Investment In Schooling Research Articles

Post-migration investments in education and job search: a family perspective

This paper examines post-migration investments in schooling and job search of immigrant families using new longitudinal data for Australia. Higher education levels at the time of arrival are associated with a greater probability of enrolling in school after migration. In households where the visa category would suggest that post-migration investments might be important, we find higher rates of school enrolment and job search. Traditional gender roles appear to dictate which partner makes the investments in formal schooling. However, labour market advantage, captured by principal applicant status, appears to dictate which partner makes greater investments in job search.

Relations between adolescents’ self-evaluations, time perspectives, motivation for school and their achievement in different countries and at different ages

The present study focused on the relations between the self-efficacy, social self-concept, time perspectives, school investment and academic achievement of students in four different European countries and in different adolescence periods. A total of 1623 students completed questionnaires. The relations between the concepts proved not to be specific to the Western or to the former Communist bloc countries studied. The expected general decline in investment and academic achievement over the adolescence period showed up in all four countries studied. Contrary to our hypothesis, however, this decline could not be explained by growing influences of either social self-concept or time perspectives regarding personal development on their investment. In fact, the effects of social self-concept were strongest for the youngest adolescence group. Students’ social self-concept was the best predictor for their investment, while self-efficacy proved to predict academic achievement best in all adolescence periods.

Gender Bias in Parental Investments in Children’s Education: A Theoretical Analysis

Human capital accumulation is one of the main engines of economic growth. Thus, many LDCs have introduced laws over the past 30 years for compulsory education and have increased their investment in public schooling. Nevertheless, the level of education in most poor countries is still very low, particularly for girls. The goal of this article is to develop a model of household decision-making in order to better understand what variables affect parents’ decision to educate girls less than boys. In the first part of the paper, a unitary model, a non-cooperative household model, and a bargaining model are developed and compared to explain factors that might produce gender bias in investment in education. As a result, the number of years of education for male and female children depends on the different costs and returns of educating girls and boys and, in the non-consensus models, on each parent’s preferences and decision power. The second part of the paper contains a simulation of the models assuming different policies for increasing women’s education using figures from the Living Standard Measurement Studies of Cote d’Ivoire.

Issues in longitudinal research on motivation

This paper discusses two methodological issues regarding the analysis of longitudinal data using structural equation modeling that emerged during the reconsideration of the analysis of a recent study on the relationship between academic motivation and language achievement in elementary education [Stoel R.D., Peetsma, T.T.D. and Roeleveld, J. (2003). Relations between the development of school investment, self-confidence and language achievement in elementary education: a multivariate latent growth curve approach. Learning and individual differences, 13, 313–333]. The issues are related to the factorial structure of the repeatedly measured variables, and to the explanation of interindividual difference by means of covariates [see Stoel, R.D., Van den Wittenboer, G. and Hox, J.J. (2004a). Including time-invariant covariates in the latent growth curve model. Structural Equation Modeling, 11, 155–167, Stoel, R.D., Van den Wittenboer, G. and Hox, J.J. (2004b). Methodological issues in the application of the latent growth curve model. In K. van Montfort, H. Oud, and A. Satorra (Eds.). Recent developments on structural equation modeling: Theory and applications. (pp. 241–262). Amsterdam: Kluwer Academic Press. It is illustrated that standard modeling practices may sometimes lead to incorrect conclusions regarding the concepts under investigation, and that ideally alternative modeling possibilities should be considered in order to check the adequacy of the standard practice.

Why Do Schooling Returns Differ? Screening, Private Schools, and Labor Markets in the Philippines and Thailand

This article examines returns to schooling in the Philippines and Thailand, using recent employee surveys in manufacturing industries. Empirical results show that (i) schooling returns steadily increase as education attainment increases in Thailand, but the returns increase only at university level in the Philippines, and that (ii) private school premiums are higher in the Philippines than Thailand. The latter finding is consistent with the dominance of private institutions in the Philippine education system. The premiums from private schooling investments in the Philippines are, however, found to be spurious in the sense that private schools screen high ability students, which augments wage. Therefore, the productivity gain from private schooling is small.

Social Learning, Neighborhood Effects, and Investment in Human Capital: Evidence from Green-Revolution India

This paper empirically identifies social learning and neighborhood effects in schooling investments in a new technology regime. The estimates of learning-investment rule from farm household panel data at the onset of the Green Revolution in India, show that (1) agents learn about schooling returns from income realizations of their neighbors and (2) schooling distribution of the parents' generation in a community has externalities to schooling investments in children that are consistent with social learning. Simulations show that variations in schooling distributions within and across communities generate through social learning substantial variations in child enrollment rate and average household income. The results suggest that imperfect information hinders investment in human capital

Poverty in Ghana from an Assets-based Perspective: An Application of Probit Technique*

: This paper extends the existing literature on poverty in developing economies by examining the effects of human capital, financial capital and physical assets on the incidence of poverty in both urban and rural Ghana. The following is found: low stocks of assets appear to be a more prevalent problem associated with poverty; the returns to human capital are positive and rise with higher educational attainment, irrespective of gender; the correlation between income distribution and incidence of poverty is positive; and ownership of human, physical and financial assets reduces the probability of being poor. Against the backdrop of growth-oriented policies, the paper calls for investments in schooling, provision of institutional credit and an enabling environment for labour market activities as strategies for the reduction of poverty.

