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The purpose of this paper is to compare the social background of Norwegian and Swedish police students. Are there differences in the students’ social background, and if so, are such differences reflected in different attitudes and career plans among the students?

The questions are explored on the basis of survey data on all Norwegian and Swedish police students who started their education in 2009 (n=737). The methods employed are cross-tabular analysis and multivariate linear regression.

The results show that a larger proportion of Norwegian police students have highly educated parents, compared to the Swedish. However, students’ social background does not seem to be important for their orientation towards theory and knowledge or their plans for doing operational police work.

An important question for the future's police educators is whether a study with a formal bachelor status will attract a different type of students. These results show that the Norwegian police education with a formal bachelor degree attracts more students with highly educated parents, but the importance of attracting students with a given social background to the police profession seems to be limited.

There are no previous comparative studies on recruitment to police education, or studies of police recruitment that focus especially on the importance of social background.

As students increasingly incur debt to finance their undergraduate education, there is heightened concern about the long-term implications of loans on borrowers, especially borrowers from low socioeconomic backgrounds. Drawing upon the concepts of cultural capital and habitus (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977), this research explores how student debt and social class intersect and affect individuals’ trajectory into adulthood. Based on 50 interviews with young adults who incurred $30,000–180,000 in undergraduate debt and who were from varying social classes, the findings are presented in terms of a categorization schema (income level by level of cultural capital) and a conceptual model of borrowing. The results illustrate the inequitable payoff that college and debt can have for borrowers with varying levels of cultural resources, with borrowers from low-income, low cultural capital backgrounds more likely to struggle throughout and after college with their loans.

In China, a growing awareness that many areas have been left behind during an era characterized by market reform has raised concerns about the impact of community disadvantage on schooling. In this paper, I investigate whether villages exert distinct influences on student achievement. Building on these results, I explore the relationship between student achievement and resources present in the community. Results indicate that children who live in communities with higher levels of economic and social resources have higher mathematics scores, on average.

Over the past two decades, scholars have noted an increasing global convergence in the policy and practice of education that predominantly contains Western ideals of mass schooling serving as a model for national school systems (Bieber & Martens, 2011; Goldthorpe, 1997; Spring, 2008). A number of transnational organizations contribute disproportionately to global educational discourse, particularly the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) through its international comparative performance measure, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). This study conducted a critical discourse analysis of the OECD document PISA 2012 Results: Excellence through Equity (OECD, 2013) to examine the ways that PISA and the OECD conceive of educational equity in a global context. Given the growing convergence of global educational policy, the way that transnational educational organizations address equity has crucial implications for the ways that the world intervenes in schooling to promote or diminish equitable outcomes. Analysis revealed that the OECD and the PISA foreground economistic notions of educational equity, which diminishes the role of other factors (i.e., race/ethnicity, gender, immigration status, language) that mediate equity in schools. Findings and implications are discussed.

On the theoretical level, this chapter examines the mechanisms through which cultural and financial capital affects educational outcomes in different institutional contexts. On the methodological level, the central question in this chapter is how to resolve concerns in comparative analyses of educational attainment, such as variations in enrolment rates and study program duration across institutional settings. On the empirical level, the chapter asks whether family background predicts educational attainment in similar ways in two diametrically opposed welfare states: the United States and Norway. Differences in dropout from higher education were compared using nationally representative longitudinal data from the United States and Norway and event history and multilevel modelling techniques. The chapter also makes use of the standardized sheaf coefficient to summarize central background variables for more direct comparison of effect sizes. The findings show that whereas parents’ education level has strikingly similar effects on students’ dropout probabilities in the two countries, the effect of parents’ income varies substantially according to the institutional context. The chapter concludes that in comparative analyses of inequality in education the value of different types of family resources must be understood in light of the concrete, practical constraints of the national institutional contexts.

Along with the other Nordic welfare states, Norway has achieved relative gender parity as measured by the Gender Gap Index of the United Nations (Hausmann, Tyson, & Zahidi, 2006) and is therefore looked upon by many as a model in minimising gender gaps in the society. With a 47 per cent share of the active labour force in the country, Norwegian women have had a high level of labour market participation since the late 1980s. In addition, Norway ranks among the top countries in the world in terms of offering women and men equal access to education at all levels, equal access to leadership positions in the workplace and in politics and generous parental leave benefits. Although gender parity in education at all levels as well as in labour market participation is a reality in Norway, there are significant gender differences vis-à-vis in career aspiration among students and the Norwegian labour market is characterized by gender segregation (Foss, 2005) which results in a gender gap in pay where women earn less than men.

From the standpoint of the future of corporate social responsibility, students' perceptions are an important research proposition. Several studies have been conducted to examine this phenomenon, yet sector‐specific studies are rather scant. The primary purpose of this work is to examine students' perceptions regarding social responsibility in the context of the US forest products industry.

A total of 257 graduate and upper level undergraduate students from Oregon State University and University of Montana, pursuing different academic majors, were surveyed to examine the differences in their perceptions of the US forest products industry's success in fulfilling its corporate social responsibilities.

Results suggest that business and forest ecology/environmental science students were least satisfied with industry fulfilling its economic responsibilities. Regarding fulfillment of socio‐environmental responsibilities, forest ecology/environmental science students were significantly less satisfied than any other study major. Additionally, a comparison between male and female students suggested that males and females have a similar level of satisfaction regarding industry fulfilling its economic responsibilities. However, males were found to be more satisfied with industry fulfilling its socio‐environmental responsibilities than females.

Students for the study were not selected randomly and as such the results of the study can, at best, be considered indicative. Study findings have implications for academic curriculum designers as well as for industry policy makers.

This is the first attempt to examine students' perceptions about the social responsibility success of the US forest products industry.

The correlation between social background, and future educational and occupational outcomes, is strengthening in the UK. It is getting harder to ignore the implications, as they manifest themselves in our economic and political fabric. Even when talented young people overcome barriers at a particular stage of their journey to the workplace, new barriers present themselves at the next. For example, it has been assumed historically that gaining access to university has a levelling effect: once you are in, you will get ahead. This is a myth. Those, for whom the cost of higher education is most significant, often benefit the least. This chapter explores why this is currently the case, and what can be done to narrow the gap in graduate outcomes by socio-economic background.