School calendars,child care availability and maternal employment

A year-round calendar redistributes schools days around the year. This paper studies how this redistribution of school days, and therefore child care days available through school, affects maternal employment. The presence of year-round calendars in a district could be correlated with other district level attributes that might affect female employment rates. I therefore use a differencing method that compares the influence of district year-round enrollment on the employment rates of women with school-aged children relative to women whose eldest child is pre-school-aged. Unobserved district factors should affect employment rates of women with school-aged and pre-school-aged children similarly, yet only women with school-aged children should be directly impacted by school calendar. I find that redistributing child care days available through school into shorter intervals over time negatively impacts maternal employment. Among those women with school-aged children, those also having pre-school-aged children have the hardest time adjusting to differences in existing availability.     

High school completion and future youth unemployment: new evidence from High School and Beyond

In this paper, I provide new evidence from High School and Beyond (HSB) on the effects of compulsory attendance on high school completion and future youth unemployment. I develop Bayesian estimation approaches to the simultaneous equation model with ordered probit and two‐limit censored regression and the bivariate duration model, accounting for the heterogeneity in returns to education and the nonlinearity in the effects of compulsory attendance. I find substantial variability in returns to education across schools and evidence of diminishing marginal effects of compulsory attendance on high school completion. The simulation results suggest that increasing the compulsory attendance age raises the probability of completing high school and reduces the proportion of time the individuals are unemployed. These effects are much more pronounced for disadvantaged students but less pronounced for advantaged students, suggesting the potential effects of compulsory attendance on reducing the inequality in education and employment. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The effects of vehicle ownership on employment

Vehicle ownership may promote work if employment opportunities and job searches are enhanced by reliable transportation. For example, vehicles may serve to reduce potential physical isolation from employment opportunities. I examine the effects of vehicle ownership and vehicle quality on employment for single mothers with no more than a high school education using National Longitudinal Survey of Youth data. I control for potential bias by jointly estimating employment and vehicle ownership in a maximum likelihood framework using state welfare eligibility asset rules as instruments. Results show that vehicle ownership increases employment. Positive effects of vehicles do not differ for urban and rural residents, but they do change with economic conditions. Further, welfare recipients are significantly more likely to exit the program and become employed if they own a vehicle.     

Barriers to skill acquisition in Brazil: Public and private school students performance in a public university entrance exam

This paper uses a novel data set to quantify the difference in performance of public and private school students in an entrance test exam of the major public university in Brazilian Northeast (Universidade Federal de Pernambuco – UFPE). Although there are many public universities in Brazil, from our knowledge, there is no study that uses data on entrance test scores at such universities to evaluate the determinants of students’ performance and the barriers for public school students to get in the good universities. The data set has detailed information on individual and school characteristics, and family background. We found that test scores of public school students are on average about 4.2–17% lower than those taken by private school students, depending on the set of controls. This result is robust when we address problems related to attrition, omitted variables (e.g., cognitive ability), and unobservable selectivity. We also show that once students get into the university, those from public schools perform as well as those from private schools. In addition, the proportion of public school students that gets into the university is roughly the same as the proportion of students doing the entrance exam. However, there is a strong barrier for public school students to get into high competitive majors. The fraction of students from public schools that gets into high competitive majors such as law, medicine, and electronic engineering is almost null. Our findings provide quantitative evidence to the common view that the Brazilian elitist high education system is an important channel for inequality persistence.     

Ethnic enclaves in the classroom

We use data on elementary-school students to investigate how the home language and other characteristics of a student's same-grade schoolmates influence that student's academic achievement. We exploit the availability of multiple cohorts of data within each school to control for endogenous selection by incorporating school fixed effects in the model. We also exploit the longitudinal structure of the data to estimate value-added models of the educational production function. We find that attending an “enclave” school provides a slight net benefit to Chinese home-language students and a large net cost to Punjabi home-language students. The results are consistent with a simple peer effects mechanism in which the academic achievement or behavior of peers is much more important than their home language.     

Do Higher Real Minimum Wages Lead to More High School Dropouts? Evidence from Maryland Across Races, 1993–2004

We explore whether higher levels of the real minimum wage have differing effects on high school dropout rates across students of various races and ethnicities (whites, African Americans, Hispanics, and Asians). Using a panel of data across Maryland counties and annual observations in 1993–2004, we found higher real minimum wages to be associated with higher dropout rates for Hispanic students, but not for other races and ethnicities. We used a variety of model specifications and explanatory variables, including real income, the unemployment rate, teen pregnancy rates, and educational attainment among adults. Several of our findings are broadly consistent with commonly reported sociological observations regarding how behavioral choices may be affected by different levels across races and ethnicities of cultural integration of recent immigrants, family cohesiveness, the value placed on education, small business ownership, and hourly (vs. salaried) employment.     