School Choice and Intergenerational Poverty Trap

This paper formulates a dynamic altruistic model of parental choice of school quality and intergenerational social mobility. It shows that when there are many school qualities, the earnings of children as a function of parental schooling investment is a non-concave function, which leads to multiple equilibria. The paper studies the intergenerational dynamics of parental schooling investment and gives conditions on the rate of return from parental schooling investment under which some families are stuck in intergenerational poverty trap. The policy implications are also discussed.

Human Capital and Growth: An Alternative Accounting

Abstract This paper re-examines the importance of human capital in explaining economic growth. Previous studies are extended by including schooling investments of both time and goods within the school year, a human capital externality, and imperfect substitution between white collar and manual tasks. The model of worker productivity used to conduct the growth accounting is consistent with (1) rates of return to time and goods investment in education, (2) white collar wage premia, and (3) trendless worker productivity growth rates in the United States over the 20th century. The analysis suggests that about one third of United States growth over this period was related to human capital accumulation, accounting for an average annual growth rate of 0.6 to 0.7 percent. The model also implies that neoclassical inputs can account for 5.5 to 8.5-fold differences in worker productivity across rich and poor countries.

The Adolescent Therapeutic Alliance Scale (ATAS): Initial psychometrics and prediction of outcome in family-based substance abuse prevention counseling

This study piloted a 14-item, observer-rated therapeutic alliance scale with adolescents enrolled in family-based substance abuse prevention counseling. The Adolescent Therapeutic Alliance Scale (ATAS) was drawn from 2 main sources: (a) items from the Vanderbilt Therapeutic Alliance Scale–Revised based on developmental considerations and (b) Bordin's (1979) theory of the alliance as consisting of bond, tasks, and goals. Independent observers rated the therapist–adolescent alliance for 51 at-risk, African American adolescents (aged 11–14 years). Factor analysis suggested the ATAS measures one construct (eigenvalue=8.6, accounting for 61.3% of total scale variance). Item loadings ranged from .40 to .90. Convergent validity with both therapist- and observer-rated engagement was also high. Internal consistency reliability (α=.90) and intraclass correlation (ICC1,2=.74) were acceptable. A trend emerged for ATAS ratings to predict improvement in adolescent investment in school. Recommendations are made for futu...

Breaking into schools: Establishing high quality human services in educational contexts

This paper explores the ACT Government’s investment in a school based human services program. This program aims to improve educational and social outcomes for children and young people by creating effective working relationships between families, communities and their schools. It considers the contemporary challenges to achieving a quality service in a domain not normally inhabited by human services professionals. The main focus of the paper is an analysis of some of the factors which were considered in establishing a high quality service.The paper draws attention to the importance of developing a conceptually sound program model, in particular one which demonstrates how evaluation can be integrated throughout the program cycle. It argues the importance of pursuing two key pathways to quality: the achievement of professional standards in program design, and the pursuit of the consumer voice in shaping and judging program performance.The paper contends that program sustainability in this field of practice hinges on recognising who the consumers are, and achieving a range of outcomes which address their varied needs and priorities.

The Human Development Trap in Mexico

Human development is characterized by intergenerational traps that slow economic growth. Such a trap exists in Mexico, with increasing returns for education not accessed by most of the population. In addition, early child health and nutrition are strongly associated with later educational achievements. The distribution of schooling is multiple peaked with two social classes, those with complete lower secondary schooling or less, and those with 15 or more years of education. The lower group's schooling investment responds mainly to public education. Policies supporting nutrition, health, early child development and education must complement pro-market reform to effectively promote long-term economic growth.

Technological change and the distribution of schooling: evidence from green-revolution India

In this paper, we develop a two-strata general-equilibrium model of human capital acquisition with endogenous school construction that permits an assessment of the relative impacts of technological change and school availability on schooling investments in landless and landed households and illuminates how these choices interact through the adult and child labor markets. The implications of the model are tested using a unique household-level panel data set which constitutes a representative sample of rural India during the peak period of agricultural innovation associated with the green revolution, 1968–1982. The empirical results indicate that the operation of the market for child labor worsens the distributional impact of agricultural productivity on school investment across landless and landed households, as landless child labor is used to replace landed child labor lost due to increased child school attendance in landed households. The results also suggest, however, that the allocation of school construction diminishes the adverse impact of technical change on the gap between landless and landed schooling investment.

How Risky is Investment in Human Capital?

