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Interest in the field of career and technical education (CTE) has experienced a resurgence over the last decade, as the global economy has grown increasingly competitive while students have continued to leave school underprepared for well-paying twenty-first century jobs. Together and separately, the education and workforce sectors have sought to address these challenges and better prepare students for viable economic futures. The results have been many new, innovative programs at both the secondary and postsecondary education levels that seek to give students technical training for specific careers, general training to prepare them for the workplace, and work-based learning opportunities where they can develop connections to employers and the workforce. While there are still many under-researched areas in CTE, this paper attempts to capture the evidence that has emerged--identifying areas where there is more evidence as well as areas where gaps in evidence still exist. The studies that have been conducted on CTE have demonstrated that it shows promise, but it is imperative to continue building evidence, particularly where there is policy interest and momentum but little data. Doing so will help demonstrate how those programs and models serve students and ensure that the continued scaling up of CTE is supported by a rigorous evidence base. This paper begins with an overview of the issues in the education system and the labor market that have led to the current revival of CTE. It argues that the skills today's employers need are not the ones schools are providing. The paper continues with a description of how various policies have fostered the growth of CTE. In the next section, it provides details on the types of programs and institutions that offer CTE, and the evidence base to support each of them. The paper provides evidence on the effectiveness of CTE at different educational levels, and for specific subgroups, including students with disabilities, and by gender. Further, the paper provides an overview of the available evidence to support different kinds of programs offered at both secondary and postsecondary education levels, touching on the amount of evidence available in each area and the level of rigor used in the studies that generated that evidence. The paper concludes by suggesting that while CTE instruction at the secondary and postsecondary levels could bolster students' economic mobility by helping them gain postsecondary credentials and obtain higher-paying jobs, there are challenges involved in turning that promise into reality. Investments in evidence-based practices can give CTE programs a better chance at success.

The paper presents a first global investigation of the longer-term inequality implications of COVID-19 by examining the effect of school closures on the ability of children from different countries and backgrounds to engage in continued learning throughout the pandemic, and their implications for intergenerational mobility in education. The analysis builds on the data from the Global Database of Intergenerational Mobility, country-specific results of the learning loss simulation model using weekly school closure information from February 2020 to February 2022, and high-frequency phone survey data collected by the World Bank during the pandemic to assess the incidence and quality of continued learning during periods of school closures across children from different backgrounds. Based on this information, the paper simulates counterfactual levels of educational attainment and corresponding absolute and relative intergenerational educational mobility measures with and without COVID-19 impacts, to arrive at estimates of COVID-19 impacts. The simulations suggest that the extensive school closures and associated learning losses are likely to have a significant impact on both absolute and relative intergenerational educational mobility in the absence of remedial measures. In upper-middle-income countries, the share of children with more years of education than their parents (absolute mobility) could decline by 8 percentage points, with the largest impacts observed in the Latin America region. Furthermore, unequal access to continued learning during school closures across children from households of different socioeconomic backgrounds (proxied by parental education levels) leads to a significant decline in relative educational mobility. [This report was prepared by the World Bank Poverty and Equity Global Practice & Education Global Practice.]

Chetty et al. (2022) say county density of cross-class friendships (referred to here as "adult-bridging capital") has causal impacts on social mobility within the United States. We instead find that social mobility rates are a function of county density of family capital (higher marriage rates and two-person households), community capital (community organizations, religious congregations, and volunteering), and mean student achievement in grades 3-8. Our models use similar multiple regression equations and the same variables employed by Chetty et al. but also include state fixed effects, student achievement, and family, community, schoolbridging (cross-class high school friendships), and political (participation and institutional trust) capital. School-bridging capital is weakly correlated with mobility if adult-bridging is excluded from the model. R-squared barely changes when adult-bridging is incorporated into the model. When it is included, mobility continues to be significantly correlated with the achievement, family, and community variables but not with school-bridging and political ones. We infer that county mobility rates are largely shaped by parental presence, community life, and student achievement. To enhance mobility, public policy needs to enhance the lives of disadvantaged people at home, in school, and in communities, not just the social class of their friendships.

This paper provides new evidence on educational inequality and reviews the literature on the causes and consequences of unequal education. We document large achievement gaps between children from different socio-economic backgrounds, show how patterns of educational inequality vary across countries, time, and generations, and establish a link between educational inequality and social mobility. We interpret this evidence from the perspective of economic models of skill acquisition and investment in human capital. The models account for different channels underlying unequal education and highlight how endogenous responses in parents' and children's educational investments generate a close link between economic inequality and educational inequality. Given concerns over the extended school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic, we also summarize early evidence on the impact of the pandemic on children's education and on possible long-run repercussions for educational inequality.

