Ka Ho Mok and Jin Jiang

With a strong conviction to transform the country and prepare its people to cope with the growing challenges of the globalising market, the Chinese government has actively increased higher education opportunities. The higher education system has experienced a transformation from elite to mass form. The massification of higher education has provided more and more access to junior colleges and universities, and subsequently produced a growing number of college graduates looking for jobs in the labour market. Similar to other East Asian countries/economies (like South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong), the strong impacts of China’s expansion of higher education on admission and the labour market are expected to become apparent. College students have begun to doubt the effect of higher education massification on bringing more equality in admission and on improving their competitiveness in the job market. This, in turn, leads to a widespread dissatisfaction with higher education development in China. This paper recognises that students coming from different family backgrounds may confront diverse experiences in higher education admission, graduate employment, and opportunity for upward social mobility. Yet it sets out – against the policy context highlighted above – to critically examine the impact of the massification of higher education on admissions, and subsequently on graduate employment and social mobility in contemporary China. In the final section, this paper also reflects upon reconstructing new education governance frameworks to promote educational equality in instances where higher education is massively expanded.

Things Have Changed: Returns to Education in Thailand

Niels-Hugo Blunch, Journal of Southeast Asian Economies 33, 2 (2016): 242-57

This study examines the developments in educational attainment and education returns of wage earners in Thailand over the period 1994–2002. In so doing, several potential weaknesses of previous studies on the topic — as well as, more generally, applied econometrics analyses — are addressed. One contribution of this paper is to gather and re-emphasize the importance of several important estimation issues frequently overlooked by researchers. The results imply that the returns to education in Thailand over the period are substantial, peaking in 2000. Taking into account the possible endogeneity of education using household fixed effects, education returns are substantially dampened, relative to the baseline ordinary least squares estimates. This indicates that previous studies for Thailand and elsewhere — when not taking endogeneity into account — may have overestimated the returns to education substantially.

Teacher Specialization and Production of Human Capital

In a field experiment in Houston public schools, after two years students with specialized teachers lagged about a month behind those with non-specialized teachers.

Industrial production methods utilizing highly specialized labor have raised the quality of manufactured goods while substantially reducing their costs. This success has encouraged school reform advocates to suggest that schools might benefit by shifting to specialized teachers. The advocates contend that specializing in a narrow subject range would reduce teacher workload and boost student achievement because teachers would have more time to master their subject and to focus on lesson planning. In The ‘Pupil’ Factory: Specialization and the Production of Human Capital in Schools (NBER Working Paper No. 22205),Roland G. Fryer, Jr. reports on results of a randomized field experiment testing that theory…

‘My job is to make children hopeful’: inside Liberia’s deaf school

Disabled Liberians are among the most marginalised in society. But one school is trying to ensure students lead full lives

Wearing smart uniforms, rows of pupils stand in line at morning assembly as they prepare to perform the national anthem. A little boy raises the Liberian flag with a great deal of solemnity as the children enthusiastically sign their anthem. This is Oscar Romero school for deaf children, one of a handful of specialist privately run facilities for children with disabilities in Liberia. There are no government-run specialist schools…

High economic contribution of low cost private schools

Developing Effective Private Education Nigeria (DEEPEN) programme has estimated that private schools could save Lagos State up to NGN 958Bn (GBP 2.39Bn) over the next ten years. DEEPEN is a five-year UK aid-funded programme seeking to improve the quality of education in private schools, especially those serving children from low-income households. DEEPEN aims to facilitate a more enabling environment for private schools and a more effective market for them to offer an increased quality education. Private schools as major players and cost savers: Private schools are a major player on the Lagos education scene, dominating at the pre-primary and primary levels. With nearly 7.5 million students enrolled over the five-year period to 2015, private schools make up a significant proportion of all school provision for students in Lagos State. Without private provision, these students would need to be educated in public schools with the costs paid by the State. If the State were to have provided education for the children attending private schools over the same period, it would have amounted to NGN 377Bn (GBP 0.94Bn)…

Appropriate Technology and Income Differences

Dozie Okoye, International Economic Review 57(3), August 2016

This article studies the relative productivity of skilled to unskilled workers across countries. Relative productivities are broken down into the human capital embodied in skilled workers and relative physical productivities (reflecting production techniques). I find that skilled workers from poorer countries embody less human capital and are also relatively less physically productive. Furthermore, results show that production techniques are inappropriate for most low-income countries, and these countries experience large increases in GDP per capita by increasing the relative physical productivity of skilled to unskilled workers. This suggests that there are significant barriers to the adoption of skill-complementary technologies…

This investment has an average 10% return

One of the biggest economic benefits of schooling are labor market earnings. For many people, education and experience are their only assets. This is why I believe that it’s very important to know the economic benefits of investments in schooling. The rate of return equates the value of lifetime earnings to the net present value of costs of education. For an investment to be justified, the returns should be positive and higher than the alternative. For the individual, weighing costs and benefits means investing as long as the rate of return exceeds the private discount rate…

IERI Academy on IRT (Beijing)

November 8-10, 2016

The IEA-ETS Research Institute (IERI), in cooperation with the Collaborative Innovation Center of Assessments toward Basic Education Quality (CICA-BEQ) of the Beijing Normal University (BNU), is organizing a three-day workshop on assessment designs, and the use of Item Response Theory (IRT) and population modeling in large-scale assessments.  The goal of the Academy is to familiarize participants with the topics related to assessment designs and IRT, and enable them to use commercially available software to conduct appropriate IRT analysis and generate proficiency estimates or plausible values. The Academy will be held in Beijing, China, November 8th- 10th, 2016. The Academies are open to anyone interested in participating. Registration for the Academy is 450USD (410EUR). Early registration is 400USD (370EUR). Students can register for 350USD (320EUR). To qualify for the student or early registration discount, complete registration and payment MUST be received before October 16, 2016. This Academy will be conducted in English.

SREE Spring 2017 Conference (Washington, DC)

March 1- 4, 2017

The Call for Papers for the March 2017 conference Expanding the Toolkit: Maximizing Relevance, Effectiveness and Rigor in Education Research is online.  Abstract submission deadline is October 1, 2016. The meeting will run from Wednesday, March 1-Saturday, March 4, 2017 in Washington, DC, with a focus on how innovations in research design and analysis, as well as models for creating and sustaining partnerships and implementation paths, may enhance the utility of education research.