Workforce development in the United States today is spread across higher education institutions (primarily public two-year and for-profit colleges), labor market institutions, and workplaces, with public funding from a range of sources. But outcomes for students and workers are weaker than they could be, especially among disadvantaged students and…

Career and technical education (CTE) is increasingly seen as a major potential contributor to the recovery of the U.S. economy. However, the effectiveness and impact of the current Carl D. Perkins Act (otherwise known as Perkins IV) that governs CTE are unclear. Is the federal investment in CTE paying off? To answer this, we need to establish the…

The author writes in favor of gearing educational systems to long-term manpower requirements as he responds to Professor Mark Blaug's article ("Prospects" v2, n4, Winter 1973) which advocates cost-benefit analysis as a tool for educational planning. (JH)

The author responds to Mr. Sanyal's comments which preceed his and which are addressed to the author's article ("Prospects," v2, n4, Winter 72) by discussing the issues of over-expansion of higher education in developing countries and the usefulness of manpower-forecasting in educational planning. (JH)

If education is a form of investment, how much does it contribute to economic growth compared with other forms of investment? The first approach to answering this question was the correlation approach. But although simple correlation studies show a relationship between education and economic progress, they do not prove cause and effect. The…

Four kinds of evidence demonstrating substantial social benefits resulting from public expenditures on higher education are discussed: (1) social rates of return; (2) nonmonetary benefits; (3) local economic activity; and (4) national economic growth. A recent study of the effect of investment in higher education on workforce productivity is…

The three main approaches to educational planning are social demand, manpower forecasting, and cost benefit. The social demand approach, useful only for reference purposes, attempts to forecast and assess consumer demand for education. Manpower forecasting tries to insure an output of the educational system to meet future economic demands, but…

Economic concepts and methods useful to a firm considering the allocation of resources to training workers are presented, with applicability where appropriate for industrial education teachers. The discussion includes goals of investment in training, determining human capital requirements, the training decision, and efficiency in training. (MF)

One in the series described in SO 008 058, this team report is a discussion in two parts of the economics of nonformal education. Part 1 deals with the national allocation of resources to the educational processes. Gathering reliable empirical data on cost-benefit and/or rates of return for allocation decisions is a critical problem. Despite this…

The objective of this study was to establish a criteria and model for comparative evaluation of manpower educational programs. The criteria developed deals with resource allocation in manpower education programs and how well those programs meet the needs of industry. In the proposed model, an occupation is reduced to its basic skills, which are…

The study was directed toward developing a manual for establishing societal benefits and costs of vocational and manpower programs in Wisconsin. After first outlining the background of benefit-cost analysis, problems in establishing cost functions in education are presented along with some important cost concepts and uses of cost information in…

A partial survey of the literature on the economics of vocational training reveals three important lessons on how evaluations may be undertaken using data on pay, inputs, and outputs. The first lesson is that social, corporate, and private returns to vocational training in developing countries appear to be high enough to justify expanding training…

Cost and benefits of education are studied by this collection of eight papers by economists in relation to issues of the genetic component of variation in intelligence, differences between integration and desegregation, and diminishing returns in educational expenditures. Silver's paper challenges the idea that better schools cannot be obtained by…

ISVOR (Societa di Sviluppo e Addestramento Industriale) was incorporated in 1978 as an independent organization owned by Fiat to provide all training services. In 1988, in the area of technical training alone, ISVOR offered 534 different training programs to over 29,500 participants, in a total of approximately 348,000 man/days. Four…

Changes in the economy and declining profit margins are prompting many businesses to question the value of their training investments. Companies that had been operating under the assumption that they were reaping positive benefits from their training efforts are asking their human resource managers to provide proof that their training programs are…