What could be more important than education?

What could be more important than education? | (News and Research 361)

What could be more important than education? | Abu-Ghaida, Silva, Devictor | About half of the 35 million refugees worldwide are children. They have fled conflict, violence, and persecution, and they are spending their formative years in exile, often in circumstances marred by legal restrictions and discrimination, poverty, trauma, and uncertainty. Providing these children with education, and especially within the national education system of the host country, is critical to ensure they can realize their potential and seize opportunities later in life. This is because refugee situations tend to last many years, or often decades. A short-term gap in education has lasting consequences, as we all witnessed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Missing several years of schooling, or even missing out on schooling altogether, condemns refugee children to a life of poverty and indignity.

David Maynier: Private sector is vital to solving education challenges

A personal history of the political economy of education | Jo Ritzen | The past sixty years have witnessed a stormy growth in the insights on the one hand concerning the importance of one’s education for one’s life, the importance of education and science for collective welfare and on the other hand on the delivery of education and science to strengthen individual and collective welfare. In that case –as one might imagine- we are ready for a golden age of education and science, as societies would organize themselves such as to deliver the best in human talents and in scientific advances. The insights in the political economy of education are less advanced. We understand little of the engineering for long run policies and for the social cohesion which generates the support for such policies. The notion of “institutions” has not yet reached a stage where it gives concrete support for political decision makers. Short term self-interest of dominant political forces continues to rule the waves. The years ahead will require an essential role for education to share the insights in climate change and overall sustainability and to find democratic support for the transitions which have to be made to maintain a planet inhabitable for its eight plus billion inhabitants.DAVID MAYNIER: Private sector is vital to solving education challenges

Invest now in education to avoid higher cost to society later | Garnier, Neyestani | “Earlier this month we participated in a high-level panel on education at the IMF-World Bank Annual Meetings in Marrakech bringing finance ministers around the table to discuss education spending not as a cost but as a critical enabling investment for the progress of societies.”

Moved to Poverty? A Legacy of the Apartheid Experiment in South Africa | Carrillo, Charris, Iglesias | “… moving to the homelands during childhood significantly reduces educational attainment. The estimates are very precise and economically meaningful. Our preferred estimates imply that a predicted move at age 9 would reduce educational attainment by about 0.55 years, or, equivalently, 11 percent of the sample mean.”

Learning and Earning Losses: The educational and economic costs of Lebanon’s public-school closures | Pushparatnam, Kheyfets, El-Ghali, El Franji | Children in Lebanese public schools have experienced four consecutive disrupted academic years (2019-20 to 2022-23), receiving approximately 270 days of in-person teaching compared with the 600 days they should have received across four typical academic years.  Pre-COVID-19 pandemic, students in Lebanon were estimated to complete an average of 10.2 years of schooling. However, taking into account how much they actually learned, students in Lebanon received an average of only 6.3 learning-adjusted years of schooling (LAYS), on par with other countries in the region like Morocco. A learning loss simulation model developed during the COVID-19 pandemic estimated that public- and private-school students in Lebanon lost between 1-1.2 LAYS due to COVID-19-related school closures.

Signaling and Employer Learning with Instruments | Aryal, Bhuller, Lange | This paper considers the use of instruments to identify and estimate private and social returns to education within a model of employer learning. What an instrument identifies depends on whether it is hidden from, or transparent (i.e., observed) to, the employers. A hidden instrument identifies private returns to education, and a transparent instrument identifies social returns to education. We use variation in compulsory schooling laws across non-central and central municipalities in Norway to, respectively, construct hidden and transparent instruments. We estimate a private return of 7.9%, of which 70% is due to increased productivity and the remaining 30% is due to signaling.

Investing in Skills to Meet the Demands of Tajikistan’s Evolving Labor Market | The Higher Education Project (HEP) supported Tajikistan with improving the quality and labor-market relevance of higher education. In total, 3,300 university teachers and 27,500 students (11,000 of whom are women) directly benefitted from HEP. Competitive grants program (CGP) and lab and IT equipment provided by HEP enabled 77% of universities to improve their learning environment and the relevance of their education to the labor market demand.

A generation of children are at risk of learning losses in Myanmar | Roy, Van Der Weide, Bhatta, Thwin | Myanmar’s education sector has faced disruptions due to both the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2021 military coup. Between February 2020 and February 2022, public schools in Myanmar were closed for a staggering 532 days, making it the country with the longest school closures in the East Asia and Pacific (EAP) region. After assuming power, the military authorities directed the reopening of public schools in November 2021. However, nearly 30 percent of the teaching workforce joined the civil disobedience movement (CDM) and were dismissed by the military authorities. Many children may have lost more than three and a half years of education.

L’éducation, l’un des meilleurs moyens de réduire la pauvreté | La Presse | Les pays en développement ont accompli des avancées extraordinaires et de plus en plus d’enfants vont à l’école, mais nombre d’entre ces pays ont réduit leurs budgets d’éducation depuis le début de la pandémie du Covid-19. L’éducation est un droit fondamental, un puissant vecteur de développement et l’un des meilleurs moyens de réduire la pauvreté, d’élever les niveaux de santé, de promouvoir l’égalité entre les sexes et de faire progresser la paix et la stabilité. L’éducation a des retombées positives considérables sur l’amélioration des revenus et c’est le premier facteur d’égalité des chances. Au niveau individuel, elle contribue à l’emploi, aux revenus, à la santé et à la réduction de la pauvreté, sachant que chaque année de scolarité supplémentaire augmente globalement de 10 % la rémunération horaire. Au niveau de la société, l’éducation favorise la croissance économique à long terme, stimule l’innovation, renforce les institutions et consolide la cohésion sociale.