There is empirical evidence of substantial heterogeneity in economic mobility across geographic areas and the efficacy of schools has been suggested as an explanatory factor. Using administrative microdata from seven states covering nearly 3 million students, we explore the potential role of schools in promoting economic mobility by estimating cross-district variation in "academic mobility"--a term we use to describe the extent to which students' ranks in the distribution of academic performance change during their schooling careers. We show that there exists considerable heterogeneity in academic mobility across school districts. However, after aggregating our district-level measures of academic mobility to the commuting-zone level and merging them with geographically matched external estimates of economic mobility, we find little scope for geographic differences in academic mobility to meaningfully account for differences in economic mobility.

I study the efficacy of test-based meritocracy in college admissions by evaluating the impact of a grade-based "top percent'' policy implemented by the University of California. Eligibility in the Local Context (ELC) provided large admission advantages to the top four percent of 2001-2011 graduates from each California high school. I construct a novel longitudinal dataset linking the ELC era's 1.8 million UC applicants to educational and labor market outcomes. I first employ a regression discontinuity design to show that ELC led over 10 percent of barely-eligible applicants from low-opportunity high schools to enroll at selective UC campuses instead of less-selective public colleges and universities. Half of those participants were from underrepresented minority groups, and their average SAT scores were at the 12th percentile of their UC peers. Instrumental variable estimates show that ELC participants' more-selective university enrollment caused increases in five-year degree attainment by 30 percentage points and annual early-career wages by up to $25,000. I then analyze ELC's general equilibrium effects by estimating a structural model of university application, admission, and enrollment with an embedded top percent policy. I find that ELC and counterfactual expansions of ELC substantively increase disadvantaged students' net enrollment at selective public universities. Reduced-form and structural estimates show that ELC participants derived similar or greater value from more-selective university enrollment than their higher-testing peers. These findings suggest that access-oriented admission policies at selective universities can promote economic mobility without efficiency losses. [Additional funding for this research was provided by the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment.]

The purpose of this brief paper is to present initial findings from the recently collected London School of Economics and Political Science-Centre for Economic Performance (LSE-CEP) Social Mobility survey, which was undertaken as part of the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) project 'Generation COVID and Social Mobility: Evidence and Policy'. These are the first results from a project that is producing a detailed assessment of COVID-19's impact on education and economic inequalities and offering an assessment for the longer term consequences for social mobility in the UK. Alongside the survey findings, the authors have also analysed economic and education outcomes of individuals in April 2020 in the Understanding Society (USoc) national household panel data. Before the pandemic, younger generations were already facing declining absolute social mobility and real wage decline (Elliot Major and Machin, 2018, 2020a). Education inequalities were also widening. Here new findings are presented on inequalities in the workplace and the classroom that have emerged following the pandemic.

Poor post-secondary education infrastructure and opportunities partly explain the low higher education rates in developing countries. This paper estimates the effect of a program that improved post-secondary education infrastructure by building many university campuses across Uruguay. Leveraging temporal and geographic variation in program implementation, we use a two-way fixed effect design and comprehensive administrative records to assess the program's causal impact. By lowering the distance to a university campus, the program successfully increased university enrollment, particularly of less privileged students who are the first in their families to attend a university. The program impacted students from localities up to 30 kilometers from the new campus, reducing spatial inequality. Importantly, this expansion did not lower university completion rates. Furthermore, the program increased high school attendance and completion rates and the proportion of educated workers in the affected localities. [Funding for this report was provided by CAF.]

The paper studies the impact of financial aid on long-term educational attainment and labor market outcomes in Colombia. In 2014, the government launched a large-scale and generous student loan program called "Ser Pilo Paga." It offered full tuition coverage to students admitted to one of 33 government-certified high-quality universities known for superior test scores, graduation rates, and per-student spending. Notably, completing a bachelor's degree converted the loan into a grant. To qualify, students must score in the top 10% of the standardized high school exit exam and have below-median household wealth. Using RD and DD methodologies, we use nationwide administrative microdata linking all high school test takers, postsecondary attendees, and formal workers to estimate impacts up to eight years after high school. Financial aid improves college enrollment, quality, and attainment, particularly in STEM-related fields. The earnings gains are substantial, growing, and driven partly by high-quality universities improving students' skills, as demonstrated by their performance on Colombia's college graduation exam. A welfare analysis using the MVPF yields over $4.8 per dollar of government spending. Lastly, the program narrowed socioeconomic gaps in college attainment, skill development, and earnings among academically similar students without adversely affecting non-recipients, thereby promoting equity and efficiency.

