There are large socio-economic gaps in higher education participation. But returns to education in the UK derive largely from the attainment of qualifications rather than years of study, and additionally vary by institution, subject and degree class for graduates. This paper provides new...

Higher education is in the position to save Europe by rendering a substantial contribution to sustainable economic growth. For that purpose higher education must strengthen its innovative power in entrepreneurship education and by focusing research more on societal problems, while being better...

College admissions officers face a rapidly changing policy environment where court decisions have limited the use of affirmative action. At the same time, there is mounting evidence that commonly used signals of college readiness, such as the SAT/ACTs, are subject to race and socioeconomic bias....

We estimate the return to attending elite colleges in China using 2010 data on fresh college graduates. We find that the gross return to attending elite colleges is as high as 26.4 percent, but this figure declines to 10.7 percent once we control for student ability, major, college location,...

In the last decade, five U.S. states adopted mandates requiring high school juniors to take a college entrance exam. In the two earliest-adopting states, nearly half of all students were induced into testing, and 40-45% of them earned scores high enough to qualify for selective schools....

This paper discusses the future of universities: trends that are increasingly drawing attention, and those who have yet to appear, without getting into the field of view of the majority of researchers in higher education. Debate on the future of the university is due to the emergence of new...

We use admissions lotteries to estimate the effects of attendance at Boston's charter high schools on college preparation, college attendance, and college choice. Charter attendance increases pass rates on the high-stakes exam required for high school graduation in Massachusetts, with especially...

Affirmative action in higher education may lead to mismatch, a situation where students benefiting from preferential admission struggle with their college-level work because of poor precollege academic preparation. In the United States, those students can switch majors if they underperform in...

This paper investigates the effect of grouping students by prior achievement into different classes (or schools) in settings where students are competing for admission to programs offering only a limited number of places. We first develop a model that identifies the conditions under which the...

Policies supporting international student mobility prepare young people for the challengesof global and multicultural environments. However, disadvantaged students have lowerparticipation rates in mobility schemes, and hence benefit less from their positive impactson career progression....