The Effectiveness of Single‐Sex Schools through Out‐of‐School Activities: Evidence from South Korea

Students’ out‐of‐school activities and time use can play a crucial role in facilitating the effect of schools on students’ achievement. Using data from Seoul, South Korea, where students are randomly assigned into schools, we show that when single‐sex schools improve students’ test performance, their effect is positive on students’ time spent on study‐related out‐of‐school activities. Our results indicate that out‐of‐school activities explain roughly 21%–30% of the effect of single‐sex schooling on test performance.     

价值分析法在民办大学生心理健康教育中的运用

本文旨在对民办院校学生自身素质、办学条件及社会认可度的分析,运用价值分析的方法,提出民办大学生将可能从入学时起、学习过程中及毕业就业末,不同时期将面临各种不同的甚至比公办院校学生还要多的心理问题,进而提出民办大学生理健康问题的教育方向应从由矫治性转向发展性,从个别学生扩展及全体学生,从单一目标变为多层次目标,从短期目标到中期目标,最后达到终极目标即自我完善,使学生个人潜能得到充分的发挥。     

A cointegration approach to modeling human capital formation,self-employment,and economic growth: evidence from Pakistan

This study aims to empirically investigate the dynamics of relationship among human capital formation, self-employment (SE), and economic growth in Pakistan. Using quarterly data of primary school enrollment, SE, and GDP per capita, we employed ARDL bound testing approach to cointegration covering the time span of 1995–2010. We found that in the long run, primary school enrollment, high school enrollment and SE have significant impact on economic growth. Enrollment in primary schools (EP) has a strong positive and significant impact on economic growth, whereas enrollment in high school has a relatively small positive and significant impact on economic growth in the long run in Pakistan. Further, SE has a small, positive and significant impact on economic growth in the long run. In short run, enrollments in high schools and SE have weak positive impact on economic growth whereas, EP has a strong positive and significant impact on economic growth in Pakistan. Further it is found that that there is unidirectional long run causality from self employment to economic growth followed by the bidirectional short run causality between economic growth and high school enrollment, GDP per capita and primary school enrollment, high school enrollment and primary school enrollment.     

开展校企合作,促进学生就业

订单教育作为高职院的就业特色,既促进了高职院的就业工作,也给高职院办学带来了新的活力,云南能源职业技术学院积极推行订单教育,创造了学校、学生、企业三赢的局面。     

Self-employment and job generation in metropolitan areas, 1969–2009

Many regional development policy initiatives assume that entrepreneurial activities promote economic growth. Empirical research has presented rationale for this argument showing that small firms create proportionally more new jobs than large firms. However, little research has been performed on the issue of net job generation at the urban level, particularly when self-employment is considered as an indicator of entrepreneurial activities. This paper investigates to what extent US metropolitan areas in the 1969–2009 period characterized by relatively high rates of self-employment also have shown relatively high rates of subsequent total employment growth. The analysis corrects for the influence of sectoral composition, wage level, educational attainment, presence of research universities and size of the metropolitan area to measure the extent to which the number and quality of self-employed in a region contribute to total employment growth. It finds the relationship between self-employment rates and subsequent total employment growth to be positive on average during the 40-year period but to weaken over time.     

Does class matter more than school? Evidence from a multilevel statistical analysis on Italian junior secondary school students

This paper assesses the differences in educational attainments between students across classes and schools they are grouped by, in the context of Italian educational system. The purpose is to identify a relationship between pupils' reading test scores and students' characteristics, stratifying for classes, schools and geographical areas. The dataset contains detailed information about more than 500,000 students at the first year of junior secondary school in the year 2012/2013. By means of multilevel linear models, it is possible to estimate statistically significant school and class effects, after adjusting for pupil's characteristics, including prior achievement. The results show that school and class effects are very heterogeneous across macro-areas (Northern, Central and Southern Italy), and that there are substantial discrepancies between and within schools; overall, class effects on achievement tend to be larger than school ones.     

如何引导当代大学生正确面对大学教育

从关心应届高中毕业生能否上大学到关注当前大学的教育教学管理模式、人才培养方案和就业出路问题,家长、学校和社会对大学的关注焦点发生了转移。文章结合长期从事高校学生思想政治教育的工作实践,就如何引导当今大学生正确认识大学、帮助大学生成长成才的问题进行探讨。     

The significance of sustained entrepreneurial orientation on performance of firms – A longitudinal analysis

This study focuses on the importance of changes in entrepreneurial orientation (EO) over time for subsequent firm performance, and the significance which inimitable resources (networks, governance system and unique competence) might have in this connection. Hypotheses are developed to test the effects that changes in EO level over a time period and resources have on subsequent firm performance. The study is based on data from 168 Norwegian SMEs, interviewed both in 2000 and 2003. The primary contribution of this study is that a change in EO over time (increased or decreased), may be of importance for a firm's performance represented by performance compared to competitors, and employment growth. A focus on entrepreneurial activities seems to be beneficial in the long run (increasing EO), while the opposite is the case if the EO level decreases. It is especially encouraging to see that firms focusing on EO (increased or the same) are positively associated with employment growth, one of the primary policy goals world-wide. Another contribution from this study is that resources that may be inimitable for firms have some influence on performance compared to competitors. Implications for policy-makers, practitioners and further research are discussed.     

