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The recent growth in higher education participation rates in Britain has been so sudden and so rapid that there is now intense public interest in its effects on graduate employment and salary prospects. Particular concern has been expressed about the development of certain phenomena associated with US-style 'mass higher education', for example, an increase in the numbers of graduates who appear to be 'under-utilised' in jobs which have not traditionally been filled by degree-holders, and reports of apparent growth in variation in 'quality' of the graduates emerging from different kinds of degree course.

Research among prospective UK undergraduates in 2002 found that some students, especially from low social classes, were deterred from applying to university because of fear of debt. This article investigates whether this is still the case today in England despite the changing higher education landscape since 2002. The article describes findings from a 2015 survey of prospective undergraduates and compares them with those from the 2002 study. We find that students' attitudes to taking on student loan debt are more favorable in 2015 than in 2002. Debt-averse attitudes remain much stronger among lower-class students than among upper-class students, and more so than in 2002. However, lower-class students in 2015 do not have stronger debt-averse attitudes than do middle-class students. Finally, debt-averse attitudes seem more likely to deter planning for higher education among lower-class students in 2015 than in 2002.

In two very different industries—biscuit manufacturing and precision engineering—US leadership in labour productivity relative to Western European countries is found to depend heavily on greater opportunities for scale-economies of production. Inter-country differences in the age and sophistication of machinery contribute only very partially to relative productivity performance but the US does benefit from higher levels of physical capital per worker. In terms of human capital, American enterprises are well-served by access to a relatively large supply of technical graduates which helps to compensate for deficiencies at lower levels of vocational education and training. The comparisons suggest that the present development of a US-style mass higher education system in Britain could make a positive contribution to British productivity performance. However, the traditional 'American model' of production organisation based on a semi-skilled shopfloor workforce is not relevant to the current and future skill needs of most British manufacturing employers.

"Low-Wage Work in the United Kingdom explains why the current level of low-paying work remains one of the highest in Europe. The authors argue that the failure to deal with low pay reflects a policy approach which stresses reducing poverty, but also centers on the importance of moving people off benefits and into work, even at low wages. The UK government has introduced a version of the U.S. welfare to work policies and continues to stress the importance of a highly flexible and competitive labor market. A central policy theme has been that education and training can empower people to both enter work and to move into better paying jobs. Low-Wage Work in the United Kingdom illustrates the way that the interactions between government policies, labor market institutions, and the economy have ensured that low pay remains a persistent problem within the United Kingdom."--BOOK JACKET.

UK labour productivity is significantly lower than that of many other similarly advanced economies and has been so for decades, with negative implications for UK living standards. To make matters worse, during the last ten years labour productivity growth has stalled in most industrialised countries, and particularly in the UK. This has led to a renewed policy focus on productivity growth, as evidenced by successive government productivity plans and efforts to re-invigorate industrial strategy. This paper reviews the evidence on UK productivity performance, identifying what we know about the causes of its weakness, what we do not know and what this means for policy. We review the evidence through the lens of developments in economic measurement, drawing in particular on the work of National Institute colleagues past and present, and with a view to the key measurement challenges ahead that, unlocked, will help us understand better what is holding back UK productivity.

Disparities in educational opportunities and attainments contribute a great deal to social and economic inequalities in the UK and other developed countries. First, it is well known that educational attainments are strongly positively related to employment rates and to pay. For example, among persons aged 25–59 in the UK, about 89 per cent of university graduates were employed in 2009 compared to 78 per cent of those whose highest qualifications were classified to Level 2 of the National Vocational Qualifications (NVQ) framework. At the same time average gross hourly earnings for 25–59 year old graduates in employment were roughly 80 per cent higher than for people in the same age group with NVQ Level 2 qualifications.

Previous international comparisons of workforce skills by the National Institute have focussed on the relative shortage of craft skills in Britain. The present study is concerned with the next higher level of supervisory and technician skills; on the basis of visits to factories and technical colleges in Britain, France and Germany, and analysis of labour force statistics, it compares and contrasts the provision and deployment of these intermediate skills in manufacturing industry in the three countries. At supervisory level only Germany undertakes a significant amount of training and to standards adequate to the increased complexity and technical demands of modern manufacturing. At technician (Higher National) level, the numbers acquiring comparable qualifications in Britain and France are substantially higher than in Germany: in part this reflects the allocation of a large proportion of technical support functions in German industry to craft-trained personnel. After examining the relative distribution of training costs between employers, individuals and the public authorities in the three countries, the paper makes proposals for a more cost-effective mix of craft- and technician-level skills in British manufacturing which might, in the process, reduce the need for over-qualified personnel to 'plug the gaps' in skills among shopfloor workers and supervisors.