Using 2016 Canadian Census data, this article examines the socioeconomic status of the second generation of immigrants, whose population has become increasingly diverse. The analysis focuses on group differences by visible minority status in two aspects relating to socioeconomic mobility: (1) intergenerational progress in educational attainment, which indicates the ability to achieve higher education regardless of parents' education, and (2) the relationship between education and labour market outcomes, which reveals the ability to convert educational qualifications into economic well-being. The results in general paint a very positive picture for the children of immigrants regarding the first aspect, while mixed results are evident for the second aspect. In particular, some visible minority groups are characterized by high educational attainment and high earnings, while some other groups experience low education mobility and low labour market returns to education. These results suggest that there are divergent paths of socioeconomic integration among the second generation.

Historically Black colleges and universities are institutions that were established prior to 1964 with the principal mission of educating Black Americans. In this essay, we focus on two main issues. We start by examining how Black College students perform across HBCUs and non-HBCUs by looking at a relatively broad range of outcomes, including college and graduate school completion, job satisfaction, social mobility, civic engagement, and health. HBCUs punch significantly above their weight, especially considering their significant lack of resources. We then turn to the potential causes of these differences and provide a glimpse into the "secret sauce" of HBCUs. We conclude with potential implications for HBCU and non-HBCU policy.

Positive social mobility benefits individuals in terms of personal advancement and the nation in terms of productivity. There are other social benefits aside. Education, including higher education, is widely understood to be a key contributor to social mobility. However, without a measure of universities' impact on social mobility it is difficult to assess their individual or combined contribution to this agenda and therefore to understand fully the value of university education to individuals, to the country and its taxpayers. The author sets out to identify a measure of universities' contributions to social mobility, combining the social distance travelled by graduates and the number of graduates transported. In this paper, Professor David Phoenix, the Vice-Chancellor of London South Bank University, proposes a new English Social Mobility Index (SMI). Incorporating the number of students from disadvantaged backgrounds and the distance they travel after they enter their higher education institution, the English SMI provides a new way of understanding the contribution of universities to social mobility. [Foreword written by Nick Hillman.]

Why is invention strongly positively correlated with parental income not only in the US but also in Finland which displays low income inequality and high social mobility? Using data on 1.45M Finnish individuals and their parents, we find that: (i) the positive association between parental income and off-spring probability of inventing is greatly reduced when controlling for parental education; (ii) instrumenting for the parents having a MSc-degree using distance to nearest university reveals a large causal effect of parental education on offspring probability of inventing; and (iii) the causal effect of parental education has been markedly weakened by the introduction in the early 1970s of a comprehensive schooling reform. [Funding for this report was provided by the ERC, the Yrjö Jahnsson Foundation, and FORTE.]

This paper introduces a new measure of the labor markets served by colleges and universities across the United States. About 50 percent of recent college graduates are living and working in the metro area nearest the institution they attended, with this figure climbing to 67 percent in-state. The geographic dispersion of alumni is more than twice as great for highly selective 4-year institutions as for 2-year institutions. However, more than one-quarter of 2-year institutions disperse alumni more diversely than the average public 4-year institution. In one application of these data, we find that the average strength of the labor market to which a college sends its graduates predicts college-specific intergenerational economic mobility. In a second application, we quantify the extent of "brain drain" across areas and illustrate the importance of considering migration patterns of college graduates when estimating the social return on public investment in higher education.

This chapter provides new evidence on educational inequality and reviews the literature on the causes and consequences of unequal education. We document large achievement gaps between children from different socio-economic backgrounds, show how patterns of educational inequality vary across countries, time, and generations, and establish a link between educational inequality and social mobility. We interpret this evidence from the perspective of economic models of skill acquisition and investment in human capital. The models account for different channels underlying unequal education and highlight how endogenous responses in parents' and children's educational investments generate a close link between economic inequality and educational inequality. Given concerns over the extended school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic, we also summarize early evidence on the impact of the pandemic on children's education and on possible long-run repercussions for educational inequality.

Most previous research on grammar schools has focused narrowly on eligibility for Free School Meals as a measure of disadvantage. But with 45% of pupils at grammar schools coming from families with below median incomes, a broader consideration of the impact of grammar schools on social mobility is necessary. The evidence suggests that grammar schools can increase the likelihood of progression to highly-selective higher education for pupils from some traditionally disadvantaged groups, including pupils in the most disadvantaged two quintiles of social disadvantage and pupils with Black and Minority Ethnic backgrounds (BME). This report considers the impact of grammar schools on progression to higher education, considering various groups of pupils and focusing particularly on progression to highly-selective education and to Oxbridge. It considers both the chance of getting into a grammar school and the relative rates of progression, to compare the opportunities of pupils in selective and non-selective areas. It also assesses the impact of the new specialist Maths schools and explores attitudes to grammar school expansion across different socio-economic classes.