Graduates,Dropouts and Slow Finishers: The Effects of Credit Constraints on University Outcomes

The effect of credit constraints on university outcomes is studied. Credit constraints have a negative relationship with dropout, especially on lower achieving high school graduates. Credit constrained students with strong high school achievement are 13–15% more (less) likely to graduate (be slow finishers) relative to otherwise similar students who are potentially or unlikely constrained. Using competing risk analysis, we find dropout is most likely in the first year of study and falls over time for all students. After 3 years of study, the risk of dropout increases for students who are constrained suggesting constraints may eventually bind on these students.     

The impact of Chicago’s small high school initiative

This project examines the effects of the introduction of new small high schools on student performance in the Chicago Public School (CPS) district. Specifically, we investigate whether students attending small high schools have better graduation/enrollment rates and achievement than similar students who attend regular CPS high schools. We show that students who choose to attend a small school are more disadvantaged on average, including having prior test scores that are about 0.2 standard deviations lower than their elementary school classmates. To address the selection problem, we use an instrumental variables strategy and compare students who live in the same neighborhoods but differ in their residential proximity to a small school. In this approach, one student is more likely to sign up for a small school than another statistically identical student because the small school is located closer to the student’s house and therefore the “cost” of attending the school is lower. The distance-to-small-school variable has strong predictive power to identify who attends a small school. We find that small schools students are substantially more likely to persist in school and eventually graduate. Nonetheless, there is no positive impact on student achievement as measured by test scores.     

校行企三方合作共建就业实习基地——提高高职学生就业实习质量的创新举措

为提高高职学生就业实习质量,文章创新提出“校行企三方合作”共建就业实习基地的人才培养模式,采取建设专兼结合的教学团队、构建基于工作过程的课程体系、建设多功能生产性就业实习基地、开展就业实习教育及建立健全就业实习的法律法规等措施来提高学生的就业质量。     

陕西高校体育专业大学生生存质量的现状调查与研究分析

大学生就业问题是目前教育专家、学者及高校最为关注的问题之一,因为学生的就业问题对于学校的办学水平是极大的考验,体育专业大学生因为专业的特殊性,学生的就业问题受到的关注程度更高,所以笔者对于陕西省高校体育专业学生的就业生存质量问题进行全面的调查和研究,旨在就学生的培养和学生的教育等方面的问题谈谈自己的认识。     

Building communities and tolerance: power,ownership and social interactions among young people in an English-medium school in Cyprus

Learning and teaching of English language in foreign contexts is usually associated with possible economic gains that it may bring. However, there are other and possibly more immediate implications of such instruction, especially on the way young people interact in schools where English is the medium of instruction. Using Bourdieu’s framework of capitals, the current study aims to explore how English language is perceived and used among young people from Turkish language backgrounds in a private school in the northern part of Cyprus where English is the medium of both instruction and communication. It also investigates whether students’ attitudes towards this language have any impact on the building of communities and tolerance when it comes to cultural diversity in and outside the classroom. Analysis of the data, which was collected through in-class ethnographic observations and informal chats with young people, showed that students who possessed a higher amount of linguistic capital in English were also perceived as popular and academically superior by all of the participants in this particular school. While linguistic abilities in English played a significant part in determining the access rights to certain peer groups, students whose first language was Turkish tended to capitalize on this skill to support each other to achieve academic success. Thus, language appeared to be a dividing factor rather than a bridge, which affected the school’s culture of tolerance negatively.

     

金融危机下高校大学生就业风险影响因素的灰关联分析

大学生严峻的就业形势已成为人们广泛重视的社会问题。本文重点分析导致大学生就业风险的主要因素,旨在对导致大学生就业风险的原因获得更科学认识,为评估风险及寻求控制风险方法服务。论文首先介绍了目前大学生面临的就业形势及研究导致就业风险因素的意义。通过研究已有文献,分析统计数据,从个人、社会、家庭、学校及用人单位五个方面提出导致风险的因素。通过频数、灰关联等量化方法,分析问卷结果得到对于导致就业风险的主因素。最后对得出的结论提出思考。