Browse by: "2010"
Index
Title Index
Year Index
Over 50% of Portuguese graduates are out of work for more than six months after leaving university, against the OECD average of 42%. This suggests that universities need to do more to improve graduates’ chances on the labour market and, in many ways, the Bologna reform provided European Union universities with an opportunity to tackle this issue. This paper describes how the Bologna process led to reform at the Catholic University of Portugal’s Faculty of Economics and Management, starting in 2005. Undergraduate studies were reduced from four to three years and strategies were implemented to improve graduates’ employability. The primary aspect of the reform was a competency-based approach to curricula development, along with the creation of three new courses dealing specifically with transferable skills: critical thinking, systemic thinking and communication and teamwork.
This paper outlines the need for adopting a more scientific approach to specifying and assessing academic standards in higher education. Drawing together insights from large-scale studies in Australia, it advances a definition of academic standards, explores potential indicators of academic quality and looks at approaches for setting standards. As learner outcomes need to be placed at the forefront of work on academic standards, this paper concludes by exploring the implications of this position for student assessment and institutional change.
This article provides estimates of the private Internal Rates of Return to tertiary education for women and men in 21 OECD countries, for the years between 1991 and 2005. IRR are computed by estimating labour market premia on cross-country comparable individual-level data. Labour market premia are then adjusted for fiscal factors and costs of education. We find that returns to an additional year of tertiary education are on average above 8% and vary in a range from 4 to 15% in the countries and in the period under study. IRR are relatively homogenous across genders. Overall, a slightly increasing trend is observed over time. The article discusses various policy levers for shaping individual incentives to invest in tertiary education and provides some illustrative quantification of the impact of policy changes on those incentives.
International migration in Latin America today presents several features that will remain constant up to 2030, and new issues will emerge such as the growing feminisation of migration, the special case of indigenous people or human rights aspects. A concentrated migration pattern to the United States and Spain dominate the region. Although this will continue during the next decades, there will also be an incipient pattern of diversification of destinations (other European countries, Canada and Japan). Little progress has been made regarding the productive use of remittances, and the agreements and programmes targeted for temporary labour migration have not become widespread and also continue to include meagre migrant worker quotas. Today, the main destinations for intraregional migrants are Argentina, Costa Rica and the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, but there are some modest signs of change in the future.
Peers play a significant role in assessing faculty members’ performance and in determining others’ career outcomes, such as tenure and promotion. However, the literature is fairly silent on how faculty members formulate their impressions of others’ performance. As part of a larger study, this paper explores factors that significantly correlate with peer ratings of research performance and the reliability of peer ratings. Using a random sample of 236 faculty members from a wide range of accredited business schools in the United States, the authors conducted a web-based survey of faculty in business management to examine the predictors of peer ratings of research performance. Implications for research and practice are discussed.
OECD countries receive a little less than half (97 million in 2000) of the world’s total migrants, of which 3.8 million are from Northern Africa and 1.2 million are from West Africa. West African migration is on the rise, due mainly to an increase in intra-regional mobility (7.5 million). Within the OECD, North America receives the most West African migrants, followed by Europe. This article explores further some current trends in West African migration and outlines some of the issues that could affect this migration in the future, including climate change and demographic concerns in Europe. A European-North African-West African dialogue is proposed to address these future issues and help promote more structured means of cooperation.
The OECD Competition Committee debated universal service obligations in October 2003. This document includes an executive summary and the documents from the meeting: an analytical note by the OECD, written submissions from Australia, Austria, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, the European Commission, Hungary, Japan, Norway, Portugal, Switzerland, Chinese Taipei, the United States, as well as an aide-memoire of the discussion.