The Education-jobs Gap

Confronting conventional wisdom, David Livingstone argues that the major problem in education-work relations is not education, but work. In "The Education-Jobs Gap" he documents significant impact of deindustrialization and the changes in time devoted to formal, nonformal, and informal learning.According to Ivar Berg's performance criteria, over half of the U.S. workforce is now underemployed. Using analysis based on U.S. and Canadian large-scale surveys of work and learning experiences, the first representative survey of underemployed people, and in-depth interviews at university placement offices and food banks, the author exposes the myth of the "learning enterprise" and explains the wastage of workers' useful knowledge in terms of the forces driving current economic restructuring. Focusing on the U.S. and Canada, he assesses six facets of the underemployment of knowledge -- the talent-use gap, structural unemployment, involuntary temporary unemployment, formal mismatches, the performance gap, and subjective underemployment. Finally, he provides a critical review of leading cases of economic democracy and guages the prospects for overcoming the education-jobs gap.