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This book discusses and analyses global policies and practices aimed at promoting equity in higher education participation and attainment. Although the massification of higher education systems has facilitated the participation of students from deprived backgrounds, socioeconomic inequalities persist in access to the most prestigious institutions and programmes. Privileged students benefit from a number of advantages in the competition for selective and scarce places: access to information, lower aversion to debt, higher expectations, better previous schooling and higher academic achievement. The chapters present a critical analysis of equity policies in different countries - with or without affirmative action policies, within a context of neoliberal policies or within a social democratic model - and the reasons why they have failed to promote equity and fairness, preventing students from achieving their full educational potential.

Edited excerpt from publisher's website.

The contents are as follows: Introduction / Alberto Amaral; Equity in higher education: evidences, policies and practices: setting the scene / Alberto Amaral; Access and inequality in US higher education: policy issues / David Dill; The persistence of inequity in Brazilian higher education: background data and student performance / Julio Bertolin and Tristan McCowan; Towards equity: developing a national approach to improving social justice through higher education in England / Liz Thomas; Undergraduate student funding in England: the challenges ahead for equity / Claire Callender; Data and reflections on access-transition to higher education in Portugal / Joao Baptista, Cristina Sin, and Orlanda Tavares; Who is left out?: inequalities in higher education admissions and placements in Portugal / Carla Sa, Orlanda Tavares, and Cristina Sin; An equality paradox?: the Northern European case / Per Olaf Aamodt; Conclusion: learning from the past to shape future policies towards equity in higher education / Orlanda Tavares, Cristina Sin, and Carla Sa. Show less

Norway's foreign-born population has tripled since 2000, and the share of migrants among the population has seen one of the largest increases across the OECD, mostly driven by labour migration from EU countries. Most migrants from non-EU countries, in contrast, are refugees and their family members. High qualification levels and labour market participation of the native-born raise the question of an adequate benchmark for integration outcomes, especially for the low-educated refugees and their families. Against this backdrop, Norway puts significant investment into integration, and a number of recent reforms have been aimed at strengthening the system.

This review provides an assessment of these reforms and the remaining challenges. It includes an overview of Norway's integration services - and the many substantial changes in recent years - as well as challenges in access and uptake of integration offers, activation programmes and outcomes of native-born children of immigrants in Norway. The report is structured as follows: chapter one presents the assessment and recommendations; chapter two provides an overview of the labour market context in which integration in Norway takes place, including the composition of the foreign-born population; chapter three discusses framework for the integration of humanitarian arrivals in Norway, including the Introduction Programme and language training; chapter four examines labour market outcomes of specific migrant groups and programmes for their support; and chapter five turns to the educational and labour market entry challenges that children of immigrants face in Norway. The report was largely completed before the Russian aggression against Ukraine. Norway swiftly adapted its integration framework to accommodate for the specific challenges arising from the inflow of refugees from Ukraine. These measures are discussed in chapter six.

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In late 2003, Norway passed a law mandating 40 per cent representation of each gender on the board of publicly limited liability companies. The primary objective of this reform was to increase the representation of women in top positions in the corporate sector and decrease gender disparity in earnings within that sector. [The authors] document that the newly (post-reform) appointed female board members were observably more qualified than their female predecessors, and that the gender gap in earnings within boards fell substantially. While the reform may have improved the representation of female employees at the very top of the earnings distribution (top five highest earners) within firms that were mandated to increase female participation on their board, there is no evidence that these gains at the very top trickled-down.

Moreover the reform had no obvious impact on highly qualified women whose qualifications mirror those of board members but who were not appointed to boards. [The authors] observe no statistically significant change in the gender wage gaps or in female representation in top positions, although standard errors are large enough that [the authors] cannot rule [out] economically meaningful gains. Finally, there is little evidence that the reform affected the decisions of women more generally; it was not accompanied by any change in female enrollment in business education programs, or a convergence in earnings trajectories between recent male and female graduates of such programs. While young women preparing for a career in business report being aware of the reform and expect their earnings and promotion chances to benefit from it, the reform did not affect their fertility and marital plans. Overall, in the short run the reform had very little discernible impact on women in business beyond its direct effect on the newly appointed female board members.

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Both the labour markets and the education systems in the Nordic countries are highly gender-segregated. This has been the case for a long time. This segregation is both vertical and horizontal, meaning that women are found in different courses and study programmes and sectors of the labour market than men, and also find themselves in different positions in the hierarchies of education systems and working life. This gender segregation has consequences for study and working conditions, pay, and the distribution of power and resources.

