Multinational enterprises and the global economy

This article examines the impact of family background (social class, cultural and economic capital) and ability on the choice of subjects in secondary and tertiary education in Britain. Using a framework that integrates rational choice perspectives and cultural reproduction theory, we assume that children take their parents' social position as a reference for their own choices, and are guided mainly by the amount of economic and cultural capital that is available within the family. Using longitudinal data from the 1958 British birth cohort (N =13,245), the empirical analysis shows that children from higher social class backgrounds achieved a higher standard in both humanities and scientific subjects in primary and secondary school. Furthermore, children of the professional class were relatively likely to choose the prestigious subjects of medicine and law in university, independent of ability. Both absolute and relative levels of ability were relevant to the choice of subject at degree level, as it was found that people chose subjects that they were relatively good at compared to other subjects. This concept of ‘comparative advantage’ gives additional insight into field-of-study choices, but does not explain the gender segregation across disciplines.

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Social Class, Ability and Choice of Subject in Secondary and Tertiary Education in Britain

It is well known that higher education financing involves uncertainty and risk with respect to students' future economic fortunes, and an unwillingness of banks to provide loans because of the absence of collateral. It follows that without government intervention there will be both socially sub-optimal and regressive outcomes with respect to the provision of higher education. The historically most common response to this market failure – a government guarantee to repay student loans to banks in the event of default – is associated with significant problems. Income contingent loans offer a possible solution. Since the late 1980s ICLs have been adopted in, or recommended for, a significant and growing number of countries, and it is this important international policy reform that has motivated the chapter. An ICL provides students with finance for tuition and/or income support, its critical and defining characteristic being that the collection of the debt depends on the borrowers' future capacity to pay. ICL have two major insurance advantages for borrowers over more typical arrangements: default protection and consumption smoothing. With reference to countries with both successful and unsuccessful ICL, the chapter illustrates that the operational and design features of such schemes are of fundamental importance with respect to their potential efficacy. It also seems to be the case that in many institutional and political environments there is not yet the administrative sophistication to make ICLs viable, although for reasons documented this is unlikely to be the case for the vast majority of OECD countries. For one country, Australia, there is now a significant amount of research into the consequences of an ICL, and the evidence is explored in some detail. The investigation into the Australian experience helps in the development of a research agenda.

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Income Contingent Loans for Higher Education: International Reforms

The dynamic changes in tertiary education that were observed in Poland for the last 20 years transformed the Polish educational market and led to the immense expansion of educational institutions. The rapid increase in the number of students that continued until 2006 is however over and Polish universities have begun to compete for their clients. Increased competition along with the pessimistic forecasts for Poland with regard to demographic changes result in the growing demand for the knowledge on determinants of student educational choices and satisfaction. Although the amount of studies in this field is growing, Poland is still substantially underrepresented in the current research. The purpose of this article was to examine the underlying factors behind the choices that Polish students make while pursuing their tertiary education. The research method that combines focus groups’ discussions and a survey study among 1,420 business major students helped us to identify the factors behind three phases of the decision making process: pursuing higher education; information search along with final choice of a university; and satisfaction from chosen studies. Our research implies that decision making with regard to tertiary education is multifaceted and longitudinal as it combines a different set of factors in each stage of the decision making process.

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Determinants of higher education choices and student satisfaction: the case of Poland

This paper employs cointegration and error‐correction modelling to test the causal relationship between real income, real investment and tertiary education using data for the People’s Republic of China over the period 1952–1999. To proxy tertiary education we use higher education enrolments and higher education graduates in alternative empirical specifications. One of the paper’s main findings is that real income, real investment and tertiary education are cointegrated when real investment is the dependent variable, but are not cointegrated when either tertiary education or real income is the dependent variable. We also extend the in‐sample analysis to examine the decomposition of variance and impulse response functions.

Higher Education, Real Income and Real Investment in China: Evidence From Granger Causality Tests

The aim of this article is to shed light on the relationship between higher education and economic development by means of econometric tools designed to evaluate the existence and direction of causality: cointegration and Granger-causality tests. The results show a significant causality from national higher educational effort (proxied by the number of students per capita, i.e. not engaged in productive activities) to economic development for four countries: Sweden (1910–1986), United Kingdom (1919–1987), Japan (1885–1975) and France (1899–1986). However, such a causality link has not been found for Italy (1885–1986) or Australia (1906–1986). This suggests that this relationship is indeed not mechanistic as already pointed out by some social scientists.

A causality analysis of the link between higher education and economic development

Rational choice under unequal constraints: the example of Belgian higher education

In this paper, we analyze a bidimensional quality competition between two higher education sectors characterised by different preferences (academic vs. vocational) as well as cost structures, and its impact on curriculum’s provision (type and quality), both in decentralised and social welfare maximisation settings. The students are heterogenous in terms of their valuation of quality and their intellectual type. We try to illustrate in this abstract setting some stylized facts as academic drift of vocational institutions as well as addressing more normative issue as the relative merits of binary or unitary models of higher education

https://dipot.ulb.ac.be/dspace/bitstream/2013/13580/1/dul-0068.pdf

Quality and variety competition in higher education

The aim of this article is to shed light on the determinants of the decision to participate in the labour force while studying, and of the intensity of this participation as measured by the wages earned by students. We show that students react to their future expected economic benefits associated with their chosen course of study. In this sense, our results confirm Levy-Garboua’s (Revue francaise de Sociologie XVII: 53–80, 1976) thesis of working as an adjustment variable for the variations in the expected rate of return of discipline. Our results indicate that the decision to work while studying and its intensity depend on students’ socioeconomic status and material needs, as well as external financial resources. Altogether, our results suggest that the equity and internal efficiency implications of such a social bias in the labour force participation behaviour might not be too important, but that some public interventions might nevertheless improve the overall external efficiency by allowing students to spend more time on more valorizing activities rather than unskilled and low-paid jobs.

Jean Luc De Meulemeester

Papers

A causality analysis of the link between higher education and economic development

A causality analysis of the link between higher education and economic development

Rational choice under unequal constraints: the example of Belgian higher education

Quality and variety competition in higher education

Labour participation of higher education students