The risk of investment in schooling has largely been ignored. We assess the variance in the rate of return by surveying the international empirical literature from this fresh perspective and by simulating risky earnings profiles in alternative options, choosing parameters on the basis of the very limited evidence. The distribution of rates of return appears positively skewed. Our best guess of ex ante risk in university education is a coefficient of variation of about 0.3, comparable to that in a randomly selected financial portfolio with some 30 stocks. Allowing for stochastic components in earnings also markedly affects expected returns.

Reforms, Investment, and Poverty in Rural China

Shenggen FanInternational Food Policy Research Institute and Institute of AgriculturalEconomics of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural SciencesLinxiu ZhangCenter for Chinese Agricultural Policy of the Chinese Academy of SciencesXiaobo ZhangInternational Food Policy Research InstituteI. IntroductionChina is one of the few countries in the developing world that has madeprogress in reducing its total number of poor over the past 25 years.

Time-Space Trajectories in Provincial Gentrification

Drawing on qualitative interviews in an inner Bristol (UK) neighbourhood, this paper offers some preliminary observations on the housing trajectories and strategies of a group of onward-moving gentrifiers. This indicates the potentially restricted nature of gentrification activity in the life-course and in the housing trajectories of these gentrifiers. The evidence points, on the one hand, to the diffuseness of gentrification, with a range of 'marginal', 'community' and 'corporate' gentrifiers all moving within the gentrified neighbourhood. On the other hand, those leaving the neighbourhood for contrasting locations and housing aesthetics experience a constrained form of gentrification: an inability to keep all social fields in play at the same time. They trade off current aesthetic display for longer-term investment in schooling and class reproduction. The structural and spatial arrangements of housing and education fields in different cities are thus critical in understanding how gentrification is expressed in terms of cultural capital, pointing to a provincial form of gentrification.

Congruence of classroom and field instruction in social work: An empirical study

This study examines the degree of congruence between the aims and missions emphasized in the classroom and those conveyed to the students in their fieldwork in the three years of an undergraduate program in Social Work at the Bob Shapell School of Social Work in Israel. Analysis of the responses of 28 classroom instructors and 142 field supervisors on a 40-item questionnaire revealed a synergetic and complementary pattern of classroom and field instruction, reflecting the School's investment of time, energy, and thought in coordinating the two. Some problems of coordination were found, however, and recommendations were made to rectify them.

“English is like the dollar”: hard currency ideology and the status of English in Peru

This paper presents observations from an agro–pastoral village in the Andes, at the periphery of Lima and from an upper–class shopping area, and discusses attitudes toward the state–driven promotion of English. In these communities, a nearly universal ideology in Peru manifests itself in the belief that “hard currency” cultural capital in the form of English competence is needed for technological advancement, employment opportunities, national progress and international travel. In education, there are increasing but ineffectual investments in public schools and a mushrooming private school industry. The struggle for linguistic distinction generates a low level language war, where colonially rooted anxieties about race and class come into conflict with popular aspirations for social mobility.

Mortality Decline, Human Capital Investment and Economic Growth

We examine the role of increased life expectancy in raising human capital investment during the process of economic growth. We develop a continuous time, overlapping generations model in which individuals make optimal schooling investment choices in the face of a constant probability of death. We present analytic results, followed by results from a calibrated version of the model using realistic estimates of the return to schooling. Mortality decline produces economically significant increases in schooling and consumption. Allowing schooling to vary endogenously produces a much larger response of consumption and capital to mortality decline than is observed when schooling is held fixed.

Parental investment in schooling: Evidence from a subsistence farming community in South Africa

Interviews were carried out amongst a cohort of 488 parents who lived as subsistence farmers in a remote and very poorly resourced region of South Africa. The majority of respondents had invested heavily in the education of their children, contrary to what might have been predicted from large family sizes and the economic and ecological pressures that families faced. There was little evidence of child specialization, in which educational investment might have been targeted more to some children than others in a family. However, relatively wide birth spacing may have made the financial and opportunity costs of schooling more manageable. This speculation is given some support by two findings: first, that the number of grades of schooling children complete before leaving increases significantly as birth spacing increases; second, that children who are still in school progress more rapidly as birth interval increases. Greater opportunities for the schooling of sons (made possible by low rates of migrant labour in the community), coupled with high opportunity costs associated with the schooling of daughters, made it likely that sons would be educated to a higher level than daughters. However, there was consistent evidence for gender equity in schooling patterns. This is attributed to the lower risk of financial and opportunity losses that are associated with rearing daughters in this particular community. Birth order exerted only modest effects on the decisions parents made about schooling their offspring. The investment strategy as a whole could be interpreted as “bet‐hedging” under conditions where events outside parental control prevented them from targeting investment to children who could be readily identified as having favourable educational and employment prospects. It is concluded that parents invest in their sons and daughters in a manner that can only be understood when the complexities of their particular social, economic, and ecological contexts are taken into account.