News and Research 242

The US infrastructure most in need of investment is human (Financial Times)

What education experts think of returns to schooling | World Economic Forum

The Returns to Education. There has been a steady stream of new research on the returns to education in recent weeks. These include: Winners and losers after 25 years of transition: Decreasing wage inequality in Slovenia, which shows that wage inequality has fallen in Slovenia in the past 25 years; the increase in the number of tertiary graduates outpaced the rise in the demand for skills and declining returns to schooling coincide with the implementation of the Bologna Reform; and Laws, educational outcomes, and returns to schooling evidence from the first wave of U.S. state compulsory attendance laws: the USA experienced two waves of state schooling laws: the first focused on children up to age 14 and the second focused on high school. Rigorous estimates of returns to schooling range from 6.7 to 7.7 percent, and the returns were largest for the lowest quantiles, and were generally monotonically decreasing for higher quantiles. In Tell me who your co-worker is and I will tell you how much you earn: human capital spillovers in the Greek health sector, using cross-sectional data, collected via a survey from the Greek healthcare sector, estimates of both the private and public/social returns to education from an increase in an employee’s educational level are provided, showing the existence of statistically and economically significant spillover effects. Return to schooling in China: a large meta-analysis, is a meta-analysis of 2,191 empirical results reported in 213 existing studies to estimate the Mincer-type return to schooling in China; the results revealed that the return to schooling showed a positive impact. The Rate of Return to Education in Iran estimates the private rate of return to schooling for men born in 1951–1983 in Iran using a pseudo-panel fixed-effect model, showing that the overall rate of return is around 9 percent. Which is close to the global average presented in the Returns to Investment in Education: A Decennial Review of the Global Literature (working paper version); full data set here.

Can Compulsory Schooling Reduce Language-Based Educational Gaps? Evidence from a Policy Change in Paraguay | The impact of a compulsory schooling policy implemented in 1994 in Paraguay—where Spanish and the indigenous language Guaraní are both official languages—on the existing language-based educational gap is estimated. The policy was associated with a 0.34-year increase in education for Guaraní speakers (the language-disadvantaged group) relative to Spanish speakers (the language-advantaged group).

The Impact of COVID-19 on Education (Iniciativa Educação) COVID-19 school closures have brought significant disruption in education. Emerging evidence suggests that the pandemic is resulting in learning losses and increases in inequality. To reduce and reverse the long-term negative effects, countries need to implement learning recovery programs, protect educational budgets, and prepare for future shocks. (In Portuguese)

How do government decisionmakers identify and adopt innovations for scale? | Brad Olsen, Patrick Hannahan, Gustavo Arcia | When it comes to supporting innovations at large scale, governments play a central role. But nonstate actors, such as researchers or project implementers, are also essential. Often, they’re the ones who design, pilot, and promote the innovations—hoping one day to hand the initiative over to the government for collaborative, long-term adoption. As evidence: In the Center for Universal Education’s global catalog of nearly 3,000 education innovations, two-thirds of them were started in the nonprofit sector, while only 12 percent originated in government.

The future of talent – new tools and policies to address skills (StrategEast.Live) | The discussion on “The future of talent: new tools and policies to address skills”, moderated by Dr Gregory Asmolov, King’s College London and with an expert panel: Tatiana Alexeev, Digital Education Consultant at ATIC companies Moldova; Dina Bayasanova, Founder and CEO of PitchMe; Altynbek Ismailov, Ex-Chairman of the State Committee of Information; Technology and Communications of Kyrgyz Republic (2020-2021); Soren Nellemann, Senior Economist with the World Bank’s Education Global Practice; Mariam Sumbadze, Managing Director at Georgian ICT Cluster.

Now in print in Nature: Angrist, N, S Djankov, P K Goldberg and H A Patrinos (2021), Measuring human capital using global learning data. Nature 592, 403–408

More HLO in the News and Blogs:

  • Schooling and learning. There is a big difference | (original: Scolarizzazione ed apprendimento. C’è una bella differenza) Schooling and learning are not the same thing and the economic growth of a country is closely linked to the second. Research reminds us that in the world, while the rate of schooling is increasing, there is little progress on the learning front. (Ekonomia.it)

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