In the Nordic countries' labour markets, there are both highly male-dominated and highly female-dominated sectors, and many education pathways are dominated by either young men or young women. This is particularly apparent in vocational education and training (VET). VET programmes involve many practices where sex and gender have significance. This applies to the VET programmes themselves as well as associated occupational practices in the workplace, and also applies to the people involved in these. The focus of this report is on gender and VET. The gender perspective is used to shed light on the gender segregation in VET and associated sectors of the labour market. The gender perspective foregrounds questions of how men, masculinity, women and femininity are conceptualised, and the aspects of power linked to this.

The first part of the report compiles knowledge about VET and gender in the Nordic countries based on current research. It also describes how the education systems in the Nordic countries function, and how they grew and developed. The second part of the report gives examples of interventions aiming to break patterns of gender segregation in VET in the Nordic countries. The final part of the report comprises an analysis of its different parts, and highlights a number of different research perspectives on sex, gender and VET. It also contains recommendations and overall reflections on what needs to be taken into account in future work for change so that interventions can successfully prevent gender imbalances in VET and the labour market.

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One in seven working-age adults identifies as having a disability in OECD countries, a share that is also substantial and growing among young people (8 per cent in 2019). Many of them are excluded from meaningful work and have low levels of income and social engagement. This report documents the current labour market situation of people with disability, who continue to face large employment, unemployment and poverty gaps compared with people without disability. The report begins with an overview of labour market outcomes for people with and without disability covering all 32 OECD countries for which comparable data is available. This is followed by a focus on policies and developments in six OECD countries (Austria, Belgium, Canada, the Netherlands, Norway and Switzerland), which provide a broad range of approaches and belong to the countries which have undergone significant reform. The four policy chapters of the report - on youth, social protection, the future of work, and skills - cover policies and practices in these countries, informed by a wide range of research from across the OECD. The policy considerations build on this material and are relevant for the OECD area as a whole. The policy conclusions also build on recent and ongoing country-specific work by the OECD, on Ireland, Italy, Korea and Slovenia, which has focused on aspects that are only covered in passing in this report, including the role of the public employment service (Ireland), ways to improve disability assessments (Italy), the necessity of an effective system of paid sick leave (Korea), and the critical role of policy coordination and early intervention (Slovenia).

The report concludes that the goal set up some twenty years ago of making disability policies pro-active and employment-oriented has not been achieved. In particular, key areas of disability policy have received too little attention so far, such as policies to support young people with disability, improve the skills of people with disability, and intervene early in the course of a health problem or disability. The report calls for rigorous disability mainstreaming in all relevant policies and practices as the missing link to better labour market inclusion.

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Drawing on 31 interviews, we explore the life trajectories of some of the women with most directorships in Norway after the introduction of the quota, with specific attention to their capitals. Adopting a Bourdieusian approach, we examine to what extent forced structural changes (the quota), challenge what are valued as legitimate capital(s) in the field (corporate boards). Our research demonstrates the progressive role of the quota in challenging gendered ideas of suitability. We found that structural adjustments in the field are leading to realignment in terms of the field-specific value and meaning of different types of capitals, which are redrawing the boundaries of the field in the process. We conclude that the external push through state-imposed regulation has broadened the field, resulting in the recognition of a wider set of capitals as legitimate. The study responds to the much-debated question about the utility of quotas in addressing systemic and historical inequalities.

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10 years after its implementation, we explore the equality reach of the 40 per cent Norwegian gender quota regulation for boards of public limited companies (PLCs) using a multi-strategy approach (administrative data and interviews with women directors) to capture interrelated macro and meso changes. We employ Acker's (2006) inequality regimes as our analytical framework, augmented by the 'equality reach' concept. We found strong compliance with the 40 per cent Quota. However, there was little evidence of voluntary spillover to limited companies as envisaged by Quota proponents; instead Quota coverage reduced as some PLCs changed status to avoid the Quota requirement. We reveal that positive equality reach in one of the most equal countries in the world is confined to a PLC 'quota silo', which has shrunk over the life of the Quota. Moreover, we suggest that PLC high levels of compliance may be a defensive strategy seen as necessary in the regulatory/high sanction context of the Quota. We demonstrate the need for further political and organisational interventions to improve equality reach beyond the quota silo. We also show the value of the equality reach concept for research on equality interventions and warn of the dangers of an intervention leading to an equality silo.

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