chapter further posits that future regional shifts in tertiary education governance will be shaped by the continuing postcolonial struggles to adapt to the global order while protecting regional and national interests and aspirations.

Today, the global education market is one of the faster growing sectors, and it has attracted several new actors or what we call educational brokers who are now responsible for shaping national agendas. The newer actors in education are vastly different for the former players in that whereas previous actors engrossed national educational systems through the provision of technical assistance to meet international standards, best practices, and benchmarks, these newer players are for-profit entities that emphasize austerity, leanness, human resource maximization, performance targets, and competition. Therefore, in this new educational landscape, national governments are seen as “clients” who receive “expert” advice from “external consultants” that have an assortment of experiences across different sectors. Education governance is no longer a statist endowed but one that incubates in laborites of best practices resonates with existing case studies and results driven based on Big Date collected. We argue that educational brokers are responsible for the emergence of a hybrid form of education governance that use business and market techniques to reform strategies within the education sector. We conclude by suggesting that collectively educational brokers are using what we call “educational sub-prime mechanisms” – higher interest rates, reduced quality collateral, and less advantageous terms to counterweight higher credit risk – to manage educational portfolios and newer forms of educational risk.

The collapse of the Soviet Union had major ramifications for the small developing countries of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) as 3 of the then 13 countries experimented with strands of socialism, festering political fragmentation/ideological pluralism regionally. As the rivets of the Iron Curtain came unfastened, the emerging markets of CARICOM were forced to rethink their geopolitical positions while reforming their national educational systems. This chapter examines how the dissolution of socialism in the former socialist countries of Southeast/Central Europe and the former Soviet Union created a reform atmosphere across CARICOM countries. CARICOM's response to the impact of 1989 lies in how it spent the 1980s dealing with the 1973–1974 oil crises, ideological pluralism, and the subsequent imposition of Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) under the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. The successive degeneration of ideological pluralism within CARICOM countries caused by the simultaneous collapse of cooperative socialism in Guyana, revolutionary socialism in Grenada, and democratic socialism in Jamaica paved the way for post-socialist transformations regionally. This chapter considers how the policy process of functional cooperation – the non-economic policy mechanism upon which CARICOM seeks to integrate its members – facilitates the policy tool of lesson-drawing to take place between member states while laying the foundation for post-socialist change across CARICOM. Using data from the educational policies of 10 countries, this chapter illustrates how CARICOM members used the global policy alterations of 1989 as a reference point to reform their educational systems. Educational reforms occurred as member states drew lessons from each other – in the form of cross-national consultations – guided by the policy process of functional cooperation.

Research on job precarity and job instability have largely neglected the labor market trajectories in which these employment and non-employment situations are experienced. This study addresses the mechanisms of volatility and precarity in observed work histories of labor market entrants using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth of 1997. Several ideal-typical post-education pathways are modeled for respondents entering the labor force between 1997 and 2010, with varying indicators and degrees of precarity. A series of predictive models indicate that women, racial-ethnic minorities, and lower social class labor market entrants are significantly more likely to be exposed to the most precarious early careers. Moreover, leaving the educational system with a completed associate’s, bachelor’s, or post-graduate degree is protective of experiencing the most unstable types of career pattern. While adjusting for these individual-level background and education variables, the findings also reveal a form of “scarring” as regional unemployment level is a significant macro-economic predictor of experiencing a more hostile and turbulent early career. These pathways lead to considerable earnings penalties 5 years after labor market entry.

“It should also be noted that the objective of convergence and equal distribution, including across under-performing areas, can hinder efforts to generate growth. Contrariwise, the objective of competitiveness can exacerbate regional and social inequalities, by targeting efforts on zones of excellence where projects achieve greater returns (dynamic major cities, higher levels of general education, the most advanced projects, infrastructures with the heaviest traffic, and so on). If cohesion policy and the Lisbon Strategy come into conflict, it must be borne in mind that the former, for the moment, is founded on a rather more solid legal foundation than the latter” European Commission (2005, p. 9)Adaptation of Cohesion Policy to the Enlarged Europe and the Lisbon and Gothenburg Objectives.

This study seeks to ascertain whether there are regional gender differences in vocational education in Bulgaria at the upper secondary level and to shed more light on the main factors for the (non-)emergence of these differences. The research has drawn on data from the National Statistical Institute and the Centre for Information in Education in Bulgaria as well as a nationally representative school-leavers survey (2014); it has applied descriptive statistics and multilevel modelling for the data analysis. Overall, the present study demonstrates that the regional dimension is indispensable for understanding the development of vocational education and gender differentiation in education. The analysis provides evidence that the mechanism by which the education system contributes to regional gender segregation in vocational education is its opportunity structures at the regional level, which are related to vocational education offers. In addition, we found a positive association between industrial development and the share of women in engineering at the regional level.

The objective of this chapter is to identify the key characteristics of Global Services businesses that will thrive and achieve success in the future. These factors are integrated into three main pillars, which we refer to as the Triple-Win. The first and most obvious pillar is technology as a tool. The second pillar is the design and sustainability of the business model, without which the previous factor would be merely a cost and not an investment. And last but not the least, there is the purpose which gives meaning to the proposal, focusing on the human being and their environment. The DIDPAGA business model sits at the intersection of these three elements.