This book argues that critical choices about the institutional design of education systems in the post-war period have long-term implications for social inequality.
This book challenges the conventional wisdom that greater schooling and skill improvement leads to higher wages, that income inequality falls with wider access to schooling, and that the Information Technology revolution will re-ignite worker pay. Indeed, the econometric results provide no evidence that the growth of skills or educational attainment has any statistically significant relation to earnings growth or that greater equality in schooling has led to a decline in income inequality. Results also indicate that computer investment is negatively related to earnings gains and positively associated with changes in both income inequality and the dispersion of worker skills. The findings reports here have direct relevance to ongoing policy debates on educational reform in the U.S.
Over the past few decades, US business and industry have been transformed by the advances and redundancies produced by the knowledge economy. The workplace has changed, and much of the work differs from that performed by previous generations. Can human capital accumulation in the United States keep pace with the evolving demands placed on it, and how can the workforce of tomorrow acquire the skills and competencies that are most in demand? Education, Skills, and Technical Change explores various facets of these questions and provides an overview of educational attainment in the United States and the channels through which labor force skills and education affect GDP growth. Contributors to this volume focus on a range of educational and training institutions and bring new data to bear on how we understand the role of college and vocational education and the size and nature of the skills gap. This work links a range of research areas—such as growth accounting, skill development, higher education, and immigration—and also examines how well students are being prepared for the current and future world of work.
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 License. It is free to read, download and share on Elgaronline.com. Skills and inequality have long been a central theme in analyses of social structure and economic development. A Research Agenda for Skills and Inequality offers an insightful cross-disciplinary framework for research on how unequal living conditions form, persist and change in interplay with human skill formation and development.
An argument for reimagining skill in a way that can extend economic opportunity to workers at the bottom of the labor market. America has a jobs problem--not enough well-paying jobs to go around and not enough clear pathways leading to them. Skill development is critical for addressing this employment crisis, but there are many unresolved questions about who has skill, how it is attained, and whose responsibility it is to build skills over time. In this book, Nichola Lowe tells the stories of pioneering workforce intermediaries--nonprofits, unions, community colleges--that harness this ambiguity around skill to extend economic opportunity to workers at the bottom of the labor market.
Exploring a new agenda to improve outcomes for American workers As the United States continues to struggle with the impact of the devastating COVID-19 recession, policymakers have an opportunity to redress the competition problems in our labor markets. Making the right policy choices, however, requires a deep understanding of long-term, multidimensional problems. That will be solved only by looking to the failures and unrealized opportunities in anti-trust and labor law. For decades, competition in the U.S. labor market has declined, with the result that American workers have experienced slow wage growth and diminishing job quality. While sluggish productivity growth, rising globalization, and declining union representation are traditionally cited as factors for this historic imbalance in economic power, weak competition in the labor market is increasingly being recognized as a factor as well. This book by noted experts frames the legal and economic consequences of this imbalance and presents a series of urgently needed reforms of both labor and anti-trust laws to improve outcomes for American workers. These include higher wages, safer workplaces, increased ability to report labor violations, greater mobility, more opportunities for workers to build power, and overall better labor protections. Inequality in the Labor Market will interest anyone who cares about building a progressive economic agenda or who has a marked interest in labor policy. It also will appeal to anyone hoping to influence or anticipate the much-needed progressive agenda for the United States. The book's unusual scope provides prescriptions that, as Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz notes in the introduction, map a path for rebalancing power, not just in our economy but in our democracy.
Confronted with pervasive and persistent inequalities, we must make room for bold new approaches that have the potential to deliver quality learning for all children and youth--not a century from now, but today. In Leapfrogging Inequality, researchers at the Brookings Institution chart a new path for global education by examining the possibility of leapfrogging--rapidly accelerating educational progress to ensure that all young people develop the skills they need to thrive in a fast-changing world. Analyzing a catalog of nearly 3,000 global education innovations, the largest such collection to date, researchers explore the potential of current practices to enable such a leap. As part of this analysis, the book presents an evidence-based framework for getting ahead in education, which it grounds in the here-and-now by narrating exemplary stories of innovation from around the world. .
Most of us assume that public schools in America are unequal—that the quality of the education varies with the location of the school and that as a result, children learn more in the schools that serve mostly rich, white kids than in the schools serving mostly poor, black kids. But it turns out that this common assumption is misplaced. As Douglas B. Downey shows in How Schools Really Matter, achievement gaps have very little to do with what goes on in our schools. Not only do schools not exacerbate inequality in skills, they actually help to level the playing field. The real sources of achievement gaps are elsewhere. A close look at the testing data in seasonal patterns bears this out. It turns out that achievement gaps in reading skills between high- and low-income children are nearly entirely formed prior to kindergarten, and schools do more to reduce them than increase them. And when gaps do increase, they tend to do so during summers, not during school periods. So why do both liberal and conservative politicians strongly advocate for school reform, arguing that the poor quality of schools serving disadvantaged children is an important contributor to inequality? It’s because discussing the broader social and economic reforms necessary for really reducing inequality has become too challenging and polarizing—it’s just easier to talk about fixing schools. Of course, there are differences that schools can make, and Downey outlines the kinds of reforms that make sense given what we know about inequality outside of schools, including more school exposure, increased standardization, and better and fairer school and teacher measurements. ? How Schools Really Matter offers a firm rebuke to those who find nothing but fault in our schools, which are doing a much better than job than we give them credit for. It should also be a call to arms for educators and policymakers: the bottom line is that if we are serious about reducing inequality, we are going to have to fight some battles that are bigger than school reform—battles against the social inequality that is reflected within, rather than generated by—our public school system.
What caused the decline in wage inequality of the 2000s in Latin America? Looking to the future, will the current economic slowdown be regressive? Wage Inequality in Latin America: Understanding the Past to Prepare for the Future addresses these two questions by reviewing relevant literature and providing new evidence on what we know from the conceptual, empirical, and policy perspectives. The answer to the fi rst question can be broken down into several parts, although the bottom line is that the changes in wage inequality resulted from a combination of three forces: (a) education expansion and its eff ect on falling returns to skill (the supply-side story); (b) shifts in aggregate domestic demand; and (c) exchange rate appreciation from the commodity boom and the associated shift to the nontradable sector that changed interfi rm wage diff erences. Other forces had a non-negligible but secondary role in some countries, while they were not present in others. These include the rapid increase of the minimum wage and a rapid trend toward formalization of employment, which played a supporting role but only during the boom. Understanding the forces behind recent trends also helps to shed light on the second question. The analysis in this volume suggests that the economic slowdown is putting the brakes on the reduction of inequality in Latin America and will likely continue to do so—but it might not actually reverse the region’s movement toward less wage inequality.
An extraordinary confluence of forces stemming from automation and digital technologies is transforming both the world of work and the ways we educate current and future employees to contribute productively to the workplace. The Great Skills Gap opens with the premise that the exploding scope and pace of technological innovation in the digital age is fast transforming the fundamental nature of work. Due to these developments, the skills and preparation that employers need from their talent pool are shifting. The accelerated pace of evolution and disruption in the competitive business landscape demands that workers be not only technically proficient, but also exceptionally agile in their capacity to think and act creatively and quickly learn new skills. This book explores how these transformative forces are—or should be—driving innovations in how colleges and universities prepare students for their careers. Focused on the impact of this confluence of forces at the nexus of work and higher education, the book's contributors—an illustrious group of leading educators, prominent employers, and other thought leaders—answer profound questions about how business and higher education can best collaborate in support of the twenty-first century workforce.