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Although optimal labour market allocation of school leavers benefits individuals, employers and societies, a substantial part of European school leavers do not find a job that matches their field or level of education. This paper explores the extent to which horizontal and vertical education-to-job matches of European school leavers from secondary education is associated with the level of stratification, standardization, and the level of vocational orientation and institutional linkages of education systems. We combine notions of signalling theory, human capital theory and job matching theory to formulate hypotheses about how education systems affect horizontal and vertical education-to-job matches. We use micro-data on 30,805 school leavers in 20 European countries from the 2009 Ad Hoc Module of the European Labour Force Survey and data on system characteristics. Using multi-level logistic regression, we show that the level of stratification of secondary education is associated with better vertical job matches. We also find that the positive relation between being vocationally trained and education-to-job matches is stronger in systems with stronger institutional linkages. The positive relation between being vocationally trained and vertical job matches is less strong in more vocational oriented systems. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights: [•] We decompose ethnic schooling and employment gaps in endowment and pure ethnic parts. [•] We take schooling delay into account and identify when pure ethnic gaps arise. [•] The pure ethnic gap in schooling outcomes if delays are neglected is small. [•] The pure ethnic gap in schooling outcomes if delays are taken into account is substantial. [•] The pure ethnic gap in the school-to-work transition is substantial. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of low-wage workers have long recognized the role of space in mediating access to employment. Significantly less attention has been paid to the ways in which space informs workers' ability to develop the attributes that would make them more employable. In this article, we address this gap through an examination of how immigrant workers use the relative spatial organization of residence and production to cultivate the skills that enable them to shift out of low-wage occupations. We also argue that workers' spatial job market strategies have an important, but often overlooked, temporal aspect: workers use space over time not only to shape their access to jobs but also to create breathing room for learning skills that enable them to improve their employment trajectories over the long term. Drawing on a multiyear ethnographic study of Mexican immigrants in downtown Philadelphia, we show that immigrant workers used the functional proximity among the restaurant industry, small-scale residential construction work pertaining to housing renovation, and the neighborhoods where they lived to develop skill sets that enabled them to shift into higher-wage construction jobs. In essence, these workers knitted together two seemingly separate industries, such that they could use their employment time in one for learning in and about the other. Our study suggests that interventions that curtail immigrants' mobility may have implications that are far more serious than limiting immediate access to jobs: these measures may undercut immigrants' strategies for developing the skills required for long-term occupational mobility and advancement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BACKGROUND. Little is known about educational attainment, agricultural jobs and income among graduates from Historically Black Land-Grant College and Universities. In this study, we examined the impact of educational attainment on type of jobs among former students and determine if controlling for income, educational attainment has a positive impact on the type jobs after graduation. METHODS. Data are from a study of graduates from three Historically Black Land-Grant Colleges and Universities in Alabama and Tennessee. The questionnaire included questions on educational attainment, career mobility, college curriculum competencies and skill, opinions about agricultural careers, actual salaries, fringe benefits, and other personal characteristics. Descriptive statistics and Chi-square statistics were used for the analysis. RESULTS. The higher the level of education, the greater the tendency for these college of agriculture graduates to remain in agriculture-related careers. To these former students, the extent to which the work is intellectually satisfying appears to be more important than the income it yields. CONCLUSIONS. Graduate related work associated with an advanced degree is highly satisfying even within low incomes. * We thank Professor Henry J. Findlay for his helpful feedback on previous drafts. Address correspondence to Professor Andrew A. Zekeri (email: Zekeri@mytu.tuskegee.edu) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study provides an analysis of the occupational and educational selectivity of Puerto Rican migration to and from the United States using consolidated data from the American Community Survey for 2006 to 2008. Using existing theoretical explanations of migration, the study assesses the extent to which current explanations of migration are applicable to the most recent migratory flows. To ascertain the validity of the proposition that Puerto Rican migration flows are primarily composed of the most disadvantaged workers, we divided the sample into two labor market segments—those employed in low-wage occupations and those not employed in low-wage occupations. The main conclusions of this study are that net migration outflows from the island are likely to persist to the extent that growing disparities in labor market conditions between Puerto Rico and the United States persist, and that the patterns of selectivity predicted by various theories of migration are not unmistakably identifiable in current flows. Such evidence calls for a new look at the case of Puerto Rican migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the role of national institutional factors – more specifically, the level of skill transparency of the education system and labour market coordination – in accounting for cross-national differences in the relationship between education and occupational status. Consistent with previous research, our findings suggest that skill transparency is the primary moderator. Countries with a highly transparent educational system (i.e., extensive tracking, strong vocational orientation, limited tertiary enrolment) tend to be characterized by a strong relationship between education and occupational status. These findings hold even after controlling for the level of labour market coordination. Nevertheless, we also find that labour market coordination plays an independent role by dampening the effect of education on occupational status. Taken together, these results suggest two quite different policy implications: (1) strengthening the skill transparency of the education system by increasing secondary and tertiary-level differentiation may strengthen the relationship between education and occupation, regardless of the level of coordination, and (2) increasing labour market coordination could lead to improved social inclusion and a reduction in inequalities related to educational attainment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Level of education is in many fields of research used as an indicator of social status. Methods: Using Statistics Denmark's register for education and employment of the population, we examined highest completed education with a birth-cohort perspective focusing on people born between 1930 and 1974. Results: Irregularities in the educational data were found for both men and women born from 1951 to 1957. For the birth cohorts born from 1951 to 1954, a sudden increase in the proportion of persons with basic school education only was seen, and a following decrease in this proportion was seen for the birth cohorts born from 1955 to 1957. For the same birth cohorts, a reverse curve was found for the proportion with vocational training as highest completed education. Using proportion of women with at least one child at the age of 30, our analysis illustrated that spurious patterns may emerge when other social phenomena are analysed by partly misclassified educational groups. Conclusions: Our findings showed that register data are not always to be taken at face value and that thorough analysis may unravel unexpected irregularities. Although such data errors may be remedied in analyses of population trends by use of extrapolated values, solutions are less obvious in epidemiological research using individual level data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article there are presented some results on the subject of how the dramatic increase in schooling in Mexico is expressed in the employment destination of the country's non-agricultural, economically-active population (EAP), age 24 to 60. The distribution of this population is analyzed by categories of education attained, income/schedule and employer for five different industrial sectors in the country: two informal (self-employed and micro-entrepreneurs) and three formal (government sector, companies of the industrial sector, and service sector companies). Data from 1992 to 2004 is compared. The results derive from a database developed for Mexico, as part of several national studies conducted by the Information System on Educational Trends in Latin America (SITEAL for its acronym in Spanish), based on the National Survey of Income-Expenditure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The labour and income gap among those who possess different education levels has been growing steadily. The new productive pattern promoted since the 80's seems reluctant to absorb a work force that is not highly qualified. The traditional fordist worker has been replaced by employees who must have more autonomy, responsibility, functional variety and a continuous labour qualification, implying an increasing education for work, as a result of their formal education, their non-formal training and the knowledge obtained during their working career. In situations of high unemployment and poverty, as it happens in Argentina, the characteristics described face a reality where workers expelled by the productive transformations need to acquire more qualifications and to find new employments; young people who look for their first job, can't find it; or, women in precarious labour condition and with lower salaries than their male partners, even with the same job, combine their own situations with their belonging to a layer of vulnerability or social exclusion. Therefore, those classes, coming from households that suffer from structural scarcities or low incomes, or both, feel unable to gain a suitable education and also endure the mechanisms of social selectivity with which the labour market operates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]