Two-year community colleges enroll nearly half of all first-time undergraduates in the United States, but to ambiguous effect: low persistence rates and the potential for diverting students from 4-year institutions cast ambiguity over 2-year colleges' contributions to upward mobility. This paper develops a new instrumental variables approach to identifying causal effects along multiple treatment margins, and applies it to linked education and earnings registries to disentangle the net impacts of 2-year college access into two competing causal margins: significant value-added for 2-year entrants who otherwise would not have attended college, but negative impacts on students diverted from immediate 4-year entry. [Additional funding for this report was provided by the Becker Friedman Institute for Research in Economics and the Robert H. Topel Faculty Research Fund at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.]

This paper demonstrates multiple beneficial impacts of a program promoting intergenerational mobility for disadvantaged African-American children and their children. The program improves outcomes of the first-generation treatment group across the life cycle, which translates into better family environments for the second generation leading to positive intergenerational gains. There are long-lasting beneficial program effects on cognition through age 54, contradicting claims of fadeout that have dominated popular discussions of early childhood programs. Children of the first-generation treatment group have higher levels of education and employment, lower levels of criminal activity, and better health than children of the first-generation control group.

The recent Supreme Court decision NCAA vs Alston (June 2021) has heightened interest in the benefits and costs of participation in sports for student athletes. Anecdotes about the exploitation of student athletes were cited in the opinion. This paper uses panel data for two different cohorts that follow students from high school through college and into their post-school pursuits to examine the generality of these anecdotes. On average, student athletes' benefit- often substantially so--in terms of graduation, post-collegiate employment, and earnings. Benefits in terms of social mobility for disadvantaged and minority students are substantial, contrary to the anecdotes in play in the media and in the courts.

This paper studies how exclusive social groups shape upward mobility, and whether interactions between low- and high-status peers can integrate the top rungs of the economic and social ladder. Our setting is Harvard in the 1920s and 1930s, where new groups of students arriving on campus encountered a social system centered on exclusive old boys' clubs. We combine archival and Census records of students' college lives and long-run careers with a room-randomization design based on a scaled residential integration policy. We first show that high-status students from prestigious private high schools perform worse academically than other students, but are much more likely to join exclusive campus clubs. The club membership premium is large: members earn 32% more than other students, and are more likely to work in finance and join country clubs, both characteristic of the era's elite. The membership premium persists after conditioning on high school, legacy status, and even family. Random assignment to high-status peers raises the rates at which students join exclusive social groups on campus, but overall effects are driven entirely by large gains for private school students. In the long run, a shift from the 25th percentile of residential peer group status to the 75th percentile raises the rate at which private school students work in finance by 41% and their membership in adult social clubs by 26%. We conclude that social interactions among the educational elite mediate access to top positions in the economy and society, but may not provide a path to these positions for underrepresented groups. Differences in academic and career outcomes by high school type persist through at least the class of 1990, suggesting that this causal channel remains relevant at contemporary elite universities.

This paper estimates the causal effect of equalizing revenues across public school districts on students' intergenerational mobility, using variation from 13 school finance reforms passed in 20 US states between 1986 and 2004. Since households sort in response to each reform, post-reform revenues are endogenous to an extent that varies across states depending on the funding formula. I address this issue with a simulated-instruments approach, which uses newly collected data on states' funding formulas to simulate revenues in the absence of sorting. I find that equalization has a large effect on mobility, especially for low-income students. I provide suggestive evidence that this effect acts through a reduction in the gap in inputs (such as the number of teachers) and in college attendance between low-income and high-income districts.

We analyze in this paper the long term effect of a high school remedial education program, almost two decades after its implementation. We combine high school records with National Social Security administrative data to examine longer-term outcomes when students were in their early 30s. Our evidence suggest that treated students experienced a 10 percentage points increase in completed years of college schooling, an increase in annual earnings of 4 percentage points, an increase of 1.5 percentage points in months employed, and a significant increase in intergenerational income mobility. These gains are reflecting mainly improvement in outcomes of students from below median income families. Therefore, we conclude that remedial education program that targeted underachieving students in their last year of high school had gains that went much beyond the short term significant improvements in high school matriculation exams. A cost benefit analysis of the program suggests that the government will recover its cost within 7-8 years, implying a very high rate of return to this remedial education program.

