By Alan Tovey. Getting a degree pays off when it comes to earnings with graduates enjoying salaries that accelerate faster and flatten out at a higher level and later age than those who did not go to university, ONS data finds.
New data from the Office for National Statistics showed that graduates’ annual earnings levelled out at a median of £35,000 a year at about 38 years old.
This compares with average earnings of those who did apprenticeships of about £27,000, levelling out at the age of about 37. However those who took apprenticeships had higher starting salaries, averaging £17,383 a year at 21, compared with £14,343 for graduates. More...
Survey: MOOC Students Are Elite, Young and Male
By Geoffrey A. Fowler. One reason massive open online courses, or MOOCs, have garnered so much attention is their potential to revolutionize access to education. Putting elite coursework online for free has the potential to bulldoze geographic, race, gender and economic hurdles to learning.
But a new survey by University of Pennsylvania, published today in a brief item in the journal Nature, shows how far the technology needs to go to meet that goal.
Penn surveyed nearly 35,000 students from more than 200 countries and territories who participated in the 32 MOOC courses it distributed through Coursera, which is the largest provider in the field with over 5 million students. The researchers found that most of these students were already well educated, and most of them were young men looking for new skills to advance their careers. More...