High school vocational education has a controversial history in the United States, largely due to a perceived tradeoff between teaching readily deployable occupational skills versus shunting mostly disadvantaged students away from the educational and career flexibility afforded by general academic courses. We study the effects of a nationwide high school reform in Norway that aimed to move beyond this tradeoff. Reform 94, implemented in one step in the fall of 1994, integrated more general education into the vocational track, offered vocational students a pathway to college through a supplementary semester of academic courses, and sought to improve the quality of the vocational track through greater access to apprenticeships. We identify the impacts of the reform through a difference-in-discontinuity research design, comparing students born just before and after the reform's birthdate eligibility cutoff to students born around the same cutoff in placebo years. Linking multiple administrative registries covering the entire Norwegian population, we find that the reform substantially increased initial enrollment in the vocational track, but with different subsequent outcomes for different groups. More men complete the vocational track at the expense of academic diplomas, but this has no detectable impact on college-going and leads to reduced criminal activity and higher earnings in adulthood, especially among disadvantaged men. For disadvantaged women, the initial surge in vocational enrollment leads to fewer high school dropouts and more vocational degrees with the college-prep supplement, and hence an increase in the share of college-eligible women; however, this translates into only small and insignificant increases in college completion and adult earnings. We show that men overwhelmingly pursue vocational education in higher-paying skilled trade fields, while women almost exclusively pursue vocational education in lower-paying service-based fields, which helps in interpreting some of these results. Overall, the reform succeeded at improving social mobility, particularly among men, but it somewhat exacerbated the gender gap in adult earnings.

For decades, assessing income has served as the tried-and-true method for creating financial aid packages--scholarships, grants, and loans--for the nation's college students. Each year, students and families living with low and moderate incomes submit income documentation to colleges, states, and the federal government in hopes of qualifying for financial aid to defray college costs. But what if a student's wealth status revealed more about their ability to cover college costs than their income did? Income is an important measure, but it provides only a snapshot of the full resources available to students and their families. Wealth, too, impacts a student's access and ability to pay for college as well as their chances of graduating and turning career aspirations into a well-paying job and fulfilling life. Examining income alone masks deep and persistent inequities in wealth by race or ethnicity. This gap, which is rooted in generations of discrimination and systemic barriers to opportunity, affects the college dreams of countless people, particularly those from historically marginalized communities. Limitations in available data mean researchers and policymakers know relatively little about how wealth impacts higher education, with far more attention focused on understanding and addressing the effects of income. This paper seeks to address that missing piece by exploring the impact of wealth on students' experiences in higher education and how these experiences, in turn, influence wealth-building.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the public health restrictions that followed changed the structure and experiences of education for young people in the UK. School closures, home schooling, online learning and exam cancellations were some of the consequences of the public health measures taken. School closures were intermittent between March 2020 and March 2021 across early years, primary and secondary education settings in the UK. This paper uses data from the COVID Social Mobility and Opportunities (COSMO) Study -- a longitudinal cohort study of over 13,000 young people who were in Year 11 in the 2020/21 academic year -- to explore young people's perceptions of the assessment process they went through in place of GCSE examinations in the academic year 2020/21, including how these differ depending upon young people's experiences. The paper then looks directly at differences in young people's performance in their Teacher Assessed Grades (TAGs) to examine the extent of inequalities in their performance. It also looks at the performance of those who received small group or one-to-one tutoring as part of efforts to support their post-COVID education recovery, particularly compared to those who were offered but did not take up tutoring of this kind. [For the sixth brief, "Financial Inequalities and the Pandemic," see ED628605.]

For a growing share of learners and workers in the United States, college is failing to live up to its economic mobility promise. The cost of college is rising, accompanied by mounting student debt, and many graduates are underemployed following college. Students face steep barriers to college enrollment and success, including time demands, access to housing and childcare, and transportation. These conditions have prompted many learners and workers to reconsider whether college is truly worth the expense. Higher education leaders are facing a moment of reckoning in which they must improve the economic returns of a college education. However, there is little clarity around which programs and initiatives best improve a student's earnings and employment later in their career. The dearth of information reflects, at least in part, the lack of attention and resources such programs have received from the majority of post-secondary institutions. This white paper puts "college-to-jobs" programs in focus, making the case that they should be a priority for future policy, investment, and research. It maps the field of initiatives that smooth transitions for college students to the workforce, identifying 13 "interventions" that have been deployed to improve college students' economic outcomes. The Playbook provides answers to a crucial question at a time of inflection for postsecondary education: what can we do to launch more college students onto successful career trajectories? [This report was co-published by the Project on Workforce and was funded by the Capital One Foundation.]